What’s up with… Telefónica’s AI agent, Huawei, ETSI

• O2 Telefónica unveils its Network Operations Agent 
• European lawmaker rules on Chinese tech bans
• ETSI issues Release 1 of its Open Operator Platform

In today’s industry news roundup: O2 Telefónica uses agentic AI in its network operations; the legal wrangle over the use of Chinese technology in Europe rumbles on; ETSI gets to work on an open telco cloud; and much more!

In what it describes as a “digital sparring partner”, O2 Telefónica (aka Telefónica Germany) has deployed an agentic AI system called Network Operations Agent (NOA) to support the telco’s network engineers and service managers in network operations and maintenance. NOA analyses network data and provides the telco’s operations staff with “precise recommendations for troubleshooting and improving network availability”, the operator noted in this announcement (in German). Mallik Rao, chief technology and business customer officer at O2 Telefónica (pictured above), stated: “Artificial intelligence significantly reduces the time between detection and action for our network engineers. The Network Operations Agent demonstrates how humans and artificial intelligence can successfully collaborate to ensure stable network operations for consumers and businesses. With the help of AI, we are taking a major step closer to our goal of a highly automated network by 2030.” 

In a legal decision that, if ratified, will no doubt lead to more lengthy legal challenges and uncertainty about the use of Chinese telecom network technology, the European Union’s advocate general, Tamara Ćapeta, has ruled that EU member states can ban the use of network equipment from any suppliers deemed to be a national security risk but that such measures must be proportionate and backed up by evidence, and not just based on the “general suspicion” that a supplier is believed to pose a potential threat. Insight EU Monitoring reports that Ćapeta has proposed that member states can, in principle, exclude hardware and software from their telecom infrastructure on the basis that the manufacturer of that equipment is a high-risk supplier, but that such bans must “involve a specific assessment of the use of the intended equipment and the risks associated therewith”, something that is often missing in such decisions. That will please the European telcos that are keen to use Huawei gear, but they’ll be less happy that Ćapeta decided that when such bans are legal and need to be implemented, telcos are not due any compensation for having to replace any deployed equipment unless a national court finds that the costs of a swap out are disproportionately heavy. Ćapeta’s decisions will now be considered by the European Court of Justice. The news comes only a few days after Dutch operator Odido lost a legal appeal against the imposition of a ban by the Dutch authorities on the use of technology supplied by Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE, and only weeks after the European Commission’s recent decision to force network operators to remove technology supplied by “high-risk third-country suppliers” from communications networks as part of its recent revisions to the Cybersecurity Act. 

Sophia Antipolis, France-based industry specifications body ETSI has announced the first release from its OpenOP (Open Operator Platform) software development group (SDG), which was established to “develop an open-source operator platform for the telco cloud, enabling operator network and testbed federation alongside capability exposure” and which “follows GSMA Operator Platform Group specifications for orchestration and federation of edge cloud resources for application deployment across telco clouds”. According to ETSI, the OpenOP “provides a collaborative platform for network service providers and application developers to experiment with 5G-Advanced and future 6G technologies”. OpenOP Release 1 “delivers the first fully integrated version of an open-source operator platform” by providing “a framework that enables telecom network capabilities to be consumed by vertical application providers and developers through developer-friendly Camara APIs”. For more about the main components of Release 1 and the SDG’s participating companies, see this announcement. 

It’s been a big few days for UK regulator Ofcom, which has been looking to the skies as well as into the UK’s fibre trenches. To “meet the growing demand for satellite connectivity services in the UK”, Ofcom has decided to make more spectrum available for satellite gateway earth stations, the giant land-based hubs that “enable large volumes of data to be transmitted between Earth and space, and then onwards to the internet or private networks”. The UK’s telecom regulator is making “up to 10 GHz of spectrum in the Q/V band available for satellite gateways across most of the UK landmass, predominantly in rural ‘low density’ areas” to provide “extra capacity to support growth in satellite services across the UK and… enable more people and businesses to benefit from improved satellite connectivity, such as faster satellite broadband”. The Q/V band offers high-capacity, millimeter wave spectrum for satellite communications in the 37.5 - 43.5 GHz, 47.2 - 50.2 GHz and 50.4 - 52.4 GHz bands. The announcement was accompanied by a blog from Nina Percival, Ofcom’s director of space spectrum and authorisation policy, outlining the regulator’s plans for satellite spectrum management. 

Telenor IoT has launched its Global APN service, aimed at helping its partners connect to the Danish operator’s points of presence (PoPs) more smoothly. The APN (access point name) offering will help strengthen performance, resilience and regional routing capabilities for Telenor IoT clients worldwide by allowing companies to use a single APN across all regions, meaning devices will automatically connect to the closest geographical PoP without reconfiguration. The automatic routing will reduce latency and improve efficiency for use cases such as payments, real-time analytics and automation by creating seamless operation across Telenor PoPs in the US, Europe and Asia, according to Telenor.

Catching up with developments of note to come out of Nvidia’s annual GTC event, Scaleway, the cloud and AI infrastructure platform of the Iliad Group, has announced the full compatibility of its quantum-as-a-service platform with Nvidia’s quantum supercomputing platform CUDA-Q. “Developers can now write CUDA-Q kernels, select Scaleway as their preferred backend, and execute workloads seamlessly either on high performance GPU clusters or on real quantum processors without changing tools or managing separate environments,” noted Scaleway in this announcement. In February, Scaleway announced that Innsbruck, Austria-based Alpine Quantum Technologies is integrating its trapped-ion quantum computer into Scaleway’s cloud platform, a move that enables Scaleway to offer a “sovereign quantum infrastructure made in Europe”. 

– The staff, TelecomTV