• Amazon’s Project Kuiper joins the LEO space race
• Qualcomm gets takeover bid extension
• BT’s stock in focus

In today’s industry news roundup: Amazon’s first Project Kuiper low-earth orbit satellites have finally made it into space, marking a new chapter in the global broadband services sector; Qualcomm has been given another two weeks to make a bid for UK chip designer Alphawave; Citi analysts are downbeat on BT’s share price prospects as competitive pressure mounts in the UK fibre broadband sector; and much more!

Project Kuiper: Too slow, too little, too late? Amazon has at last lofted the first batch of its oft-delayed Project Kuiper low-earth orbit (LEO), broadband-beaming satellites. The initial 27 satellites (out of a planned constellation of 3,236) finally went where they were meant to go, but they are late, and every day, Amazon’s already-established and aggressive rival, Elon Musk’s Starlink, gets bigger and attracts more customers. The initial launch had originally been set for 9 April, but weather conditions proved unfavourable at the time. The much-hyped race for supremacy in orbital internet connectivity between Jeff Bezos and Musk is finally underway, but Kuiper is a long way down the field and will have to go like the proverbial clappers of hell if it is to stand any realistic chance of catching up. There are now in excess of 8,000 Starlink satellites in orbit with more being added to that number. Starlink has also built up a customer base of 5 million users across 125 countries and attracted military and intelligence agencies to use the system (as well as its manufacturing capabilities) for national security initiatives. Starlink also has its reusable Falcon 9 vehicle that keeps launch costs low. Amazon has no such equivalent. The company has announced that it hopes to launch five more Kuiper missions before the end of this year. That is a very modest figure given that Amazon must meet a deadline imposed by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the body that regulates telecom and the US satellite comms sector, if it is to meet the obligations it agreed to when it signed a US government contract to have half its constellation in place (that’s 1,618 satellites) by mid-summer 2026 – in just 15 months’ time. The delays are making things look difficult for Amazon and speculation is rising that it will be forced to go cap-in-hand to the FCC to ask for a deadline extension. Such an embarrassment notwithstanding, Amazon maintains that it could start to offer services in some northern and southern regions once it has 578 satellites in orbit and expects to start some commercial services “later this year”. Bloomberg puts Kuiper’s delays down to an inability to scale the launches because of delays in the production of the necessary number of satellites, reporting that Amazon has manufactured only “a few dozen of these satellites.” CNN, quoting a report from investment bank Raymond James Financial, says setting up just the first-generation Kuiper system could well cost $17bn upfront, and even more if component prices continue to rise in the wake of President Trump’s tariff wars. It adds that even if Kuiper is successful, attracts a lot of customers and uses the revenues gained to help offset some of the costs of deployment, the service could still cost $1bn or $2bn a year to run and it is hard to forecast how long such a state of affairs could continue. Despite such problems, Bezos remains bullish about Kuiper’s chances of competing successfully against Starlink. Back in January, he told Reuters that “there’s insatiable demand” for internet connectivity [so] “there’s room for lots of winners. I predict Starlink will continue to be successful, and I predict Kuiper will be successful as well.” Amazon’s line is that the enormous success of its consumer services and the extent and experience it has in cloud computing and applications will give it an edge over Starlink. Time will tell. 

Qualcomm has been given a couple more weeks to decide whether to make a formal takeover bid for British chip designer Alphawave IP Group, which announced at the start of April that Qualcomm was considering an acquisition offer. At that time, and in conformance with London Stock Exchange rules, the US wireless chip giant was given until the end of the afternoon UK time to make a formal bid or step away. Now Alphawave has announced that it is now “engaged in discussions” with Qualcomm and that consent has been given for an extension of the bid deadline to the end of the working day UK time on 12 May, by which time it must either “announce a firm intention to make an offer for Alphawave” or “announce that it does not intend to make an offer”. While Alphawave noted that there is no certainty of a bid being tabled, its share price is up by 7.8% to 119.9 pence on news of the ongoing talks. 

For years, BT Group’s share price was in the doldrums, weighed down by a combination of high debt, declining revenues and concerns about its long-term growth prospects. However, more recently, the company’s fortunes began to change for the better as investor sentiment improved, the telco’s strategy under new CEO Allison Kirkby began to pay off and major operational improvement became apparent. In the past year, BT’s share price has climbed by more than 60% to reach its current 171.7 pence on the London Stock Exchange. Admittedly, the shares were cheap to start with, but investors like the approach taken by Kirkby, who became the carrier’s CEO in February 2024. However, in August of last year, the mood of growing confidence diminished suddenly when close to £1bn was wiped off the company’s market value after it was announced that UK ISP Sky signed a major wholesale fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network services deal with City Fibre, one of the major competitors to BT’s wholesale fixed access network division, Openreach. However, overall, BT’s prospects recovered, not least because it retains a strong lead in terms of network coverage, having already passed some 17 million premises with its fibre access network compared with CityFibre’s 4.3 million. BT hopes its sheer scale will give it a cost advantage over the likes of Virgin Media O2, but Britain’s altnets continue to nibble away at BT’s market share and at the income from its core infrastructure. These, and other factors, such as BT’s continuing high debt levels, have given major US bank Citi cause for concern: It is worried Openreach will start losing revenue from financial year 2026 and could continue to do so into the 2030s, reports Proactive Investors. Thus it anticipates “disappointment over the medium term” for BT’s prospects because the telco’s self-made case for investment was founded on minimising broadband subscriber churn and maintaining cash flow even while continuing to rush to deploy more new fibre infrastructure. So, Citi has placed BT on “negative catalyst watch” for at least the next month. A “negative catalyst watch” indicates that analysts are concerned about potential events or circumstances that could negatively impact a company’s performance or shares, and is essentially a signal for investors to be cautious. BT’s annual results are due out on 22 May, when Kirkby will no doubt address such concerns. And despite the Citi warning, the UK national telco’s share price appears to be holding firm, at least for now, having dipped by only 0.15% in Tuesday trading.

Hey you, get outta my cloud! London, UK-based Arqit, which has developed an encryption software service that makes the comms links of any networked device, cloud machine or data at rest secure against both current and future forms of attack on encryption (even from a quantum computer), has teamed up with Intel for a data security development. The two companies are collaborating on an innovative confidential computing solution that protects cloud data and encryption keys – even from the cloud provider itself. Confidential computing is a technology that protects data while it is being processed, even within a cloud environment. It is done by isolating data in a secure, hardware-based environment called a trusted execution environment (TEE) that ensures the data remains confidential, even if the cloud provider or other unauthorised third parties have access to the underlying hardware. Thus, it becomes impossible for a bad actor to access encryption keys or workloads even when distributed across multiple hosts. The new technology is powered by the Arqit NetworkSecure and Intel Trust Domain Extensions (Intel TDX), which strengthen the security of Arqit’s quantum-resistant crypto key delivery system. It enables organisations and businesses to overcome one of the main and longest-standing challenges of cloud security by enabling total control over encryption keys, securing data in transit, enabling trusted collaboration, and reducing the cost and complexity of additional hardware. The welcome development brings an end to the constant worry that, hitherto, putting sensitive data in the cloud has always been at least a theoretical risk because doing so always meant trusting infrastructure providers despite the possibility that they could access encryption keys or data as it moved between environments. Now, with Arqit NetworkSecure running inside a trusted domain (TD), created by Intel TDX, encryption keys are generated inside the Intel TDX ‘enclave’, are visible only to the trusted domain owner and are rotated frequently. Between enclaves, data is protected with quantum-safe encryption. The new solution will provide enormously strong network security for telcos deploying network-as-a-service (NaaS) or virtual RAN (vRAN). It also has applications in enterprise edge and AI workload situations. Large enterprises moving sensitive data workloads between on-premises environments and the cloud need particularly strong isolation and secure communication. The new Arqit/TDX solution confines the workload and secures the channel using symmetric keys, all without exposing processes inside the TD to the cloud or the infrastructure provider. Where critical infrastructure is concerned, expensive virtual hardware security modules (HSMs) have been de rigueur but, with the new solution, organisations will now be able to deploy Arqit’s symmetric key platform inside TDs as a “virtual HSM”, thus cutting costs while meeting the highest security standards for cryptographic operations. Furthermore, in sectors including defence, finance, and public services, data collaboration often involves multiple parties. By using secure enclaves and Arqit’s ephemeral key model, organisations can now enable secure, privacy-preserving analytics across trusted domains.

Nordic colocation, high-performance computing (HPC) and AI service provider atNorth is to provide Nokia with a multi-megawatt cloud infrastructure deployment at its FIN02 datacentre site in Finland as part of a 12-year deal that includes potential extensions totalling more than 10MW. Nokia, which has its headquarters near to the FIN02 facility in Espoo, Finland, has long made use of the country’s datacentre infrastructure to support its needs, leveraging the country’s cool climate and renewable energy sources to ensure the sustainability of its workloads,” noted atNorth in this announcement. The FIN02 facility “runs on renewable energy and features robust power and liquid cooling capabilities,” according to atNorth. “atNorth was able to meet our complex technical requirements at speed without compromising on our sustainability goals,” stated Marika Mentula, vice president for network infrastructure for northern Europe at Nokia. “By helping support our cloud infrastructure at atNorth’s FIN02 datacentre, we can deliver high-performance infrastructure that supports our most demanding applications,” added Mentula. Nokia and atNorth have an existing commercial relationship as the datacentre operator uses the vendor’s datacentre switches to underpin its HPC-as-a-service offering, which currently runs from facilities in Iceland and Sweden. 

– The staff, TelecomTV