A week in telecoms: Vodafone’s Oracle cloud deal; BT partners on AIOps

Vodafone and Oracle have announced a strategic partnership to modernize Vodafone’s European IT infrastructure and accelerate its transition to the cloud. Under the multi-year agreement, Vodafone will modernize and migrate a large number of its systems to OCI Dedicated Region, Oracle’s fully managed cloud region. This gives Vodafone a cloud platform to support and scale its OSS and BSS systems, including CRM and order management.

BT’s Digital unit is partnering with Dynatrace, using the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform as part of a new service management stack. The goal is to simplify, add intelligence to, and ultimately automate, service operations within BT in a new AIOps model, with Dynatrace supporting the automation of issue detection across BT’s technology estate.

Ericsson is predicting 5G subs will hit 1 billion globally by the end of this year. In China, the world's largest mobile operator China Mobile recently passed the 1 billion mobile connections milestone. In May it signed up 9.7 million new mobile users, taking its domestic total to 966.6 million. Elsewhere it has 42 million connections at Zong in Pakistan and 3.1 million at China Mobile Hong Kong.

Revenues from mobile services reached a record level in the first three months of 2022, according to research company Omdia. Omdia’s calculations are based on information collected from 731 operators in 226 countries. The highest annual revenue growth rate was in Central and Southern Asia, including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, at 14.5%. Western Europe’s growth, meanwhile, was only 2% in the first quarter.

Meanwhile, a group of technology companies has launched the Metaverse Standards Forum to develop industry guidelines and coordinate and implement interoperability standards. The list of companies involved includes Meta, Microsoft, Huawei and Qualcomm, but Amazon, Apple, Google and communications service providers are notable absentees.