Technology

Orange has announced a new deal with Eutelsat that will enable it to add LEO connectivity into its portfolio of satellite-based communications services.

Vodafone has launched a new digital travel platform centred around its Travel eSIM, and has extended it to 206 destinations on 700 networks, which will be supported by GenAI customer service.

• Unprecedented £11bn investment is one of the largest privately funded infrastructure programmes in the UK, connecting all four nations and every community  
• VodafoneThree is the only mobile network operator with a fully funded, regulated and guaranteed

US public cloud giant AWS has unveiled a new company that will run its European sovereign cloud operations, with copious vows about security and autonomy.

Nokia has been selected to lead PROACTIF, an EU project involving 42 European tech firms from 13 countries with the aim of boosting drone and robotics autonomy on the continent.

BT has reorganised its multinational services operation into a dedicated division within the group, fuelling further speculation about its future.

Nokia, Colt, and Honeywell are researching how to protect encrypted data from quantum risks using Low Earth Orbit satellites.

Analyst IDC has decreased its predictions for worldwide smartphone shipments this year, forecasting them to grow 0.6% YoY to 1.24 billion units, citing uncertainty and tariff volatility.

ITRI Establishes a New Office in the UK

The Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) has recently inaugurated its new office in the UK. This establishment marks a noteworthy moment in enhancing collaboration between Taiwan and the UK in the fields of technology and innovation.

Five organisations have jointly developed and conducted a live demonstration of a new 5G non-terrestrial network (NTN) satellite technology for mobile connectivity in remote areas.

Following Three’s installation of 18 Open RAN small cell sites in Glasgow City Centre, the project will now expand that to 34, says Mavenir.

EE and Ontix have installed 80 small cells across the City of Westminster, which support both 4G and 5G traffic for EE customers in central London.

Hello, I’m Dan Kilper, an electronics and engineering professor at Trinity College Dublin. I am also the director of the CONNECT Centre, a large multi-university research centre funded by Research Ireland that studies future networks and communications. 

Nokia and Blackned signed an MoU to provide deployable mobile communication systems for military battlefield operation, designed for Germany’s defence requirements.

In today’s hyper connected world, seamless digital experiences – from cloud based services to encrypted communications and satellite navigation – are powered by something often invisible to users: technology standards. Underpinning key aspects of telecommunications systems – interoperability, trust, and reliability.

Numbers from Canalys claim that smartphone shipments into Europe (excluding Russia) declined by 2% in Q1 2025 to 32.4 million units, which the analyst says was largely caused by sluggish entry-level demand.

The UK Government has announced 50 existing mobile masts across England, Scotland and Wales have been upgraded to improve rural mobile coverage.

The masts, which were initially only used to connect EE customers and those calling 999, have now been upgraded to provide coverage from all mobile network operators. 

Vodafone Group Plc (“Vodafone”) and CK Hutchison Group Telecom Holdings Limited (“CKHGT”), a wholly owned subsidiary of CK Hutchison Holdings Limited (“CK Hutchison”), are pleased to announce that the merger of Vodafone UK and Three UK successfully completed on 31 May 2025.

Xiaomi shipped the most wearable band devices in the first quarter of this year, overtaking Apple, as the broader market witnessed an increase in demand, new analyst data shows.

According to a recently published report from Dell’Oro Group, the trusted source for market information about the telecommunications, security, networks, and data center industries, the Optical Transport equipment market declined 1 percent year-over-year in 1Q 2025.

Three UK has successfully completed the first stage of a landmark trial – the UK’s first deployment of Open RAN technology in a dense urban environment. The trial was designed to test the viability of deploying Open RAN in a complex city setting.

Vodafone and chip firm MediaTek say they have reached a milestone by successfully testing 5G uplink speeds of up to 277 Mbps.

Microsoft has announced a new enterprise agentic platform called Microsoft Discovery, which purports to accelerate research times by giving scientists and engineers specialised AI agents to collaborate with.

Juniper Networks and ServiceNow have integrated some tools for a joint network and service automation product which they say is the first of its kind.