Eurobites: Nokia teams up with NTT for Industry 4.0 foray in Thailand

Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Ericsson hooks up with AWS and Hitachi for private networks demo; global IoT connectivity set to soar; anyone seen our unicorn?

Nokia has signed a deal with NTT that will see the two companies coming together to sell 5G private networks to more than 3 million enterprises across Thailand. The Finnish vendor will be bringing its Digital Automation Cloud technology and MX Industrial Edge platform to the joint initiative. Digital twins, video analytics, machine vision and a range of other so-called Industry 4.0 applications are expected to feature. Like seemingly every other country in the world, Thailand is officially pushing a "digital transformation" agenda – this deal is being trumpeted as a part of that vision.

Also busy on the 5G private networks trail is Ericsson, which has hooked up with Amazon Web Services and Hitachi to attempt to demonstrate what the technology can to improve the productivity of businesses while cutting costs and improving worker safety. The threesome's private 5G infrastructure trial is taking place at Hitachi's electric vehicle manufacturing plant in Berea in the US and sees Ericsson's 5G tech harnessed to AWS' Snow Family of storage/edge compute devices. Using Hitachi video analytics, live video of the component assembly operation was distributed across the Ericsson private 5G network to help detect defects earlier, reducing waste and lost production.

New research from Sweden's Berg Insight reveals that the global satellite IoT subscriber base looks set to reach 23.9 million by 2027, representing a compound annual growth rate of 39.6%. Satellite connectivity, says Berg, provides a complement to terrestrial cellular and non-cellular networks in remote locations, and comes in particularly handy for applications in agriculture, asset tracking, maritime transportation, oil and gas industry exploration, utilities, construction and governments. According to the analyst firm, Iridium, Orbcomm, Inmarsat and Globalstar are currently the largest satellite IoT network operators, Iridium alone serving 1.5 million subscribers.

Tech "unicorns" appear to be an endangered species in the UK. City A.M. reports new research from investment analysis firm Pitchbook which shows that the number of billion-dollar-plus startups created in the UK has plummeted from ten last year to just one in the first six months of 2023 – that one being Quantexa, an AI company (of course). Pitchbook reckons unicorns will continue to be elusive in the UK and mainland Europe in the months to come.

London-based Colt Technology Services has hooked up with Edgegap, a Canadian server orchestration company, and CIN, a UK telecom infrastructure provider, to deliver what the companies describe as the world's first game server running on true edge computing, a setup that, they claim, will dramatically improve multiplayer gaming experiences for those hunched over their consoles in London.

New research from Vodafone UK reveals that when to give a child his or her first phone is considered one of the toughest decisions parents have to make – startlingly, as hard as choosing which school junior should attend. The study, carried out to mark a new partnership with children's charity NSPCC, found that parents overwhelmingly (74%) felt a phone was important for a child to have when he/she goes to secondary school. Unsurprisingly, the data also suggested that parents were pretty clueless when it came to setting up safety features on apps such as Snapchat and TikTok.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading