In Canada, TELUS has invested $25 million to connect more than 90 percent of homes and businesses in Leduc, Alberta directly to its fiber optic network as part of its commitment to invest $14.5 billion in infrastructure and operations across Alberta through 2024.

In the UK, BT has initiated trials of a new type of optical fiber—hollow core fiber—at the BT Labs in Ipswich, in a collaborative project with Lumenisity and Mavenir.

In other network evolution news, Lumen has launched Lumen Media Transformation, which takes live and on-demand video from the camera to the edge to enrich content and provide high-quality online viewing experiences with Lumen’s global fiber and edge networks.

AI News

New developments in AI news made headlines this month. Cellwize Wireless Technologies announced a collaboration with Intel to propel deployment of automated AI-driven 5G vRAN networks. Virtualization of RAN is necessary to support the use cases and performance requirements of 5G, as vRAN is more agile and flexible than the hardware-based RAN that most operators are currently using.

Six major corporations—Repsol, Gestamp, Navantia, Técnicas Reunidas, Telefónica, and Microsoft—have joined forces to create IndesIA, the first data economy and artificial intelligence consortium in the Spanish industrial sector. Focused on Spain with a European outlook, the consortium aims to take on more companies and integrate different business sectors.

NEC has enhanced CropScope, its agricultural ICT platform, with new functions to improve farming, including a service that provides farming advice using artificial intelligence. The AI capitalizes on a wealth of know-how from experienced cultivators, enabling it to provide guidance on the optimum amount of water, fertilizer and the best time to apply them. In other innovative AI news, iCAD’s third generation artificial intelligence solution for 3D mammography received CE Mark approval—meaning AI is now being used to fight breast cancer.

As AI moves into ever more areas of our daily lives, Deutsche Telekom and its technology partner Cognigy have unveiled smart voice and verified chatbots with unbiased AI for customer contact management; the solution is one of the first to be verified in accordance with criteria for trustworthy AI.

Security News

Cybersecurity news included insights from new research that reveals the vulnerabilities in our increasingly digital lives. A new global survey from Enea reveals that lockdowns in many of the world’s leading economies contributed to children being left unsupervised online for extended periods. The report finds that 50 percent of parents want mobile operators to provide safeguards and are willing to pay for it. Positive Technologies reported that extensive analysis of cyberthreats in 2020 reveals a 91 percent jump in attacks on industrial companies and a 54 percent rise in malware-related attacks compared to 2019. In addition, the total number of incidents grew by 51 percent compared to 2019. Nexusguard’s Annual Threat Report 2020 has found that cyberattacks increased 341 percent during the pandemic, targeting industries providing connectivity, services and entertainment to populations forced to shelter-in-place. In addition, Black Lotus Labs, the threat intelligence arm of Lumen Technologies, recently uncovered a hacktivist campaign that leveraged misconfigured routers and switches to distribute an anti-government manifesto. More than 18,000 devices worldwide are still exposed to potential abuse.

In response to the growing threats, leading companies have introduced new solutions and partnerships in security news this month. AT&T is now offering an advisory team for cybersecurity, the AT&T USM Anywhere Advisers. Stellar Cyber has enhanced its Open XDR security operations platform with centralized management and visibility functionality. Subex and Spire Solutions have embarked on a strategic alliance to address the steep rise in cyberattacks and cyber risk in the Middle East and Africa, starting with a major oil and gas company.

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