• T-Mobile US offers its direct-to-cell beta service to AT&T, Verizon users too
• Mavenir CEO boasts strong 2024
• Iliad Group highlights €3bn investment in AI 

In today’s industry news roundup: T-Mobile US has launched its satellite-to-smartphone beta service to AT&T and Verizon customers, as well as its own customer base; Mavenir’s CEO says the company had its second best year ever in terms of bookings; Xavier Niel’s Iliad Group issues a reminder that it wants to be a major AI player in Europe; and much more!

T-Mobile US used the Super Bowl 2025 sporting event to launch the public beta version of its satellite-to-smartphone (aka direct-to-cell) service, T-Mobile Starlink, which is now available across the US, including the “more than 500,000 square miles of the country unreached by any carrier’s earth-bound cell towers,” the telco noted in this announcement. The telco first announced the development of the  service with Elon Musk’s SpaceX/Starlink in August 2022. “T-Mobile Starlink is the first and only space-based mobile network in the US that automatically connects to your phone so you can be connected even where no cellular network reaches. It’s a massive technical achievement and an absolute game changer for ALL wireless users,” said Mike Sievert, president and CEO of T-Mobile. “We’re still in the early days – I don’t want to overhype the experience during a beta test – but we’re officially putting ‘no bars’ on notice. Dead zones, your days are numbered at the Un-carrier.” The beta service is free to everyone until July, at which point T-Mobile Starlink will be included at no extra cost for T-Mobile US customers on Go5G Next plans. The operator’s business customers will also get T-Mobile Starlink at no extra cost on Go5G Business Next, first responder agencies on T-Priority plans and other select premium rate plans. T-Mobile customers on any other plan can add the service for $15 per month. And, in a cheeky move, the “Un-carrier” is also making the beta service freely available to AT&T and Verizon customers, while from July, it will cost $20 per month for those signed up to a rival telco. AT&T and Verizon are not working with Starlink for the development of their own satellite-to-smartphone services – instead they have invested in and have committed to using the service, which will be provided by AST SpaceMobile. It’s not known when AST SpaceMobile plans to launch a rival beta service in the US, though it is planning to launch a service by late this year or early 2026 in Europe with Vodafone as its telco partner.

The Open RAN sector may be suffering something of a blip currently but that didn’t stop Mavenir, which has a broad portfolio of software and hardware products, having what CEO Pardeep Kohli described in this LinkedIn post as “our second-best year in the company’s 20-year history in terms of bookings”. For the 12 months to the end of January 2025, Mavenir’s bookings totalled $650m, up by 45% compared with the previous fiscal year. “This achievement is a testament to the trust and support of our customers and partners. Our product portfolio has seen significant growth, with notable expansion in messaging, IMS, packet core, Open RAN, billing, charging, fraud and security. Both new and existing customers have contributed to our success, expanding their business with us and exploring new areas. We’re grateful for their partnership and look forward to continued growth and innovation in the years to come,” noted the CEO. “As the sole provider of a software stack independent of proprietary hardware for all key network components in the telecom application space, we’re poised for continued growth and success. Our network functions are fully containerised, enabling seamless deployment on various platforms, such as Red Hat, VMware, AWS, Wind River and Azure. This flexible architecture empowers us to harness the potential of AI, leveraging AI tools to drive innovation and pioneer meaningful innovation in the telco software space,” added the CEO. Mavenir cut its headcount and costs last year as the Open RAN sector hit an investment slump and there was even speculation that a potential new investor (Aramco Digital) might come on board to prop up the company, but it seems Mavenir might not need a white knight after all. 

To coincide with the start of the AI Action Summit in Paris, Xavier Niel’s Iliad Group has reminded the world that it is pouring significant funds into AI infrastructure and R&D, and has also announced it is bundling an AI assistant into its mobile packages in France. Iliad noted in this announcement that it has “allocated a total of €3bn to invest in AI-dedicated infrastructure [datacentres and computing power], research and application layers”. A big chunk of that total, €2.5bn, is being pumped into OpCore, which runs Iliad’s datacentres and has forged a partnership with European private equity firm InfraVia. In addition, Iliad’s enterprise cloud services unit Scaleway has “invested in the largest AI compute capacity available in the commercial market in Europe. This means that almost 5,000 top-tier GPUs [graphics processing units] are offered to companies for them to train and use their models.” Iliad has also invested €100m in Kyutai, a nonprofit open-science AI research lab. And now Free, Iliad’s service provider business in France, has teamed up with Mistral AI to become the first telco in France to “offer all of its mobile subscribers an AI assistant, with an exclusive 12-month, free-of-charge offer for le Chat Pro – the new premium version of the AI assistant developed by Mistral AI. This means that Free’s 15.5 million subscribers will be able to use, at no extra cost, a state-of-the-art AI tool developed by a French champion and European leader in AI.” Iliad Group CEO Thomas Reynaud noted: “For several years now at the iliad Group we’ve believed in the power of artificial intelligence, which is why we decided to devote the necessary resources to it. We’re investing €3bn across the entire value chain – from datacentres to computing power and open-science research, and we’re democratising AI through our partnership with Mistral. The reason we’ve taken so many initiatives over the past three years is because we know that it’s a decisive time, when our society’s future is being played out.” For more on Iliad’s AI plans, see this announcement. 

Iliad isn’t alone in aiming to make France an AI superpower. The country’s presidency has announced plans with the United Arab Emirates to invest between $30bn and $50bn in AI technology development and datacentre infrastructure. The investments would encompass the development of AI applications, datacentre construction, sovereign cloud platforms and more, reported Reuters. The French government has identified 35 locations for potential datacentre construction across France.   

– The staff, TelecomTV