What’s up with… Deutsche Telekom, 4iG, WIOCC

• Deutsche Telekom appoints new CTO, CFO and more
• 4iG partners with SpaceX for Starlink and sovereign services
• WIOCC secures $300m investment

In today’s industry news roundup: Deutsche Telekom appoints a new CTO, a new CFO and a new chief product & digital officer; Hungary’s 4iG partners with SpaceX to launch Starlink satellite services and a new sovereign offering in central and eastern Europe; WIOCC receives investment to the tune of $300m from AFC and the Saudi Vision Fund to continue its infrastructure rollout across Africa; and much more!

Deutsche Telekom has appointed Jan Hofmeyr, most recently VP of telecom at Amazon Web Services (AWS), as its new CTO and board member for product and technology (P&T), effective from 1 November. Hofmeyr, who was also previously chief network officer at giant US cable operator Comcast and director of TV strategy at Microsoft, will fill the position left vacant when Abdu Mudesir suddenly departed DT in March and subsequently joined Verizon. “Deutsche Telekom is one of the few companies in the world that has a strong telecommunications base, international reach and the ability to industrialise technology on a large scale at the same time,” stated Hofmeyr. “This connection is an exceptional starting point for the next few years. I am very much looking forward to the new task and to working with Tim Höttges, the entire board of management and the P&T team. Together, we want to bring networks, cloud, AI and digital platforms even closer together – with the ambition not only to use technology but to actively shape the future of our industry.” Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges stated: “Jan knows the telecommunications industry from his many years of experience. At the same time, he knows the world of international technology platforms, the speed of cloud and digital business models, and the enormous momentum that has created artificial intelligence. He knows both sides of the playing field. This is exactly the connection we need now. I look forward to shaping Deutsche Telekom’s technological future with him – and to further expanding our position as a leading European telecommunications company.” 

The telco has also appointed Mladen Mitic, previously head of B2C commercial growth in DT’s Europe segment, as its new chief product & digital officer with effect from 1 October, succeeding Jonathan Abrahamson, who has resigned: Mitic will report to Hofmeyr when the new CTO joins the company. He has previously held senior positions at Telenor Norway and TDC Business in Denmark and was chief commercial officer at Slovak Telekom, part of the DT empire, from 2021 to 2024. Mitic stated: “I’m honoured by the trust placed in me to help shape the next generation of our products and customer experiences across Europe. The next decade of telecommunications will be defined by software and AI – they are already changing what our networks and products can do for customers. Deutsche Telekom has the scale, the infrastructure and the trust to lead that shift in Europe. My focus will be to turn that scale into speed, creating simpler, more personal products that make a real difference for our customers. Because ultimately, technology should do one thing: Make everyday life better.”

DT is also getting a new CFO, as 62-year-old Christian Illek is stepping down at the end of next April, after 20 years at the telco, “for age-related reasons”: He will be succeeded on 1 May 2027 by Dhananjay Mirchandani (51), who has been at DT since 2019 in various finance, investment and strategy roles, most recently as head of group controlling, where he is responsible for the telco’s financial planning, performance management, cash flow management and risk management. DT’s CEO, Tim Höttges, stated: “For me, the farewell to Christian is much more than a personnel matter. Christian and I have worked closely and trustingly together for over two decades… he leaves behind a well-ordered house. I particularly appreciate the fact that he is introducing his successor to the task with great professionalism. That is leadership responsibility beyond his own term of office. With Dhananjay Mirchandani, we have been able to recruit a recognised leader from within our own ranks to succeed him. He knows Deutsche Telekom and the industry. I look forward to working with him.” 

4iG Group and SpaceX have signed an agreement to launch a satellite-powered resilient communications network in Hungary and the Western Balkans. The companies will also collaborate to launch secure sovereign satellite services in Europe. The partnership will see 4iG collaborate on the launch of current first-generation Starlink Mobile commercial services and, ultimately, the next-generation Starlink V2-enabled services announced by SpaceX earlier this year: The direct-to-device (D2D) services will complement 4iG’s existing offering in areas with limited or no terrestrial network coverage. Budapest-based 4iG owns several operations across central and eastern Europe, including One Hungary (formed by the merger of Vodafone Hungary and Digi), Netfone Telecom, 2Connect Telecom, One Albania and One Macedonia. The partnership deal, which was signed in Texas by Gellért Jászai, chairman and CEO of 4iG, and Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, will be based on a collaboration model that 4iG claims is “unique” in Europe, by “combining commercial satellite-to-mobile connectivity with satellite technology for sovereign solutions communications”.

African wholesale digital infrastructure operator WIOCC Group has secured $300m of investment from the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) and the Saudi Arabian Vision International Investment Company to support its plans to build and operate open-access, critical infrastructure across Africa. The investment, which Wiocc secured through a Shareholder Subscription Agreement, will be used to accelerate the Mauritius-headquartered company’s plans to accelerate its deployment of datacentres while also building more open-access terrestrial and subsea fibre across the continent. Wiocc currently operates in more than 30 African countries and works with many of the continent’s biggest telecom operators. Its existing shareholders include Uganda Telecom, Djibouti Telecom, Onantel and Telkom Kenya, among others. Samaila Zubairu, president & chief executive officer of AFC, said: “The Africa we build must be connected, competitive and equipped to create value from the digital economy, not only consume it. Just as transport corridors enable trade, and energy networks power industry, fibre, datacentres and subsea cables are now essential infrastructure for growth, innovation and AI. Our investment in WIOCC will expand the open-access digital backbone African businesses and communities need to integrate, innovate and compete globally.”

KDDI and its research division, in partnership with Samsung Research, has achieved wireless transmission speeds as high as 3.6Gbit/s in tests using spectrum in the 7GHz band outdoors. The 7GHz band – which is seen as a candidate frequency for future 6G networks – was trialled at Samsung’s Seoul R&D Campus using 100MHz of capacity and a base station equipped with extreme multiple-input multiple-output (X-MIMO) technology and 1024 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) modulation, achieving downlink data rates of up to 3.6Gbit/s, which Samsung is claiming as a world record for data throughput across 100MHz of spectrum in the 7GHz band. The trial is notable as delegates at next year’s ITU World Radiocommunication Conference in Shanghai are expected to discuss the potential allocation of frequencies in the 7GHz and 8GHz bands for 6G services. One of the challenges KDDI and Samsung came up against during the trial was the 7GHz band experiencing greater propagation loss than sub-6 frequencies, which resulted in reduced signal coverage. To overcome this, the partners deployed 1024 QAM modulation, which increases the number of bits carried in a single signal, enabling simultaneous transmission of more information.

Italian wholesale carrier Sparkle, which is still part of Telecom Italia (TIM) though soon to be sold for €700m, has partnered with satellite operator Hellas Sat to implement a quantum-safe satellite connection between Greece and Cyprus. Sparkle and Hellas Sat first validated a quantum-safe IPsec connection between two datacentres in Greece before extending the quantum-safe protection to a live satellite link between Sparkle’s facility in Athens and Hellas Sat’s infrastructure in Cyprus. According to Sparkle, this is the first deployment of quantum-safe protection using a satellite connection between the two countries. The end-to-end satellite path spans approximately 72,000km, including the uplink from Cyprus to the geostationary satellite and the downlink to Greece. It leverages Sparkle’s Quantum Safe Interconnect solution, which aims to protect data from future quantum-enabled threats through quantum-safe key delivery and automated key rotation.

BT Group is on course to bank as much as £2bn over the next decade from the sale of the copper it is stripping out of its fixed access network as it replaces the metal connections with fibre, according to a report from The Guardian. 

US space agency NASA has selected Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned rocket company, to develop the agency’s Mars Telecommunications Network, a “next-generation communications system that will enable reliable, high-bandwidth communications and navigation services for current and future Mars missions.” The contract, worth up to $700m, tasks Blue Origin with delivering to NASA by the end of 2028 a “high-performance Mars telecommunications orbiter” that can transmit science data, imagery, navigation information and critical mission communications for spacecraft operating on and around the planet”.  

– The staff, TelecomTV