This Week's Top Five Stories in the Telco Industry

Xavier Niel Buys US$5.9bn Vodafone Stake From e&

Billionaire Xavier Niel, the driving force behind iliad's rise from a French challenger operator to a multinational group with operations in France, Italy and Poland, is on his way to becoming Vodafone Group’s largest shareholder.

Vega, an acquisition vehicle wholly owned by the Niel family group, has secured a binding agreement to buy approximately 16.2% of Vodafone Group’s issued share capital from UAE-based tech conglomerate e&.

For now it has ruled out any move to buy Vodafone Group outright but it reserves the right to do so, should Vodafone’s Board of Directors agree to it or if a third party makes its own offer.

Ericsson, DT and HHLA: Private 5G at the Port of Hamburg

A high-performance private 5G campus network is now operational at the Container Terminal Altenwerder (CTA) in the Port of Hamburg, Germany. 

Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG (HHLA) implemented the infrastructure in collaboration with Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson. 

Developed as part of the “PROCON 5G” project, the network has been supplying wireless coverage across an area of more than one square kilometre since the end of May 2026. 

Mike Katz to Exit T-Mobile as Sambar Named Enterprise Chief

T-Mobile has announced that Mike Katz, its Chief Business & Product Officer, has decided to step away from the company and pursue new professional interests. Mike will remain in a strategic advisory role through December 2026 to support a seamless transition.

The departure follows more than 20 years at the operator, during which Katz played a central role in shaping the Un-carrier movement that has defined T-Mobile's approach to the American wireless market.

T-Mobile is currently evolving its executive team, aligning with strategic priorities outlined in the company's February 2026 Capital Markets Update. 

Ookla: How Well Do 5G Networks Support AI Workloads?

While the mobile industry has been traditionally preoccupied with download speeds, the parameters that matter most to AI performance are the upload capacity, latency under load and the quality of the connection path to cloud servers, according to Ookla.

The network analytics firm’s latest analysis across 22 5G markets has found that while every market meets the minimum median upload speed requirement for text LLM, voice AI, AI-generated video, and agentic AI services, only 10 reach the 20Mbps target for Augmented Reality (AR) and multi-modal AI.

According to Ookla, today's 5G infrastructure can handle the latency demands of today’s AI applications – text LLM interaction, AI-generated video, and agentic AI – but falls short for emerging applications.

SK Telecom Targets Asia AI Hub With 15GW Data Centre

South Korean telecoms operator SK Telecom has unveiled ambitious plans to build an AI data centre with a combined capacity of up to 15GW.

SK Telecom is pursuing this initiative to establish South Korea as a leading Asian digital infrastructure centre. 

The telecoms giant is developing domestic computing resources to meet growing demand for AI model training and inference workloads. SK Telecom considers advanced computing infrastructure a crucial factor in determining national economic competitiveness.