What’s up with… AT&T, Nokia, Reliance Jio and the TM Forum, 5G

AT&T’s push to do the right thing by its investors, Nokia’s latest “beyond 5G” R&D initiative and some Open API actions from India’s largest mobile operator are today’s top news today.

AT&T announced its intention to divest its stake in WarnerMedia to its shareholders as part of the previously announced agreement to combine its media units with Discovery: AT&T shareholders will receive 0.24 shares of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) for each AT&T stock held. AT&T expects to raise $43 billion in proceeds from the media merger and plans to use those funds to position itself as “one of the best-capitalized 5G and fiber broadband companies in the United States.” He expects increased investment in 5G and fiber to result in 5G C-band coverage of 200 million people by the end of 2023 and fiber deployment to 30 million customers by the end of 2025. About 71% of new company, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), will be owned by AT&T shareholders, and the remaining 29% will be owned by existing Discovery shareholders. AT&T will also have about 7.2 billion diluted shares outstanding after the deal closes. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of this year. “We believe that the remaining AT&T and the new WBD are two stocks that the market will want to hold and that the markets to support those stocks will grow,” commented AT&T CEO John Stankey. “Rather than trying to account for short-term market volatility and deciding where to allocate value in the stock trading process, derivative distribution will let the market do what markets do best,” he added. The operator noted that the deal presents it with an opportunity to “deleverage its balance sheet and capitalize on longer-term demand for connectivity while unlocking shareholder value from its media assets on a tax-advantaged basis and creating through WBD a stronger global competitor in streaming and digital entertainment.” WBD will be led by Discovery President and CEO David Zaslav and is expected to achieve cost synergies of more than $3 billion by end of the second year following the transaction. In addition, AT&T announced that it had cut its dividend by almost half – from $2.08 per share to $1.11 per share. AT&T investors were not so enthusiastic about the set, as the carrier’s stock price fell 4.6% to $24.34 in the early afternoon on the New York Stock Exchange. AT&T’s announcement.

A consortium led by nokia and managed by the University of Oulu is launching a “massive project”, dubbed RF Sampo, which aims to “accelerate the development of RF and antenna technologies and accelerate the transition from 5G to 6G”. RF Sampo is the main optimized antenna technology effort that falls under Nokia’s Veturi program which aims to tap into the technology ecosystem in Finland. Other project consortium partners include RF design automation software specialist Optenni, test and measurement specialist Keysight Technologies, military radio communications developer Bittium, manufacturing solutions company Flex and aerospace company and defense SAAB. The €14 million project, according to the University of Oulu, which has long been a leader in 6G R&D, “will improve the design of the future radio platform by introducing a modeling concept supporting the design of complex wireless solutions.The project will investigate novel RF solutions for 5G and 6G, including antenna structures, integrated circuits, RF-related architectures and algorithms.The Sampo RF Project develops new skills, which help the project partners realize the commercial potential in various 5G application areas.For more details, see this announcement from the University of Oulu.

Addiction Jio, India’s largest mobile operator with over 400 million customers, has achieved Open API Platinum compliance certification in TM Forum, the industry body announced today. At first glance, this may not seem like a big deal, but it points to a very important trend in the industry – the use and deployment of open APIs, which will be absolutely essential if telecom operators are to survive in the oriented world. cloud. of digital services. Reliance Jio should be applauded for adopting the APIs, but the TM Forum should also be applauded for their efforts to bring these APIs to market in a way that will hopefully bring some compliance and interoperability to the market. . And it’s worth noting which other companies have made good use of the TM Forum’s open APIs – Comviva, Inspur, Tecnotree, Totogi and Whale Cloud. Hats off to them too and it will probably be very useful to them. For more information, see this announcement.

Orange welcomed an initiative which he said is “the largest 5G network deployment plan on the 700 MHz frequency band in Spain”. Throughout the year, the technology will be offered in more than 1,100 cities across the country, the majority of which have between 1,000 and 50,000 inhabitants. The company, in this announcement (in Spanish), pledged to also cover 140 cities with less than 1,000 inhabitants in a bid to bridge the digital divide. And it will also offer 5G services using the 700 MHz band in 140 cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants. The operator said the frequency band is “essential” to enable the greatest benefits of 5G, including high download speed and capacity, and ultra-low latency. He says the benefits will result in improvements in economic recovery spurred by digital transformation and national productivity. Orange, which had 620,000 5G customers in Spain as of September 30, 2021, won the largest amount of spectrum in the two priority bands for 5G in the latest auction, paying €350 million for two 2×5 blocks of spectrum. MHz. (See the latest 5G spectrum auction in Spain which brings in just €1 billion.)

Chip giant Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has moved closer to its planned $35 billion acquisition of Xilinx after the deal was approved by China’s Office of Anti-Monopoly Policy. The companies now expect the merger to close within the next two months, AMD noted in its filing with the SEC.

RCS (Rich Communication Services) are expected to be used by 3.8 billion people by 2026, up from 1.2 billion this year, according to Juniper Research. This growth will in turn lead to improved RCS-generated revenue for operators, which is expected to increase from $230 million this year to $4.6 billion in 2026, according to projections by the Juniper Research team. The numbers, however, suggest that RCS won’t really make much of a difference to ARPU or profitable revenue generation figures, as $4.6 billion isn’t really a return on 3.8 billion users. : for the sake of telcos, hopefully there are other benefits to sticking with RCS as a messaging services platform. The forecast came just as Deutsche Telekom announced plans to ramp up its RCS marketing efforts as part of an enhanced collaboration with Google. Read more.