In December 2019, UK telecom giant BT Group agreed to sell BT Espana to investment fund Portobello Capital. This was the first part of its plan to dismantle and sell off its sprawling BT Global Services unit. This month, BT agreed to offload its Latin American businesses to CIH Telecommunications Americas, marking the second confirmed transaction.
Today we examine BT’s motivations and take a closer look at other businesses that are likely to be sold off.
Mobile data usage continues to boom worldwide.
Here’s just one example. Following Super Bowl LIV in Miami, AT&T reported that users in the stadium consumed 10.2TB of mobile data during the game. This is enough to stream high-definition video for almost two months straight.
The ill-advised merger between Brazilian telecom giant Oi and Portugal Telecom—a union that we first heard about in October 2013—ranks as one of the more disastrous telecom tie-ups in recent memory. While Oi’s subsequent financial issues have been well-documented, the slow unraveling of the enlarged company is altogether less clear-cut.
Today we look closer at the fallout.
French billionaire Xavier Niel rose to prominence in the telecom world for his ownership of domestic telco Iliad. You might know Iliad for sparking a price war in the mobile sector when Iliad’s Free Mobile launched in January 2012. (Niel employed a similar price-war tactic when Iliad Italia launched in May 2018.)
But these companies only represent the tip of the iceberg.
Indeed, the size and scale of Niel’s empire are often overlooked due to convoluted shareholder structures and the lack of a unified brand name across markets.
Today we piece it all together to appreciate the bigger picture.
We've been celebrating the launch of our beautiful new CommsUpdate site by taking a closer look at the year’s major global developments—the highs, the lows, the mergers, the auctions. All of it.
One thing is certain: there was more than enough telecom news to go around in 2019. If you haven't had a chance to peruse our wrap-up of January-June 2019, click here and have a read. Keep scrolling to take in the biggest news from the back half of the year.
A year is a long time in telecommunications–something that our CommsUpdate correspondents know all too well.
To celebrate the launch of our beautiful new CommsUpdate site, we’re taking a closer look at the year’s major global developments, including a few things that you might have missed along the way.
Keep scrolling to catch up on the biggest headlines from early 2019.
The government of Hong Kong has completed a round of 5G spectrum auctions, having sold frequencies in the 3.3GHz, 3.5GHz, 4.9GHz, and 26GHz ranges this year. The sales raised a total of HK$1.91 billion ($244 million) in spectrum utilization fees (SUFs).
The territory is looking to be among the front-runners in the race to launch 5G networks in the Asia-Pacific region.
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