Opus Broadband challenges BT deal for 1.5M TalkTalk customers

TL;DR: Opus Broadband sent an open letter to the UK government criticizing its decision to allow BT to buy TalkTalk's consumer division, which serves 1.5 million retail customers. Opus said it had made two rejected offers for the business and plans to make representations to the Competition and Markets Authority. In separate EMEA updates, Vodafone, Telefónica, Deutsche Telekom and RTL Deutschland ran a 5G TV production trial, Arelion completed a 500km optical trial with Nokia, and Sesterce announced a data center investment of more than €10 billion in Jämsä, Finland.

Opus Broadband has written an open letter to the UK government criticizing its decision to allow BT to buy TalkTalk's consumer division. In the letter, Opus chairman Mike Ellwood said emergency action to protect vulnerable customers should not result in the permanent transfer of 1.5 million retail customers to BT when an independent purchaser was available.

Opus Broadband said it made the second of two rejected offers for TalkTalk's consumer business last month. The company said it now intends to make representations to the Competition and Markets Authority and will ask that TalkTalk's consumer business remains operationally and commercially separate from BT.

Vodafone, Telefónica and Deutsche Telekom teamed up with broadcaster RTL Deutschland to trial 5G-based live TV production at a soccer match between HEBC Hamburg and Borussia Dortmund. The companies said network APIs supported voice communications between the control room, camera crews and reporters, while network slicing provided bandwidth and a constant data rate for camera footage transmission.

Arelion completed a live field trial with Nokia on its 500km optical backbone route from Amsterdam to London. Arelion said Nokia's Super C and Super L band technology expanded usable optical spectrum by around 21% over its existing fiber infrastructure. Separately, France's Sesterce announced plans to invest more than €10 billion in AI-supporting data centers at a former paper mill site in Jämsä, Finland, with about 2,000 construction jobs and approximately 300 permanent jobs expected.