What’s up with… VMO2, BT, OpenAI

• Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) goes even greener 
• BT boasts 5G SA success
• OpenAI’s finances, relationships in the spotlight

In today’s industry news roundup: Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) strikes a 10-year solar power deal as part of its plan to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040; BT’s mobile operation, EE, says it has exceeded its 5G+ (aka 5G standalone) targets; OpenAI’s numbers are under scrutiny as its loosens its ties with Microsoft; and much more!

Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), the UK operator jointly owned by Liberty Global and Telefónica, has announced a 10-year deal with solar power provider Egg Power to source around 5% of its energy from Egg’s new solar farm in the English county of Suffolk. The deal is part of VMO2’s ambitions to reach net-zero emissions across its entire value chain by 2040 and builds on another deal that the operator signed last year for wind power provided by The Renewables Infrastructure Group. Together, the two deals mean the operator expects 20% of its energy to come from renewables. Egg, it must be noted, is also owned by Liberty Global, through its investment arm Liberty Growth: It is currently building the new 70MW solar farm in Suffolk, with plans to begin power generation in 2027.

BT Group’s mobile operator division, EE, has shared some numbers around its recent 5G advances, revealing that more than 50 million people have access to 5G+ (its term for 5G standalone, or 5G SA) in more than 610 towns and cities across the UK, topping its goal of reaching 41 million by spring 2026. The BT-owned mobile operator says 5G+ usage has grown by more than 54% in the past six months, driven by more access to 5G+ devices and sites. In the past year, EE has refarmed 2.1GHz spectrum across more than 4,000 sites, with plans to add a further 5,000 sites in the coming months. EE also revealed it has expanded the rollout of Ericsson’s Advanced RAN Coordination (ARC) capacity-sharing technology to London, following initial trials in Manchester and Edinburgh last year, with more of the UK’s busiest cities – including Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle and Sheffield – to follow by the end of May.

Sticking with EE, the BT-owned operator has partnered with neutral host network operator  Boldyn Networks to enable the UK’s Emergency Services Network (ESN) to deliver 4G connectivity across the London Underground. Boldyn will work with EE, which is the main provider for the ESN, the UK Home Office, and Transport for London (TfL) – which runs the Underground – to deploy its infrastructure solutions across the 137 Tube, Docklands Light Railway and London Overground stations located ‘underground’. The ESN is a 4G network currently being built by EE to replace the existing Tetra-based Airwave network that provides dedicated connectivity to the UK’s emergency services. Boldyn already has a partnership with TfL to deploy 4G and 5G cells across the Underground network and holds a 20-year concession agreement to build a new fibre network leveraging existing TfL ducts

It’s been a busy week for ChatGPT developer OpenAI which, following rumours that it is planning to develop its own smartphone, has been forced to react to a Wall Street Journal report that it has missed financial and new user targets, with CEO Sam Altman describing as “ridiculous” any suggestion that the company is having to pull back on its planned AI datacentre investments, reports Reuters. The reports, and the general economics of the AI services sector, could mean that OpenAI’s planned initial public offering (IPO) might not happen this year, reckons seasoned tech sector analyst Richard Windsor in his latest Radio Free Mobile blog: Windsor has long flagged that the economics of mass market AI services do not easily stack up and now warns that Japan’s SoftBank Group, which has been pumping tens of billions of dollars into OpenAI, might soon feel the wrath of its investors if such investments don’t result in healthy rewards.     

Meanwhile, OpenAI has revamped its relationship with Microsoft, one of its major investors and long-time partners. “Microsoft remains OpenAI’s primary cloud partner, and OpenAI products will ship first on Azure, unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities. OpenAI can now serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider,” noted OpenAI in this announcement. 

Still with Microsoft… It has reminded the market that it’s as keen as its hyperscaler rivals to play a key role in the provision of sovereign digital services by noting that Azure Local, which enables enterprises to “run cloud-consistent infrastructure on hardware they own and operate within their sovereign boundary” can now scale to “support deployments of up to thousands of servers within a single sovereign environment, allowing organisations to run much larger workloads locally across large-footprint datacentres, industrial environments and edge locations while maintaining control within their sovereign boundary.” And Microsoft has some big name use cases to help it make its mark: AT&T is “deploying Azure Local to run mission-critical infrastructure on hardware they own in their environment,” noted Microsoft in this blog. Sherry McCaughan, VP of mobility core services at AT&T, commented: “Azure Local provides the infrastructure foundation we need to run critical operations at scale, while ensuring control and governance across our environment. The consistency of the Azure operating model, delivered on our own infrastructure, is key as we continue to modernise while delivering reliable services to our customers.”

Telenor has reported a steady financial first quarter despite challenging conditions in some key markets, particularly Bangladesh where the operator is represented by Grameenphone. Telenor reported group service revenues of 14.8bn Norwegian krone (NOK) ($1.59bn), up by 1.6% on an “organic” (like-for-like) basis, while its adjusted EBITDA was up by 3.1% to NOK8bn ($859m). Service revenues in Asia declined 1.9% on an organic basis, “reflecting challenging market conditions for Grameenphone in Bangladesh. This was further affected by broader macroeconomic headwinds and energy supply chain constraints due to the war in Iran,” the operator noted in its earnings release. In its home market of Norway, Telenor noted that its AI factory, which was launched in 2024, “continued to ramp up its commercial activities” during the first quarter, with the total number of customers reaching 20. But it’s still early days for the sovereign infrastructure operation: “While… utilisation increased during the period, revenues remained at a low level,” noted Telenor.  

Rakuten Symphony has teamed up with private wireless networks tech specialist Celona for the development of Open RAN-based private 5G solutions for large and medium-sized enterprises, with global logistics, manufacturing, agriculture, ports and mining among the vertical sectors being targeted. The companies will integrate Rakuten Symphony’s enterprise-scale cloud-native 5G Open RAN infrastructure with Celona’s 5G local area network (LAN) enterprise platform to create a pre-integrated offering. The vendor partners aim to offer a fully managed solution that can support “internet of things (IoT)-driven use cases and mission-critical applications, helping enterprises modernise operations, unlock new efficiencies and lower costs,” noted Rakuten Symphony in this announcement. Celona will lead customer deployments and ongoing services and delivery through its established partner ecosystem.

In Italy, the country’s two main wholesale fibre access network infrastructure operators, FiberCop (the former Telecom Italia fibre access network acquired as part of a broader deal in 2024 by a consortium led by private equity firm KKR) and Open Fiber (majority owned by the Italian government, with Macquarie as a minority shareholder) are reportedly in discussions to align their rollout plans and help boost Italy’s fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) coverage, reports Reuters. The Italian government has long harboured hopes that the two operators could merge to create one national wholesale fibre broadband player, but such plans appear to be on the back burner these days, with collaboration regarded as a more likely near-term option (if regulators give such a relationship the green light). 

– The staff, TelecomTV