What’s up with… BT, Orange and Samsung, Telecom Italia

• BT rides the sovereign services wave
• Orange expands RAN engagement with Samsung
• Telecom Italia completes quantum-safe tests in Milan

In today’s industry news roundup: BT unveils its initial sovereign service; Orange is expanding its virtual and Open RAN engagement with Samsung; Telecom Italia has successfully completed quantum-safe networking tests between datacentres in the Milan area; and more!

As the temperature rises around the topic of digital sovereign services, UK national operator BT Group, which unveiled its sovereign services plan last December, has announced the launch of Sovereign Voice, a “new state-of-the-art sovereign cloud calling system that offers UK businesses a new way to stay connected, bolster resilience and meet changing regulations.” According to the British telco, the service is “hosted entirely in secure UK datacentres and is managed by UK-based, security-cleared staff, allowing customers to access elite cloud calling whilst meeting sovereignty needs… Unlike standard cloud voice services, Sovereign Voice ensures all call routing remains within UK borders,” according to the telco. But like many early sovereign services in Europe, there is a heavy dependency of technology from US-based companies, as BT’s Sovereign Voice service is “powered by Cisco Calling technology to deliver highly secure, sovereign cloud calling.” 

Orange has expanded its virtual RAN (vRAN) and Open RAN partnership across Europe with Samsung, building on the initial engagement announced in July 2025. Following a successful deployment that “delivered enhanced quality of service (QoS) and an improved end-user experience, showing performance maturity and operational effectiveness comparable to or better than those of traditional RAN solutions,” the partners have announced they are “advancing their vRAN and Open RAN collaboration by integrating the latest processors into Orange’s networks. This includes Samsung’s AI-powered vRAN with Intel Xeon 6 system-on-a-chip (SoC), which runs on a single commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) server from Dell with a cloud platform from Wind River.” 

Telecom Italia (TIM) says it has successfully completed the first live network test in Italy of quantum-safe communications between two datacentres in the Milan area, “validating the use of quantum key distribution for data stream encryption in a real operating environment”. The operator noted in this announcement that the test is “part of a broader set of projects aimed at strengthening the country’s digital sovereignty and, in particular, the security of the entire network-datacentre-cloud ecosystem, with the aim of increasing resilience, operational continuity and the protection of sensitive data.” The test was carried out using technology from Cisco and leveraged the expertise of the TIM Enterprise ecosystem, namely Telsy and QTI for the encryption and quantum security components, and Noovle for the datacentre infrastructure.

UK broadband provider TalkTalk has completed the spinoff of its Business unit into a standalone entity. TalkTalk Business Direct was sold to the company’s own shareholders in a deal worth £95m in October 2023 but continued to maintain access to some TalkTalk Group systems while it built up its own operations – a process it says is now complete, TalkTalk Business Direct CEO Ruth Kennedy noted in this LinkedIn post. The spinoff has now established its own operational infrastructure, modernised system stack and comprehensive service delivery capabilities, and is now operating independently, allowing it to offer customers products beyond connectivity, such as managed services.

– The staff, TelecomTV