Recent cable landing station news from eastern India and West Africa underlines the continuing growth of the submarine cable business across both regions.

Troubled Chilean operator WOM has emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with CEO Chris Bannister pledging to steer the company forward.

As the telecoms industry hurtles towards the digital world, demand is already growing for emerging bandwidth-intensive applications and services such as artificial intelligence (AI).

The widely reported sale by international service provider Telefonica of its Argentinian division to Telecom Argentina for US$1.245 billion, a deal agreed in February, is now on hold, apparently by order of Argentina’s government.

Global digital operator Veon announced on Friday it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Airspan Networks to collaborate on Open RAN and air-to-land network solutions for Veon’s Ukrainian operator Kyivstar.

State-owned Bangladesh Submarine Cables PLC (BSCPLC) has reportedly decided to slash its wholesale bandwidth prices by 10% in a bit to make internet access in Bangladesh more affordable.

India’s 5G subscriber base has reportedly grown to around 250 million since commercial 5G services were launched almost two and a half years ago, according to the latest figures from the Ministry of Communications.

MegaFon Tajikistan has switched on 60 new 4G base stations across the country as part of its efforts to enhance service quality.

During MWC 25 Barcelona, Huawei held the Intelligent Operations Summit to bring together global carriers, industry partners, and industry organizations and discuss how carriers can upgrade their operations in the intelligent era, enabling new experiences and of course new growth.

East African carrier-neutral data centre operator Wingu Group says that it has kicked off the second phase of its data centre expansion in Tanzania.

Veon’s Ukrainian operator Kyivstar says it has acquired local ride-hailing and delivery platform Uklon in a deal valued at US$155.2 million to expand its digital consumer services portfolio.

India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has reportedly dropped a plan to waive adjusted gross revenue (AGR) dues of telcos, which is especially bad news for financially struggling telco Vodafone Idea.

TIM Group's global operator Sparkle and Al-Bawaba for Telecommunications and Informatics, a Libyan ISP provider offering a wide range of ICT solutions, say they have enhanced their commercial partnership to provide international connectivity services to and from Libya.

The released scenario-based WLAN performance certification standards by the World WLAN Application Association (WAA), marks a key step in ensuring a high-quality WLAN user experience across a broad range of applications including industrial and medical scenarios, as well as in the home.

Uruguay-headquartered payment platform dLocal, which connects global merchants to emerging markets, has announced a strategic partnership with fintech Belmoney, the first remittance-as-a-service (RaaS) provider in Europe.

As well as providing a showcase for new products and services, Mobile World Congress is an occasion for industry bodies to gather and review ongoing work designed to set new benchmarks and establish the future direction of key enabling technologies.

Global data centre operator Digital Realty has officially entered Indonesia by forming a joint venture with Southeast Asian regional digital infrastructure platform provider Bersama Digital Infrastructure Asia (BDIA).

Satellite operator SES said on Wednesday that it has signed a financial package worth almost EUR60 million (US$65.4 million) with European Investment Bank’s global arm EIB Global and the European Commission for a project to provide satellite internet connectivity to remote rural areas in Central Asia.

PLDT Group’s data centre arm Vitro announced on Wednesday it has kicked off proof-of-concept (PoC) trials with Nokia to develop data centre solutions tailored for AI workloads, including generative AI (GenAI) training and inference.

Vodafone Idea (Vi) has launched 5G services in Mumbai.

Abu Dhabi’s Department of Government Enablement has announced an agreement with Microsoft and Core42, a G42 company specialising in sovereign cloud, AI infrastructure and digital services. G42 is an artificial intelligence development company based in Abu Dhabi.

Underlining the continuing effect of the AI boom on Asia, Thailand has reportedly approved an estimated US$2.7 billion of investments in data centres and cloud services from both local and foreign firms.

StoneX Group and Bamboo Payment Systems say they are planning a leading solution for global merchants and financial institutions that need to collect and make payments in Latin America.

Global digital operator Veon and Cohen Circle Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company, have announced the signing of a business combination agreement that will result in the listing of Ukraine operator Kyivstar on the Nasdaq Stock Market in the United States.

MyRepublic Indonesia is a provider of fiber optic internet and subscription TV services that offers solutions for the internet and entertainment needs of Indonesians. The company has been working with ZTE to boost high-speed internet access in Indonesia. We spoke to Mei Zhonghua, President of Asia-Pacific and CIS, ZTE Corporation, and Timotius Sulaiman, CEO of MyRepublic, to learn more.

Indonesian market leading operator Telkomsel has signed a mobile video advertising deal with Novosol to boost high-margin mobile ad revenue in the country.

ZTE Corporation has unveiled a range of new, AI-enabled devices during MWC2025 in Barcelona, under the banner of its "AI for All" product strategy.

At Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2025, Huawei emphasised the urgent need for operators to construct future-proof optical networks to capitalise on the surge in data demand driven by AI-powered applications.

Safaricom M-Pesa announced on Monday it is partnering with Ethiopian fintech startup LakiPay Financial Technologies to enhance digital payment services in Ethiopia.

Indonesia’s Telkom Group announced on Monday that it plans to implement Meta’s Llama open-source AI model into the customer chatbots of its enterprise clients to encourage them to adopt WhatsApp as a customer channel.

Japan’s NTT Data announced on Monday that its long-awaited Malaysia, India, Singapore Transit (MIST) subsea cable system will be commissioned by June this year as it also outlined plans to double its data centre capacity in India over the next few years.