Ericsson is to significantly increase its minority stake in CENX after agreeing to purchase 100 per cent of the company’s shares.

Nokia has signed a €500 million loan transaction with the European Investment Bank (EIB), supported by key Investment Plan for Europe element, the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI). The company plans to use the funding to further accelerate the research and development of 5G technology.

VIAVI Solutions has partnered with Microsemi to enable flexible optical networking technologies to meet the demands of 5G networks, providing service providers globally with solution platforms to build, test and quickly deploy 5G-ready optical networks including OTUCn, Flexible OTN (FlexO) and Flexible Ethernet (FlexE) technologies.

ADVA Optical Networking will host a joint demonstration with BT to showcase end-to-end, multi-layer transport network slicing and assurance.

AACHEN, GERMANY – Ericsson and the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT are working together to explore use-cases for 5G in the manufacturing environment, developing application scenarios for production and testing them in a real environment. 

Nokia and Qualcomm have successfully completed standard-compliant key interoperability tests in the 3.5GHz and 28GHz spectrum, using the Nokia AirScale base station and device prototypes from Qualcomm Technologies.

Following these recent tests, and the agreement in September last year that they would collaborate on 5G new radio (NR), the businesses say that widescale 5G deployments could take place in 2019. This will be timely for commercial network launches in the United States, China, Japan, Korea and Europe.

Huawei Group’s chairwoman, Madam Sun Yafang has met with UK prime minister, Theresa May to reaffirm the company’s long-term commitment to the UK, with the announcement that it will procure new deals totalling £3 billion over the next five years, helping UK businesses to increase exports to China.

Telenor Group is replacing its legacy optical backbone network across Norway and Sweden and has selected Nokia as sole supplier for the work. The upgrade will involve replacing its current optical core network, which connects major centres across Norway and Sweden. It is designed to provide a much-needed increase in bandwidth capacity throughout the countries.

OFS and CommScope have entered into a new eight-year partnership to help ensure the availability of optical fibre supply to CommScope for use in its customers’ networks. The specific terms of the agreement have not been publicly disclosed, but it represents an investment from both companies in order to address the increased demand for greater bandwidth.

The SoftFIRE project consortium is calling for applications to its challenge on Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), Software Defined Network (SDN), and 5G technologies. The call goes out to all technologists, visionaries, and practitioners involved in these fields.