From the newsletter (October 1; sign-up or follow if you want it sooner): Nokia and ICEYE are launching a sovereign satellite communications venture, while US telcos formalize a satellite coverage JV and SoftBank completes its $3.1bn DigitalBridge acquisition. Verizon meanwhile outlines an agentic AI network vision.
Some quick news for you, in some kind of order, just to keep us honest. Nokia has a new sovereign sat-com venture with compatriot space group ICEYE – which is about new connectivity frontiers (of course), but also (plainly) about ownership and control of the satellites, ground systems, and terminals. The Finnish firm has also, for the record, completed the sale of its FWA unit to Inseego, which doubles the latter’s revenue, adds 250 staff, and gets a bunch of tech, contracts, and carrier relationships – in return for an 11% stake in the business, at least. Next up: the sale of Nokia’s ECE unit, the erstwhile king of private 5G – due any day now (surely?). And back on satellite-NTN, quickly: the big three US telcos – AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon – have formalized their anti-Starlink JV to pool spectrum resources to eliminate coverage “dead zones” and expand satellite coverage. It is a “complementary service” to fiber and 5G, they reminded everyone. The trio has also appointed Paul Roth as interim CEO, while the search for a permanent placement continues. Roth was previously with AT&T, Cingular Wireless, and Ameritech. And to flip flop: on the subject of completed deals, Softbank has handed over $3.1bn for digital infrastructure investor DigitalBridge, giving it greater exposure to data centers and connectivity infrastructure. DigitalBridge will remain separately managed under Marc Ganzi. Also, and as picked up everywhere: Reuters says the EU’s attempt to force high-risk (Huawei, ZTE, etc) equipment out of its mobile networks might be delayed – as governments concede that networks, critical as they are, are also expensive to rip-out and replace.
Meanwhile, here’s the intro section from a well-written review of a well-executed interview from Intelligent RAN Forum last week… Maybe it was just the quality of the questions (chapeau, Sean); but Verizon rose above it all at Intelligent RAN Forum – above the commercial tests at Orange, the early wins at Optus, the scare stories at SK Telecom – to draw the line between automation and autonomy, capability and context, tools and platforms, research and action, order and chaos. It was a useful closing session, which painted the US firm like it had all the right questions, if not the answers just yet. But then probabilistic AI is an awkward bedfellow for a deterministic telco. Which is why Verizon talked at some length about guardrails, arbitration, provenance, and (human) intent. The firm wants to move beyond the kind of rule-based automation that drives helpful changes in its own radio (RAN) network – of the sort, actually, that Optus referred to in another session – to an agentic operating model where AI systems reason across its different network domains, and also coordinate with one another, and take actions in response to problems that are not already scripted by humans. Which is the AI dream for Level 4/5 network operations, of course. More here, or via the link below.
