What’s up with… Ciena, Telstra, Singtel & KKR

• Ciena reports 37% leap in fiscal Q3 sales 
• Telstra fesses up to outage-related shortcomings
• Singtel and KKR complete takeover of ST Telemedia datacentres

In today’s industry news roundup: Ciena credits AI infrastructure wave for 37% leap in Q3 sales; Telstra chief says it “let customers down” during major outage caused by network timing node shortcomings; Singtel and partner KKR complete their $5.2bn takeover of ST Telemedia Global Data Centres ; and much more!

Ciena continues to benefit from the AI infrastructure rollout wave that is, in turn, driving demand for the kind of datacentre interconnect networking equipment that the vendor has long been developing. For its fiscal third quarter that ended 1 August, the optical/data networking and orchestration software vendor reported revenues of $1.67bn, up by 37% year on year, and adjusted EBITDA (discounting one-time items) of $411.1m, up by 160.2%. For the fiscal fourth quarter, which runs to the end of October, the vendor expects revenues of about $1.75bn, enabling it to raise its full fiscal year revenues guidance to $6.42bn, which would represent a 35% year-on-year increase. CEO Gary Smith, who has now been at the helm of the vendor for more than 25 years, stated: “Today’s outstanding financial performance demonstrates Ciena’s leadership in providing industry-leading, high-speed connectivity solutions as AI continues to drive compounding waves of network investment. As the only pure-play optical systems and interconnects provider, Ciena’s unmatched combination of incumbency, technology innovation and deep expertise gives us a powerful competitive edge.” One can never quite tell how Ciena’s financial results will impact its share price – that depends on what investors had been expecting in terms of actual and forecast number – but the vendor’s share price trend over the past year tells the story of a company riding a very big wave: Ciena’s share price closed on Wednesday (ahead of the results announcement) at $354.16, up an astonishing 273.5% compared with a year ago and giving the company a market valuation of just over $50bn. 

Telstra has shared the findings of an external expert investigation conducted by Technology Audit Partners (TAP) into the nationwide mobile service outage suffered by the Australian telco in July, with the TAP report confirming what was already known – the disruption was caused by network timing nodes that Telstra knew were not fit for purpose but which it didn’t bother to replace. Telstra’s CEO, Vicki Brady, admitted that Telstra had let its customers down (an understatement) and is at least accepting the telco’s failures, noting in this announcement that “TAP found the outage was primarily a result of us not treating network timing as a critical capability within the network (or a ‘sovereign function’) requiring the highest levels of oversight and protection”. Brady noted that Telstra has “taken a series of immediate actions to strengthen the resilience of the timing system in our mobile network. We have migrated services away from the previous network time protocol (NTP) servers to our strategic system across all three sites. We’ve also added additional monitoring and alarm capabilities in our network, introduced additional testing of network changes in lab environments, and worked closely with our vendors to continue uplifting our operational and change processes. At the same time, we established a company-wide programme overseeing remediation, network resilience improvements and implementation of the findings arising from the outage.” She goes on to note that “modern networks are complex, but complexity is not an excuse. This outage should not have happened, and the findings released today help explain why it did. Our commitment is to use what we have learned from this outage not only to address what went wrong but to make Telstra stronger and our services even more resilient and reliable for our customers.” Brady will be hoping that avoidable service outages are now a thing of the past at Telstra. 

Private equity firm KKR and Singtel have completed their takeover of international datacentre operator ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STTGDC). In February, the partners announced an agreement to acquire the 82% of STTGDC they didn’t already own for 6.6bn Singapore dollars (US$5.2bn): With that transaction completed, KKR now owns a 75% stake in STTGDC and Singtel the remaining 25%. To mark the new ownership, STTGDC, which builds and operates datacentres in 12 markets across Asia and Europe, has adopted a new corporate mantra, ‘Built Ready’, and unveiled a “refreshed brand”. And the company is growing: It says its operational capacity has increased by 25% since the end of 2025 to 780 megawatts (MWs) and its contracted capacity has grown by 50% “reflecting continued demand from hyperscalers, cloud service providers, AI customers and enterprises across its markets” (though no specific number was shared for contracted capacity). Bruno Lopez, president and group CEO at STTGDC, stated: “Today marks the most important turning point in STTGDC’s evolution since we founded the company more than 12 years ago… We have spent over a decade building a global platform with the scale, capabilities and operating discipline needed to support the next generation of cloud and AI growth. With the KKR-Singtel consortium’s investment, we have greater capacity to grow and execute at scale while remaining true to the values and customer commitment that have defined STTGDC from its inception. Our refreshed brand reflects both the company we have become and the responsibility we carry as digital infrastructure becomes increasingly critical to economies, businesses and communities. ‘Built Ready’ is our commitment to delivering the critical infrastructure our customers need to grow with confidence, while building responsibly and sustaining the trust of governments, customers and communities.” The move gives Singtel an even greater international presence in the digital and AI infrastructure sector, in which it is already a major player – see Singtel lays out its AI progress, ambitions.

As anticipated, Nvidia is splashing out $12.9bn to acquire popular open-source AI and machine learning development platform Hugging Face, which was in the headlines recently when it was hacked by a rogue OpenAI agent: The Information broke the news of the impending acquisition at the end of August. In the official announcement of the M&A deal, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pledged to “scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide. Over the past decade, Clem, Julien, Thomas and the team at Hugging Face have built something remarkable: A vibrant home for the open model developer community. More than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customise and deploy AI. Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face. Hugging Face will continue to support open-source and open-weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder. It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work.”

Orange has joined a consortium of telecom operators and subsea infrastructure firms to launch a new subsea cable system linking South Africa with La Réunion (Réunion Island), a French Overseas Territory in the Indian Ocean. The €93m ReuNION cable project is due to go live in 2028 and will feature 16 fibre pairs, each with a capacity of 20 Tbit/s. It is being backed by a consortium of operators consisting of Telco OI, Réunicable, and La Réunion Connectée, which together are investing €36.6m, while the European Union is supporting the project by contributing €20m through its Connecting Europe Facility and €30m through the European Regional Development fund. The French government is also investing in the cable, to the tune of €6.5m. Orange Marine will act as the “landing party” for the cable, making it responsible for managing permits with local authorities, carrying out civil engineering works at the landing site, establishing a secure landing station, and interconnecting the cable to local infrastructure. Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) will design and manufacture the cable.

Chinese vendor Huawei is pumping more and more money into its R&D, according to a half-year financial update posted by the vendor’s holding company, Huawei Investment Holdings, with the Shanghai Clearing Bank. For the first six months of 2026, Huawei generated revenues of 467.82bn yuan ($69.6bn), a year-on-year increase of 9.5%, while its R&D expenses increased by more than 25% to RMB121.38bn ($18.1bn). Its R&D expense ratio grew to about 25.9%, up from 22.7% during the first half of 2025. (For comparison, Ericsson invests about 20% of its revenues in R&D and Nokia about 24%, but ZTE’s R&D spend during the first half of this year amounted to just 14% of its revenues.) Huawei notes on its website that at the end of 2025 it had 114,000 employees working in R&D, representing 53.7% of its total workforce of 213,000 staff. The decision to increase its R&D investments (as it ploughs ever more money into AI-related product development, including its own AI processors) understandably impacted the vendor’s bottom line, as its profit for the first half of this year came in at RMB23.43bn ($3.49bn), down 36.8% year on year.   

Canadian investment firm La Caisse (formerly CDPQ) has invested approximately 121bn rupees (C$1.76bn, US$1.28bn) to acquire a 24% stake in Altius Telecom Infrastructure, India’s “largest independent telecom tower platform”. Altius owns and operates more than 258,000 telecom towers and sites across India, giving it a nationwide presence. Brookfield, also a Canadian investment firm, remains the largest investor in Altius, while other existing shareholders include affiliates of Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, GIC, and British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI). 

Finnish digital healthcare platform BeeHealthy has signed a deal with Nokia to use its Network as Code technology for verification in its consumer-facing applications. The Network as Code solution will replace SMS one-time passcodes for BeeHealthy’s partners, which include care providers and insurers in countries such as Finland, Sweden, Germany, Estonia, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates, Nokia stated in this press release. BeeHealthy – which is owned by Mehiläinen – is Nokia’s first healthcare-sector commercial customer to take up its Network as Code solution, which the Finnish vendor claims can represent a new monetisable enterprise use case for network APIs. In addition to core number verification, Network as Code APIs being embedded into BeeHealthy’s patient and professional apps include: SIM Swap/Number Recycling to help prevent account takeover fraud and keep customer registries up to date; Location Verification to support appointment-management use cases and reduce missed appointments; and KYC Match, to validate a new user’s identity against trusted network data during onboarding (in select markets). Oskari Eskola, CEO at BeeHealthy, said: “Digital healthcare depends on making access both simple and secure. By integrating Nokia’s network-based verification into our platform, we can give customers a faster, more seamless experience while strengthening trust for the providers and insurers we serve.”

In advance of the 2026 IBC Show (11-14 September), Comcast Technology Solutions (CTS) has unveiled a suite of “end-to-end AI-powered workflow applications for broadcasters, content owners and operators worldwide”. Building on the foundation of its VideoAI platform, the new applications “deliver AI as practical, integrated solutions to real-world content production and management challenges,” noted CTS. “In a market increasingly crowded with standalone AI vendors and startups, CTS aims to serve as a single, trusted partner for end-to-end AI-enhanced content processing, video management, and monetisation – backed by the proven reliability and scale of Comcast Technology Solutions and 24/7 managed services.” Expect to see a growing volume of AI-enabled video traffic management announcements in the next two weeks…

Having failed to find a buyer last year, Patrick Drahi’s Altice has finally managed to offload its stake in German fibre broadband network builder OXG Glasfaser, which Altice formed as a joint venture with Vodafone Group in early 2023 (having announced the venture in late 2022). Drahi is seeking to sell assets to reduce Altice’s debt pile – his biggest M&A move so far has been to agree to the €20.35bn sale of Altice France to Orange, Iliad and Bouygues Telecom. Now Altice, via its subsidiary Geodesia Holding, has agreed to sell its 50% stake in OXG Glasfaser to French banking giant Société Générale. Financial terms have not been disclosed: At the start of this year, the team at investment analyst firm New Street Research valued OXG at about €2bn, pegging the Altice stake at around €1bn. OXG Glasfaser has deployed its fibre access infrastructure in more than 40 German cities and, at the end of June this year, its network reached 840,000 German homes: Its current stated goal is to reach “several” million premises with its network in the coming years, which sounds like a retrenchment from the 7 million it was targeting when it was formed three years ago.    

– The staff, TelecomTV