• DT’s CTO Abdu Mudesir promoted to board post 
• BT doubles down on fibre rollout
• Telefónica is offloading its Uruguay unit for $440m

In today’s industry news roundup: Deutsche Telekom’s group CTO Abdu Mudesir is to take on the board role for technology and innovation as Claudia Nemat steps down; BT is accelerating its fibre rollout and forecasting sales and margin growth in the years ahead; Telefónica has struck a deal to sell its business in Uruguay to Millicom; and much more!

Deutsche Telekom’s group CTO Abdu Mudesir is to become the German telco giant’s board member responsible for technology and innovation starting on 1 October, the operator announced on Thursday. He will replace Claudia Nemat, who has decided not to renew her contract after 14 years on the board. DT’s chairman, Dr Frank Appel, noted: “Claudia Nemat has played a decisive role in shaping Deutsche Telekom's culture and performance in recent years – from the digitalisation of networks to the success story of 5G, the development of resilient supply chains in times of polycrises, global product innovations and our recently developed AI strategy. The Supervisory Board would like to thank Claudia Nemat for her outstanding work over the past 14 years. We are pleased that we have been able to recruit Abdu Mudesir as an excellent internal candidate for this important task. He will continue to drive the digitalisation, scaling and automation of Deutsche Telekom. His previous work ensures a smooth transition.” DT’s CEO, Tim Höttges, noted that Nemat “brought her successor Abdu Mudesir into the company at an early stage and assigned him responsible tasks so that he can take over his new post well prepared. In the future, he will be responsible for a technology and product area that is ideally positioned for the future. With Abdu, a young and at the same time experienced technical expert is joining the board. In his previous role, he played a key role in the continuous expansion of a high-performance and future-proof network architecture – with over 10.5 million fibre-optic connections and over 98% 5G coverage in Germany today. Innovation is part of his DNA. Abdu has been instrumental in advancing key future technologies, such as Open RAN, cloud infrastructure and AI-based network control. The use of AI has significantly increased power quality, energy efficiency and service automation – a milestone towards an autonomous grid. I am looking forward to working with him. I like the hands-on way in which he approaches things.” Mudesir added: “I would like to thank everyone involved for the trust they have placed in me – especially Claudia, with whom I have been working closely for years. I have great respect for everything Claudia has done and moved for Deutsche Telekom. I am very much looking forward to the new task and to shaping the next technology phase together with the technology and innovation team. Like no other company, Deutsche Telekom stands for innovation, social responsibility and international competitiveness. I am proud to be able to participate in this.” To find out more about Mudesir’s views, check out TelecomTV’s recent exclusive interview – MWC25: Deutsche Telekom’s CTO on 5G, AI and more

BT Group is to accelerate its fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) access network rollout in the current financial year (to the end of March 2026), with plans to expand to 5 million premises during the 12-month period, up from a record 4.3 million premises in the financial year that ended on 31 March 2025 that took the total number of premises reached to 18 million: The UK telco’s access network division, Openreach, plans to reach 25 million premises by the end of December 2026. The news came as BT reported a 2% dip in fiscal year revenues to £20.4bn, “mainly due to continued challenging trading conditions in our global and non-UK portfolio channels and weaker handset trading in consumer, offsetting the benefit of FTTP growth in Openreach and price increases,” noted the operator in this announcement. And with CEO Allison Kirkby now focusing BT’s efforts on the UK (the international operations are being spun out into a separate company), BT reported that its adjusted UK service revenues for the full year stood at £15.6bn, down by 1% (due to lower demand for legacy voice services). But Kirkby is revamping the company and cutting costs and despite the decline in revenues, BT reported a 1% increase in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) to £8.2bn and a 12% increase in profit before tax to £1.33bn. And there will be better times ahead, according to the operator, with revenues set for “sustained growth” from the financial year that starts in April 2026, with EBITDA growth set to rise at a faster rate and capital expenditures declining. As a result, BT expects its free cash flow figure to hit £3bn per year by the end of the decade, compared with £1.6bn in the year just reported. “BT Group delivered strong progress against its strategic priorities in FY25, as we stepped up the pace of build of the UK’s leading next-generation networks,” stated Kirkby. “We set new record build and connect highs: Our full fibre network now reaches more than 18 million homes and businesses, with more than 6.5 million already connected, and we were awarded the country’s best mobile network for the 11th year in a row, recognising EE’s clear leadership in 5G. We also accelerated the pace of simplification and transformation, agreeing asset sales, improving customer satisfaction across all of our brands and business segments, and delivering over £900m of annualised cost savings. Although revenue declined year on year, driven mainly by lower international sales and handsets, strong cost control and a step-up in focus and transformation resulted in growth in both EBITDA and normalised free cash flow, allowing us to increase our dividend for FY25 by 2% to 8.16p per share,” added the CEO. The news gave BT’s share price a slight lift, by 1.8%, to 172.3 pence on the London Stock Exchange: The stock has gained in value by more than 33% in the past year. 

Telefónica’s exit from Latin America continues with news that it is selling its business in Uruguay to Millicom for $440m. “This transaction is part of the Telefónica Group’s asset portfolio management policy and is aligned with its strategy of reducing exposure in Hispanoamerica,” the operator announced in a brief note to investors. It follows the sale of operations in Argentina, Colombia and Peru (see this article), while reports suggest a sale process is underway for the telcos’ businesses in Mexico and Chile. Telefónica Móviles del Uruguay S.A. is the second-largest mobile operator in the country (total population about 3.5 million), after state-owned Antel and bigger than América Móvil’s Claro, with about 1.4 million customers. While Telefónica is seeking to exit the region (apart from Brazil), Millicom is looking to expand and add to its already extensive Latin American portfolio. Millicom CEO Marcelo Benitez stated: “This acquisition represents a key milestone in our purposeful growth strategy across Latin America – especially in Uruguay, a country with strong fundamentals and a forward-looking digital agenda. We are committed to being a long-term partner in Uruguay’s digital development by investing in mobile infrastructure, improving service quality, and fostering innovation and talent development,” he noted in this announcement. 

Following the agreement reached in January 2025 with Vodafone Spain to create a major fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) joint venture (still just called FiberCo), MásOrange has successfully secured about €11bn in financing to help fund the rollout of FiberCo and refinance its debt “under more favourable conditions”, the operator has announced. The financing, which comes from about 20 banks, comprises €6.25bn for debt refinancing and €4.7 bn for FiberCo infrastructure investments. FiberCo combines the existing fixed access network assets of the partners, which already reach 12.2 million premises across the country, about one-third of the total. The venture will be a fully commercial operation from day one, as the fibre broadband network operations being folded into FibreCo already provide services to more than 4.5 million customers (including Vodafone Spain customers currently serviced via a wholesale agreement with national operator Telefónica that will be transferred to FibreCo). In addition to providing services to the retail broadband customers of the two telco owners, MásOrange and Vodafone Spain will also offer wholesale FTTP services using the FibreCo network. The partners are also seeking a third-party investor that can help invest in the business in return for a large minority stake (40%), while MásOrange will hold a 50% stake and Vodafone Spain the remaining 10%. 

Back in September 2024, the first rumours began to circulate that US telecom networks and systems had been massively compromised in a powerful cyberattack by an entity calling itself Salt Typhoon, which was (and is) believed to be operated by China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). Salt Typhoon group’s espionage campaign is believed to have penetrated nine US telcos, including AT&T and Verizon, and struck at the heart of their core network components. These included Cisco routers that managed access to the internet. The hackers accessed metadata of users’ calls and text messages, including dates and time stamps, sources and destination IP addresses, and phone numbers from over 1 million users, most of which were in Washington DC, where all the vital organs of the US government are to be found. The attack posed a genuine risk to US national security so a great many resources were applied to stop it and no expense was spared in efforts to root out every tendril of Salt Typhoon. However, according to a new report from CyberScoop, it was too late to purge Salt Typhoon from US telecom networks. This is because of the sheer size and complexity of today’s networks and the increasing intricacy of managing identity solutions that grant very broad access to those networks. Those factors, when taken together with the long history of industry mergers and acquisitions in the telecoms sector, the entanglement and consolidations that ensued and the cavalier attitude (and even indifference) historically exhibited by telcos to cybersecurity, has left them too technologically fragmented and vulnerable to ever be sure now that their systems are clear of the contagions implanted by ‘bad actors’. Laura Galante, who until recently led the US Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told CyberScoop, “We can’t accept this level of espionage on our networks. If you had 50 Chinese [MSS] spies or contractors sitting inside a major [telco] building, they would be walked out and it would be a full-scale effort. That’s in broad strokes what has happened [with Salt Typhoon] but the access was digital.” The trouble is that even as one access point is patched or shuttered and bad actors kicked out of part of a system, there are so many other potential sites of weakness to be exploited that cyberattackers simply move to another, and another and another, more or less at will and ad infinitum. The Salt Typhoon attackers, and their ilk, have compromised telecom networks to such a scale, particularly in the areas of identity management software and devices and software at the network edge that, it seems, the best we can expect is that an infection might be ‘contained’ but not completely eradicated. Indeed, the network edge is the latest battlefield with Chinese hackers (and others) infiltrating virtual private networks (VPNs), small office/home office (SOHO) routers and Wi-Fi-only routers, while domestic US subscribers remain completely unaware that there’s a cuckoo in the nest. Blending in with ordinary private traffic in this way enables hackers to operate within trusted US networks and evade detection before hopping across to bigger networks to wreak truly dangerous damage.

– The staff, TelecomTV