• Openreach is asking for help to fibre 2 million homes
• Ribbon wants to be a big hitter in data transport
• A busy week for Nokia

That Openreach is reaching out for help in digging its way to 2 million more UK homes, makes it to the top of the pile in today's serving of fresh news

Openreach, BT's semi-detached infrastructure deployment and maintenance arm, has awarded Telent, based in the splendid UK town of Warwick, a sizeable slice of the UK's £12 billion project to deliver full-fibre, ultra-fast broadband access to the entirety of homes and businesses in the UK by 2025. Currently full fibre access is available to three million or so premises and Openreach is awarding contracts to ensure coverage is provided, in short order, to at least a further two million. Telent will be partly responsible for construction work including surveying, building, testing and supporting Openreach to commission the network and so enable customers to sign-up for service across 12 cities. At a terrible time for the national economy  with jobs disappearing ever more quickly, Telent is recruiting people to help deliver the project. Openreach will be offering its own training as part of the build programme which includes the use of its 12 training schools across the UK. Interested candidates should visit https://telent.com/work-with-us for more info. 

Ribbon Communications is making it very clear it wants to be a big(ger) hitter in the data transport technology market: It has followed up its $400m+ acquisition of ECI Telecom, which was completed in March, with the hiring of Sam Bucci as Executive VP and General Manager of its Packet Optical Networks business. (Former ECI chief Darryl Edwards jumped ship in May, so Bucci is, in some ways, his replacement.) Bucci has spent the past 11 years at the various iterations of what is now Nokia, most recently as head of that vendor’s optical networking team, and prior to that spent 15 years at Nortel, so you could say he has already seen the light. (Geddit? Oh please yourselves…)

It has been a busy week for Nokia… In addition to its tasty DISH deal and network automation adventures, the Finnish vendor has landed a deal to provide Nigerian operator Tizeti with a 4G/LTE fixed wireless solution, and is supplying Philippines operator Converge ICT with fiber access nodes to support its high-speed fixed broadband network rollout on the island of Mindanao

India’s telecoms regulator, the TRAI, has ruled out the need for a regulatory framework for IP (OTT) communications services.  India’s telecoms operators have been lobbying for regulation of apps that offer free voice and text services - Facebook, WhatsApp and Google - because they claim they erode their own services. Not going to happen. 

Ericsson has integrated technology from A10 Networks into its packet core gateway to offer an oven-ready (us Brits love that phrase) cloud native packet core firewall. Full details can be found in this announcement.

G-Core Labs describes itself as a global CDN player and a cloud and edge leader and says it  has just launched an AI platform that can help to speed the development AI-based apps by a factor three. G-Core says it’s all part a "single comprehensive portal" within the company’s public cloud and allows business and development teams significantly to reduce the time-to-market of their applications and is a one-stop-shop where developers can work on apps without having "to worry about preparing infrastructure, purchasing necessary software and generally  getting set up. G-Core's PR release says the technology "opens up great opportunities" where projects related to the recognition of people, images, objects and documents. It claims such applications will be "useful" in the retail, finance, insurance and media sectors as well as health care and public safety. It doesn't overtly mention surveillance and facial recognition, but perhaps it should?