Following our recent listing of countries delaying spectrum auctions during the coronavirus, news has reached us of an actual rollout going ahead in Colombia, despite the pandemic.

Will 5G growth continue – and eventually boost the pandemic-hit profits of Chinese operators? It’s a pertinent question in the light of first quarter figures from the country’s big three operators.

Oman’s regulator has unveiled an initiative aimed at connecting over 500 remote communities and villages in the Sultanate.

Loon, a subsidiary of Alphabet that takes internet connectivity to the skies in a fleet of balloons, has announced that more of its balloons have been approved to fly in Kenya.

The Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications (GIFEC), an agency under the country’s ministry of communications, has selected OpenRAN provider Parallel Wireless to provide mobile telephony connectivity to underserved and unserved communities in Ghana.

Montenegro is likely to see 5G launches by the end of 2022, with the regulator looking to outline a roadmap this year.

Tigo Tanzania has enabled interoperability between mobile wallet services, allowing customers to send and receive funds from M-Pesa in Kenya, MTN in Uganda and Rwanda, and Airtel in Rwanda.

While many development plans are at a standstill around the world, some telecommunications initiatives are still being unveiled. Hungary, for example, has invited proposals for the funding of its latest superfast internet rollout initiative.

SatADSL and YahClick have partnered to expand connectivity across Sub-Saharan Africa.

India’s handset manufacturers are facing an even more uncertain time since the Ministry of Home Affairs’ decision last weekend that non-essentials cannot be sold online during the nationwide lockdown. ‘Non-essentials’ in this case includes smartphones.

Yemen’s Al Kuraimi Islamic Bank is replacing its legacy IT systems with a single cloud-native, cloud-agnostic digital banking platform from Temenos to underpin its banking operations.

The adjusted gross revenue story is back in the news in India as Vodafone Idea has asked the government for more time to pay its AGR-based dues for the January-March 2020 period.

We now not only know that the South African regulator has released emergency spectrum to a number of service providers, as requested by the government, but we also know who those service providers are.

Nanosatellite manufacturer and mission integrator NanoAvionics, together with the Mexican Space Agency (AEM), is planning to introduce a nanosatellite pilot project for future space missions.

Turkcell, the leading mobile network operator in Turkey with around 34 million subscribers, has selected Mavenir, a cloud-native network software provider, to deploy its cloud-native, network functions virtualization (NFV)-based IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) solution.

Recent media reports indicate that Google has plans for a submarine cable connecting India and Italy via Israel. The cable will reach Israel in 2022.

A lengthening list of countries putting off the auction of 5G spectrum just got longer as Poland announced plans to delay the process.

The Slovakian regulator – the Office for Regulation of Electronic Communications and Postal Services (also known as Regulacny Urad or RU) – has announced that it will be going ahead with an auction of 5G-capable spectrum.

South Africa recently announced the allocation of extra spectrum on a temporary basis to operators facing high demand during the lockdown. Now it's Ghana’s turn.

Zimbabwe’s second-biggest operator, the state-owned service provider NetOne, is expecting a rise in subscriber numbers after the announcement of a recent government initiative.

The launch of the Philippines new third player DITO (formerly Mislatel) is “on track” in spite of the Covid-19 pandemic.

3 Indonesia has deployed Nokia’s 3G-4G dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) technology in its live network infrastructure to dynamically extend its 4G bandwidth when the demand for 3G subsides.

Indonesia’s new Nusantara Dua (Palapa N1) satellite did not enter its allocated orbital slot on schedule and has reportedly been destroyed.

South African operator Vodacom is to spend more than $27 million to add network capacity during the lockdown that is in place while the country tries to manage the spread of the coronavirus.

After yesterday’s reports of continued cable repair delays near Vietnam, some better news comes from Malaysia, where Telekom Malaysia has quickly restored international capacity lost due to a submarine cable fault.

Vodafone Qatar has deployed commercial VoLTE services, allowing subscribers to make high definition (HD+) calls over its network.

When we reported early last week on the latest issue facing the Asia America Gateway (AAG) undersea cable – and internet users in Vietnam – it wasn’t clear how long repairs would take. We now know it could be another week before normal service is resumed.