• KDDI taps Blue Planet for autonomous networking smarts 
• Jensen Huang quits as Nvidia’s CEO
• Telia buys another B2B MVNO

In today’s industry news roundup: Japanese telco KDDI is to use the automation solutions portfolio of Ciena’s Blue Planet division to help transform its networks; Nvidia’s Jensen Huang falls on his sword; Telia buys another enterprise MVNO customer base and licenses UCaaS tech as part of the same deal; and much more!

KDDI has picked Ciena’s Blue Planet to help with its network modernisation programme and to help introduce autonomous operations. The Japanese operator, which has almost 73 million mobile customers, will leverage Blue Planet’s cloud-native automation portfolio as it expands AI-driven operations throughout its network. The deployment, which will start with the telco’s fixed network and be expanded to its mobile network starting in 2028, is being delivered in collaboration with Accenture, as KDDI looks to build a scalable, operational foundation that brings together network inventory, orchestration, assurance optimisation and agentic AI around a single, trusted source of operational data. KDDI and Accenture will work alongside Blue Planet to configure and deploy automation capabilities, resource adapters, workflows and AI agents on the Blue Planet platform “tailored to the requirements of Japan’s network environments and multivendor ecosystem,” noted the vendor. “This collaboration will apply reusable automation frameworks while establishing the data models, integrations and governance required to support trusted AI-driven operations at scale,” it added. Toshio Kato, general manager of the advanced platform development division at KDDI, stated: “KDDI is committed to shaping and leading the future of intelligent, autonomous networks. We want to scale AI operations safely, bearing in mind the unique requirements of Japan’s network environment, and this standardised model with Accenture and Blue Planet gives us the confidence to continue our AI momentum at scale.” The deployment follows a six-month trial conducted by KDDI and Accenture in a laboratory environment, in which the two partners validated the AI capabilities of Blue Planet’s AI Studio and its wider automation portfolio. Together, they tested a number of use cases, including natural language alarm search, closed-loop fault remediation and AI-driven alarm prioritisation.

It was one scandal too many. Having admitted to a relationship with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy, the revelation that Nvidia’s figurehead and founder, Jensen Huang, also had an extra-marital relationship with one of his direct reports, Kimberly Powell, VP of health care at the AI tech giant, was too much to gloss over. Huang has now resigned as president, CEO and board member with immediate effect: Colette Kress, who has been the vendor’s CFO since 2013, has agreed to serve as interim CEO until a full-time replacement is appointed. Harvey C. Jones, a tech sector veteran who was previously CEO and chairman of Synopsys, has been appointed as Nvidia’s first ever chair of the board. Jones noted: “Colette has helped lead Nvidia through a period of extraordinary growth and has a deep understanding of our business, customers, operations and financial position. She is supported by an experienced leadership team that has been instrumental in executing Nvidia’s strategy and advancing its technology roadmap. The board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team, and we expect the company’s operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption.” Almost as a footnote, the Nvidia announcement stated: “Jensen’s contributions to Nvidia are profound. Nvidia is one of the most consequential technology companies in the world. The board and the company thank Jensen for his immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry.” One thing the events of the past week have changed is Nvidia’s share price: It is down almost 8% today to $159.98 on the Nasdaq exchange, and has dropped by almost 16% since the news broke that Huang had hooked up with Chinese businesswoman Huang Le (aka Alice Huang), a suspected spy for the People’s Republic of China. One thing that doesn’t change is that most of the world’s AI infrastructure relies on Nvidia technology and those companies are committed to many long-term deals to continue buying the AI tech giant’s products, so expect Nvidia’s financial performance to keep on smashing records. However, Nvidia’s rivals will now smell blood and may well find it easier to chip away (geddit?) at Nvidia’s AI processor market share more quickly. Nvidia’s next earnings report will be published late on 17 November.

Telia has struck a deal to buy the Nordic enterprise customer base of Swedish MVNO Telavox for 3.8bn Swedish krona (SEK) ($381m). The deal brings around 24,000 enterprise customers, primarily small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) located across four countries (Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark), to Telia’s B2B base: Those SMBs have about 325,000 end users between them (of which more than 240,000 are mobile end users), mostly based in Sweden. The acquired business generates around SEK1.1bn ($110.2m) in annual revenues, Telia noted in this announcement. The MVNO already operates on Telia’s mobile network, under a wholesale agreement that was due to expire next year. As part of the transaction, Telia has also agreed to “retain the technology for the acquired customer base”, which comes in the form of a licensing agreement for Televox’s unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) platform to bring together business telephony, contact centre, messaging, AI and digital self-service capabilities in one operating system. Telia will make the platform available to its existing enterprise customer base as well as the acquired Telavox customers. Around 180 employees are expected to make the switch from Televox to Telia as part of the deal, which will be subject to regulatory approval and is expected to close in Q1 2027. It is Telia’s second major MVNO acquisition to bolster its B2B arm this year, following April’s agreement to buy Nordic Communications Group’s Swedish MVNO, Telness – a deal that also saw Telia integrate the company’s Seamless OS technology platform into its network.

One New Zealand has expanded its partnership with Nokia in an agreement that will see the Kiwi telco deploy Nokia’s Assurance Centre and Autonomous Networks Data Suite as part of its network upgrades. The aim is to build a “stronger foundation for predictive, data-driven operations”, explained One NZ’s chief technology officer, Sharina Nisha, in a press release. The operator will use the Assurance Suite to ingest and correlate multiple datasets from across the network, subscriber, service and security domains to trigger autonomous processes. This, according to Nokia, will help the telco predict and resolve potential issues. It will also use Nokia’s Data Suite to catalogue network data for network automation solutions, which will help One NZ to better anticipate network conditions and adjust them more quickly. The partnership builds on the Finnish vendor’s existing relationship with One NZ, following One NZ’s deployment of Nokia’s Unified Inventory and Orchestration Centre in 2025. “The ambition for autonomous networks is no longer simply to automate more tasks. It is to enable networks to sense changing conditions, make trusted decisions and act at machine speed,” said Shkumbin Hamiti, head of autonomous networks at Nokia.

As global leaders meet in Turkey to discuss climate change at COP31, the GSMA has warned that the impact of extreme weather on mobile networks is often overlooked. Recent research from the mobile industry trade body shows that storms and floods already cost mobile operators $1.7bn every year, mostly spent on repairing and replacing damaged cell sites. As climate risk intensifies, this figure could almost double, the GSMA claims, surpassing $3bn a year by 2050. Between 2022 and 2024, major storms and floods in 50 countries coincided with around 150 major telecom outages each year, impacting around 215 million mobile users. In the first of a six-part series of reports, entitled ‘Futureproofing Connectivity: Climate Risk and Resilience in Telecommunications’, the GSMA was keen to stress that these figures are “conservative” because they do not include natural phenomena, such as wildfires or extreme heat. The report also includes recommendations for policymakers and regulators, including consulting with operators to develop new resilience frameworks, that set proportionate, outcomes-based resilience measures. “Operator-led frameworks can be implemented more quickly, are more flexible and risk based, and will be more cost effective,” the GSMA said.

​The member states of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have re-elected Doreen Bogdan-Martin as the organisation’s secretary-general: Bogdan-Martin, who is from the US, won re-election to lead the UN agency for digital technologies with 164 votes out of 173 votes cast. “I am deeply honoured for the trust ITU member states have placed in me to serve a second term… The digital world has changed dramatically in four years, and it will change even faster going forward. Our job is to make sure that change works for everyone, especially the 2 billion who are unconnected. Together, we can make sure the digital future leaves no one behind." For further details, see this announcement. 

Google is aiming to provide an optimum mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) service in the US with the launch of Google Fi’s “super new network”, which not only hooks up the latest Google Pixel smartphones (and soon some Samsung and Motorola devices) to the best Wi-Fi signal but also connects subscribers to the best available 5G signal from “two of America’s fastest 5G networks”. Google doesn’t identify the networks, but it has long had an MVNO agreement with T-Mobile US and, following checks and testing by one of the writers for PC Mag, it appears the other is most likely Verizon. More details are available in this Google Fi announcement. 

– The staff, TelecomTV