• Boardroom battle brewing at TIM
• Rakuten Symphony adds to its top team
• Germany’s 1&1 preps its 5G Open RAN rollout

A bitter boardroom wrangle in Italy and the latest action involving Rakuten Symphony top today’s news charts.

Not for the first time in recent years, a bruising boardroom battle appears to be brewing at TIM (Telecom Italia), with shareholder Vivendi (24% stake) in the centre of the ring... Vivendi isn’t happy with current CEO Luigi Gubitosi, and would like its own CEO Arnaud de Puyfontaine to take over as TIM chairman, but TIM’s second-largest shareholder, Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP, a 9.8% stake) doesn’t want this Thursday’s board meeting (called by Vivendi) to be about governance issues, preferring to focus instead on strategic issues such as the proposed merger of TIM’s fixed access unit with Open Fiber. This is a battle TIM could currently do without...

Rakuten Symphony, the Open RAN products and solutions arm of Rakuten Mobile that’s being tuned up for an IPO or stake sale, has strengthened its top table team with the appointment of former Ericsson and MobiledgeX exec Geoff Hollingworth as its Chief Marketing Officer. Hollingworth, now more than a week into the role, not only adds years of telecom industry knowledge to the Symphony team, but also offers a not-to-be-underestimated passion for Indian cuisine and brewed hops, vital for any CMO needing to engage with the industry...  

1&1, the German service provider that is building a greenfield, Open RAN-based 5G network with help from Rakuten Symphony, has grown its mobile customer base during the first nine months of the year to just over 11 million and increased its revenues for the period by 3.1% to €2.9 billion, though its fixed broadband customer numbers dropped slightly to 4.26 million. The service provider, which currently offers its mobile services using Telefónica Deutschland’s network under an MVNO agreement, noted in its financial update that early 5G network planning costs are starting to nibble at its earnings, though at this stage the numbers are not weighing heavily – just €24.5 million “in start-up costs for preparations for the 5G network roll-out.” The operator says it plans to agree deals with tower companies during the current quarter and also begin its 5G network construction before the end of this year.  See this update for more details on its financials .  

NFV is alive and well and living in Sophia Antipolis! The ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group (ISG) has rolled up its sleeves to start ‘Release 5’ that will include further work in areas such as VNF configuration, fault management modelling, evolving RAN requirements, energy efficiency and cloud-native VNFs. Read more. 

Infovista says it has integrated direct access to crowdsourced user data into Planet 7.5, which it describes as the world’s first AI-powered planning and optimization solution. “By automatically integrating processed data on how subscribers are using and experiencing operators’ services into Planet, network engineers can derive actionable insights from a detailed picture of traffic demand and network KPIs based on 9 billion data points collected daily worldwide,” states the vendor in this press release. 

UK network interconnection specialist LINX is to deploy 400 GigE edge routing systems from Nokia in three locations around London. The move will “allow LINX to support services at speeds of up to 400GE initially with the ability to seamlessly grow capacity and scale to higher speeds in the future. LINX will benefit from Nokia FP silicon that ensures network performance and capabilities such as traffic engineering do not degrade as network traffic levels increase.” Read more.