Unlike Swedish rival Ericsson, Nokia does not say how many people it employs in quarterly financials. For the past year, that concealed the full human cost of Nokia s efforts to slash about 500 million (US$597 million) off its yearly expenses. But the toll was made apparent today when the Finnish company published its latest annual report. After nearly 5,000 jobs disappeared from the total in 2019, more than 6,000 went last year.
The net reduction of 11,044 left Nokia with an average workforce of 92,039 employees in 2020 and means headcount has fallen by 11% in just two years. A regional breakdown shows that job numbers fell in all parts of the world, but the decline was steepest in China. Staff numbers there dropped 12% last year, to 13,749, and they are down by nearly 3,500 since 2018.
Going to the M&A well a second time in 2021, DZS has acquired RIFT, a provider of network orchestration and automation software. DZS will now look to deploy the technology to a global installed base of some 20 million mobile and fixed broadband products.
RIFT and its open source RIFT.ware offering gives DZS an overarching software-defined network and software orchestration automaton tool that can be offered as a standalone product or in tandem with DZS s fixed and mobile networking products. RIFT will also help form the basis of DZS Cloud, a new portfolio/pillar that will also include AI and data analytics capabilities, and be offered alongside the company s historical focus on broadband and access transport products and its existing SDN operating system.
Also in today s EMEA regional roundup: Spotify complaint could spell EU trouble for Apple; Equinix opens data center in Bordeaux; Ericsson s Ekholm sounds off on 5G.
The pace of superfast (30 Mbit/s-plus) broadband take-up in France picked up in Q4 2020, with an additional 1.1 million connections being added during the quarter. This the headline finding of the latest scoreboard from regulator Arcep. Over the course of 2020, subscriptions to FTTH connections increased by more than 3.3 million, while the number of copper-based connections fell by 2.5 million. The total number of broadband connections, both superfast and notsofast, stood at 30.6 million at the end of 2020, a rise of 800,000 on the previous year.
The problem of vendor interoperability has been a thorn in the sides of service providers for many years, as they try to balance cost considerations and product options with efficiency.
Maria Alejandro, FTTH global lab manager for GPONDoctor, co-founded GPONDoctor in 2016 to address vendor interoperability issues that arose as the GPON standard was being defined. At the time, Alejandro and her two co-founders were working in a major European research and development center called Tecnalia Research and Innovation, and were also collaborating with Telefónica, which was the first service provider to express interest in GPONDoctor s GPON Analyzer. Now we are present in more than 30 countries all around the world and many of our customers are well-known companies in the telecommunications market, says Alejandro.