What’s up with… Telefónica, Telenor IoT, Bharti & BT

• Telefónica teams up with Google Cloud for sovereign pitch
• Telenor IoT hooks up with Sateliot 
• Bharti’s BT stake is unlikely to get bigger

In today’s industry news roundup: Telefónica takes the hyperscaler partner route to the sovereign cloud services market; LEO satellite service provider Sateliot has become the NTN partner for Telenor’s IoT service provision; the UK government would intervene if Bharti Enterprises tried to increase its stake in BT above 25%, according to the FT; and much more!

Telefónica’s enterprise digital division Telefónica Tech, has teamed up with Google Cloud to develop and launch a new sovereign cloud offering that, according to the giant Spanish telco, enables “Spanish public administrations and private companies, particularly those in highly regulated sectors, to maintain strict control over their data hosted on Google Cloud.” The hyperscaler is “extending the capabilities of its Madrid region to offer Google Cloud Data Boundary services to customers and its wider partner ecosystem in Spain,” noted Telefónica, which has been selected by Google Cloud “as its trusted sovereignty partner in Spain to offer its Data Boundary service and manage the controls that enable data sovereignty,” stated the telco. “The service, using Google Cloud’s local infrastructure, provides verifiable controls over data protection, residency and personnel access, enabling compliance with Spain’s privacy and digital sovereignty requirements,” it added. Telefónica says the data stored in Google Cloud as part of this service “is encrypted by keys that are generated and stored by Telefónica in its own sovereign cloud. In this way, the keys are generated and managed by a sovereign operator from Spanish territory, providing increased protection against unauthorised access from external jurisdictions.” Sofia Collado, CEO of Telefónica Tech, stated: “At Telefónica, our ambition is to become the leading gateway to digital technologies through continuous innovation and by exploring new solutions and enhanced services that deliver greater value to customers. This new offering is a clear example of that commitment, enabling organisations to define precise data residency, access control and data protection policies through encryption keys generated and managed outside public cloud environments. As part of our commitment to digital sovereignty, we also provide a comprehensive 24/7 support and monitoring service, together with continuous audit capabilities that help detect and alert organisations to any policy changes that could compromise their compliance posture.”

Telenor IoT (aka Connexion) has struck a strategic partnership with low earth orbit (LEO) satellite provider Sateliot to enable standard narrowband IoT devices to transition between terrestrial and satellite networks and ensure continuous coverage. The move follows the completion of successful trials in Spain, which showed that “Telenor IoT SIM cards can stay connected to Sateliot’s satellite network for extended periods.” The partners aim to “enable global, resilient IoT solutions” that combine the best of Earth-based connectivity and non-terrestrial network infrastructure, using the former where it exists and leveraging the latter for low or no-coverage areas. Sateliot said its constellation of LEO satellites follow the 3GPP Release 17 5G NTN standard, which means compliant devices can connect to satellites without any modifications, custom antennas or special firmware. This opens up use cases in industries such as agriculture, maritime, transport and logistics, and energy and utilities. The news comes only days after Telenor announced that its IoT business will be spun out as a joint venture later this year. 

Following recent reports that India’s Bharti Enterprises is keen to increase its stake in BT Group beyond its current 24.95% holding, The Financial Times (subscription required) reports that the UK government would block any such move because of the need to maintain sovereign control over “critical national infrastructure”. Bharti Enterprises, which has two non-executive seats on BT’s board, would be subject to a review under the National Security and Investment Act if it attempted to take its stake over 25%: According to the FT’s UK government source, any such move would be blocked, not because India or Bharti Enterprises is regarded as a security threat but simply because the government wants to keep sovereign control over infrastructure such as national communications networks, particularly at this time of heightened international friction.    

Payments provider Monzo has followed rival Revolut in launching a UK mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) running on Virgin Media O2’s 4G and 5G network infrastructure and supported by 1Global’s international eSIM platform. Monzo – the UK’s biggest digital bank with more than 14 million customers – is welcoming prospective customers to sign up for its eSIM mobile offering, which will launch in “summer 2026”, according to the sign-up page. The fintech firm said it has signed a “multi-year” agreement with VMO2. It will offer three plans, ranging from 10Gbytes of data with unlimited calls and texts for £8 per month, to unlimited data for £20 per month, which also includes 25Gbytes of global roaming data in 52 countries. Users can also switch plans at any time, the payments provider said. It follows rival Revolut, which launched eSIM plans in the UK last year, and announced an expansion of its services last month.

Sparkle, the international network unit that is in the process of being divested by Telecom Italia (TIM), has partnered with Géant, the pan-European network and service provider for the research and education establishments, to expand connectivity for the global and scientific research community, the companies have announced. Géant operates a network that interconnects Europe’s National Research and Education Networks, serving over 50 million users and more than 10,000 scientific institutions across Europe with backbone speeds of up to 1.6 Tbit/s. Sparkle already supports it with connectivity and cloud services, but the two firms have extended their partnership to include new routes across Europe, Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean region. These have been backed by international projects co-funded by the European Union. Sparkle pointed to several new routes as significant, including one that links the Arab States Research and Education Network’s point of presence in Slough in the UK with Allan in Jordan, which is home to the Sesame international research centre. Other routes highlighted include a link between Marseille and Cairo and a route between Lagos and Cape Town. The move comes as Sparkle is set to be sold by parent TIM in a recently-approved €700m deal with the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance and Retelit, which will take joint control of the wholesale provider.

Rakuten Symphony, the vendor sibling of Rakuten Mobile, is losing one of its big hitters – its cloud business unit and AI chief Partha Seetala. He joined the company when Symphony acquired cloud-native telco platform specialist Robin.io, where Seetala was CEO, in early 2022. Seetala, his team and Robin.io’s telco cloud technology were well known to the Japanese company as Rakuten Mobile had already been using the startup’s technology for a couple of years and knew how (and why) it was the right fit for virtualised mobile network environments. Now Seetala has “decided to step back from [his] role as President of Rakuten Cloud and Chief AI Officer at Rakuten Symphony to build the next big thing,” he announced in this LinkedIn post. “This is the end of one chapter — and the beginning of another,” he added. The TelecomTV team wishes Seetala, who is highly regarded as a person as well as a tech executive, all the best in whatever that next chapter brings. 

A Montreal-based telecom software startup that tags itself as the “the AI-native operating system for communications service providers” has raised $40m in a Series B round led by JMI Equity that takes its total funding to $66m. The team at gaiia was formerly at Canadian internet service provider (ISP) Oxio, where they developed OSS and BSS applications that suited that operator’s needs: When Oxio was acquired in 2023 by Cogeco Connexion in 2023, gaiia was spun out as an independent company and now supplies its software to multiple ISPs. Marc Campagna, co-founder and CEO of gaiia, stated: "Telecom has the lowest NPS of any major industry, and the reason is the software running it. Operators have been forced to run their business on tools built before the internet became essential to everyday life. We built gaiia because we lived that problem ourselves at Oxio, and this raise lets us keep building, faster, for the companies delivering the most important utility on the planet."   

Just days after Verizon joined Project Glasswing, the initiative set up in April by Anthropic to secure its new frontier large language model (LLM) Claude Mythos, Anthropic has issued an update on what the AI giant and its Project Glasswing partners (which now number about 50) have “learned about this critical challenge for cybersecurity”. Anthropic notes that the initiative’s participants have “used Claude Mythos Preview to find more than ten thousand high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities across the most systemically important software in the world. Progress on software security [was formerly] limited by how quickly we could find new vulnerabilities. Now it’s limited by how quickly we can verify, disclose, and patch the large numbers of vulnerabilities found by AI.” In the update, Anthopic outlines what it and its partners have “learned about this critical challenge for cybersecurity in the first weeks of Project Glasswing. We focus on the early public evidence of Mythos Preview’s performance, on the initial results of our effort to scan thousands of open-source software projects, and on what this progress means for cyberdefenders today. We also cover what to expect next from Project Glasswing, and how we’re thinking about releasing Mythos-class models in the future.” 

– The staff, TelecomTV