Rakuten Symphony appointed former Telefonica CTIO Enrique Blanco (pictured) as a strategic adviser, charging the experienced executive with helping guide the company’s technology and support its ongoing expansion across global markets.

Blanco was global CTIO at Telefonica from 2017 until 2025, having previously been CTO at the group. Towards the end of his stint at the operator he was a vocal supporter of the move to open and virtualised network infrastructure.

Rakuten highlighted the expert brought decades of experience in the telecoms industry, which would help it in a drive to accelerate operator network modernisation.  

Part of the remit of the newly created role is to support adoption of AI-driven operations in the sector, with the ultimate aim of improving end user experience and achieving long term growth.

The vendor noted Blanco joins at a time when operators are upping investments in infrastructure and intelligence while being under pressure to improve returns and deliver better customer experiences.

These trends, it believes, are driving interest in software-based networks, automation and open ecosystems.

Rakuten Symphony president Sharad Sriwastawa said Blanco’s “insights and expertise will accelerate our work with like-minded service providers that want to build better networks for the future of connectivity. His experience will enable us to provide even greater support to operators as they move beyond network modernisation and embrace AI-driven business transformation”.

Blanco added: “The industry has made significant progress over the past decade as we’ve advanced to 5G and beyond, but operators still face many of the same challenges around complexity, cost and speed of innovation.”

Noting Rakuten’s willingness to “rethink” how networks are built and operated, he noted “open architectures, automation and cloud-native technologies give operators more flexibility to adapt their businesses and respond to changing customer expectations. I’m looking forward to helping shape that next stage of the industry’s evolution”.

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SpaceX has agreed to acquire startup Cursor in a $60 billion deal, the latest move in Elon Musk’s push to close the gap with rivals on AI-powered coding tools.

A regulatory filing today (16 June) with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) confirmed Cursor investors will receive SpaceX stock based on the implied $60 billion equity value of the startup.

The transaction, which converts an earlier option into a binding merger agreement, is expected to close in Q3. After gaining regulatory approvals, Cursor will become a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX. The filing was signed by SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen.

The deal came a week after SpaceX completed the largest initial public offering in history.

Bloomberg reported the Cursor acquisition is central to SpaceX’s ambitions for its AI business.

The news outlet noted Musk has publicly acknowledged xAI, which is now part of SpaceX’s operations, trails rivals including Anthropic and OpenAI on coding capabilities.

Bloomberg also reported SpaceX’s AI unit has been hit by internal turmoil, with dozens of departures across engineering and data training and ongoing difficulty recruiting top talent, prompting Elon Musk to bring in leadership from Starlink to steady the business.

It also noted US-based Cursor, whose AI coding assistant launched in 2023, has become one of the fastest-growing coding startups by helping developers write and debug software through chatbot prompts.

Before SpaceX moved to acquire the company, Cursor was reportedly in talks for a funding round that would have valued it at more than $50 billion, according to Bloomberg.

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The TM Forum added satellite to an existing framework for digital networks in recognition of forecasts space-based connectivity is poised to become a significant earner over the next 10 years.

Companies including Rakuten Group, Huawei and Netcracker Technology are joined by operators Telekom Deutschland and Vodacom Group among the initial members of the Open Digital Architecture (ODA) for Satellite initiative.

The standards organisation stated the full potential of satellite for services including IoT and direct-to-device connectivity is being held back by various incompatibilities between terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks, highlighting billing systems and requirements for specialised devices as examples.

Dr Ryan van den Bergh, managing executive for group technology strategy, architecture, spectrum and assurance at Vodacom, said “greater interoperability and simpler integration” are needed to capitalise on the “significant opportunities” to use satellite connectivity as a complement to ground-based networks.

The TM Forum’s existing ODA covers digitalisation measures spanning automation and intelligence. It stated the satellite element adds standard frameworks, operating models and governance for companies working in the terrestrial and non-terrestrial sectors.

It expects the architecture to lay the groundwork for “seamless multi-orbit service delivery” along with speeding integration and boosting the overall value of space and land-based infrastructure.

Willie Stegmann, the body’s EVP for composable IT and ecosystems, said ODA for Satellite is “a call to action” for the telecoms industry.

The group is “overcoming challenges and unlocking avenues for growth…before operating models, customer ownership and value chains are defined elsewhere”.

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US communications company Comtech Telecommunications entered into a definitive agreement to sell the bulk of its satellite and space operations to Israeli company Gilat Satellite Networks in a $157.5 million deal.

Under the agreement, Gilat will pay $10 million of the sum up front, taking control of Comtech’s ground infrastructure systems, large antennas, modems, communications equipment, and network control and management systems for different types of satellites including low Earth orbit (LEO) offerings.

The deal is a significant about-turn for Gilat, which agreed to be bought by Comtech for around $580 million in 2020 in a deal which ultimately collapsed.

Gilat specialises in creating equipment for satellite communications including stations, modems, amplifiers and antennas.

The acquisition is expected to beef up Gilat’s presence in the defence market since Comtech is a big supplier for the US military.

Gilat CEO Adi Sfadia said it was impressed with the successful progress of Comtech and the segment is an “excellent strategic fit”.

Comtech will retain some cybersecurity assets and rights to certain accounts in line with a shift towards public safety operations being driven by its Allerium business unit.

“The sale of most of the satellite and space segment, together with the agreements we have reached with our lenders and preferred stockholders, represent a significant milestone in Comtech’s transformation and reflect the successful execution of our strategy,” CEO Ken Traub said.

The deal requires regulatory approval and is expected to close by the end of the year.

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Senior figures from UK operators Virgin Media O2 and VodafoneThree voiced confidence premium network offerings based on standalone (SA) 5G could become a solid revenue source, during sessions at a circus-themed Ericsson event.

The vendor’s tech showcase was held in central London in a building which also houses the UK’s National Centre for Circus Arts, with performers appearing in the breaks of the main programme.

It brought together operators, enterprises, partners and representatives from UK authorities to discuss the benefits of cutting-edge 5G technology and progress of network rollouts. It acted as a follow-up to a music-themed event in 2025.

Juggling networks
VodafoneThree CNO and network director Andrea Dona (pictured, below) highlighted early progress integrating assets previously held by the Vodafone and 3 UK brands following a merger just over a year ago.

Describing the deal as “a really important one for the country,” the network guru reiterated an argument frequently voiced while the deal was going through the approvals process: it would boost network investment by the combined entity and rivals.

Highlighting a “really fast start” in the process of merging the two networks and employing respective spectrum assets, he added recent benchmark statistics showed peers “have not stood still, they’ve also invested. Everyone feels the pressure to do more and give the UK a better network”.

“There’s still a lot of work to do but I think in some areas we are ahead [of target],” Dona added. “The scene is set for an amazing journey”.

VodafoneThree describes its ambition with SA 5G as to build the “UK’s first nationwide AI-ready network”.

Dona explained the connection to AI was due to SA 5G’s bandwidth and latency being able to support compatible applications, as well as the benefits the technology can bring to the network architecture itself including use in and on the RAN.

“The network we’re building is going to be an exceptional network,” he asserted, pointing to the benefits of slicing in stadia as an example.

“If you want a privileged lane to do your upload and you’re willing to pay,” then you can, he said, adding operators can monetise the network through “quality on demand” offers.

“We need to ensure in a situation with congestion, when a resource is not readily available, we can make it available if you pay for additional quality, additional performance and additional services”.

Selling premium versions of services “happens in every industry”, he said.

Singing in harmony
During a separate session, Virgin Media O2 director of strategy, transformation and planning Anita Tadayon (pictured, below) said she also believes there is an appetite for services based on network slicing on SA 5G, but called for an industry-wide effort to get the message across on what the technology can do.

“Articulating the benefits of slicing for a customer is really important and collectively, as an industry, we have to do that together. We’ve got to sing from the same hymn sheet,” she noted, adding if there’s value “then the customer will pay”.

Speaking broadly on SA 5G, she highlighted a strong push on rolling out the technology at VMO2.

Its network now covers 700 towns and cities, and Tadayon explained the technology benefits all customers whether they have a compatible handset or not.

“I know we talk about monetisation, but look at what it also does for our customers.”

“Absolutely, there’s new innovation and use cases, but it also delivers all of our customers a benefit on coverage, capacity, speed, everything”.

Away from the latest iteration of 5G, she highlighted the operator’s work in providing direct-to-device satellite connectivity to users in remote areas through a deal with Starlink and a push to introduce greater autonomy in its network.

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SpaceX reportedly leased the full capacity of its Colossus 1 data centre to Anthropic after running into technical problems using the site for its own Grok AI workloads.

Bloomberg reported last week (12 June) the company planned to use Colossus 1, located in the US state of Tennessee, as part of a three-campus cluster to train its more advanced AI models, but latency issues emerged when the facility was linked with two other sites more than 10 miles away

Sources told the news site the problems were said to be worsened by older network infrastructure.

Bloomberg noted high-performance AI training depends on fast, low-latency links between compute sites, but bottlenecks can slow the wider cluster.

Rather than continue trying to resolve those constraints, SpaceX decided leasing the site to third parties would generate greater value and create an additional revenue stream.

The move comes as SpaceX pushes its data centre expansion as a key plank of its investor story following its acquisition of xAI earlier this year.

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The government of Taiwan reportedly plans to deepen its diplomatic relationship with Paraguay through a planned $200 million data centre investment, in a rare technology investment designed to strengthen the pair’s diplomatic relationship.

Bloomberg reported the date centre partnership, which is backed by the Trump administration, is targeting 10-megawatts of computing capacity. It is expected to be operational by the end of 2027.

The data centre will be built on government land near the capital of Asuncion.

The news site noted Taiwan will supply Nvidia chips and supporting equipment, while Paraguay brings cheap hydropower and basic infrastructure to the partnership.

Both sides are in discussions with the US International Development Finance Corporation over financing arrangements.

Sources told Bloomberg Taiwan’s International Cooperation and Development Fund has separately approached Google, Microsoft and Amazon about potentially investing in the project or taking up capacity.

Paraguay is one of only a handful of countries worldwide which still maintains formal ties with Taiwan rather than China, but pressure is growing domestically for a reassessment of the position as neighbouring countries have attracted substantial Chinese investment.

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SpaceX raised $75 billion in an historic initial public offering (IPO), pricing 555.6 million shares at $135 each with trading set to begin later today (12 June) on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

The listing is the biggest of all time, more than doubling the value of Saudi company Aramco’s stock market debut in 2019 which raised around $29 billion.

In a filing, SpaceX stated it has granted underwriters a 30-day option to purchase an additional 83 million shares, which could increase the total fundraising to $86 billion at a $1.78 trillion valuation.

Financial Times reported Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite and AI company drew orders more than three times the amount on offer, with demand coming from huge asset managers, gulf sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds and retail investors.

According to the outlet, individual investors placed orders for more than $100 billion and will be allocated around 20% to 25% of the total shares sold.

Musk is apparently keen to place smaller shareholders at the centre of SpaceX’s ownership, leaving fewer shares available for big companies and accounts that tend to be prioritised in IPOs.

Through the funds raised, SpaceX is to pump cash into a plan to establish AI data centres in space, a Musk vision that centres on overcoming energy limitations on earth. The company is also plotting new satellite constellations to fuel Starlink, while it will also pay down debt after taking a $20 billion bridging loan in March.

FT added the $1.78 trillion market value makes SpaceX the priciest of the world’s top 10 valuable companies, with its shares trading at 92 times its $19 billion revenue in 2025.

Following SpaceX’s market debut, OpenAI and Anthropic have also announced intentions to also hold a listing.

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Dell’Oro Group predicted cumulative 6G RAN capex would exceed $500 billion and revenue $100 billion in the first six years of deployment, spanning the period 2029 to 2034.

The company expects 6G RAN to account for approximately half of total capex during the period and tipped the technology to follow an evolutionary path, building on existing network architecture rather than reshaping the market entirely.

Dell’Oro does not expect 6G to expand the overall RAN market, forecasting an overall CAGR of 1% between 2030 and 2034.

It envisions 6G developing from Massive MIMO, existing sites and wider channel bandwidths, so changing RAN economics in stages. Capex is expected to accelerate toward the end of the 20230s.

Stefan Pongratz, VP of RAN and telecom capex research, said the most likely scenario is 6G would follow the established generational pattern, despite growing momentum for a so-called “G decoupling movement”.

He asserted “operators are in a much stronger position today from a network capacity perspective than they were during the transition from 4G to 5G”, meaning total 6G RAN revenue “during the first six years of the cycle is projected to be 10% to 20% lower than during the comparable period of the 5G cycle.”

The company expects sub-7GHz and cm wave bands to be key in 6G deployments, though noted growing momentum above 7GHz.

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NTT Global Data Centres (GDC) is reportedly seeking at least $1 billion in fresh capital to fund new development projects in the US, working with Citigroup to raise funds.

Bloomberg reported the company, which is a subsidiary of NTT Group, is selling stakes with the investment bank2sedxzsz`Ω in a development vehicle for new US data centre projects.

The size of the equity offering could increase depending on investor demand, and the company may also raise a credit facility alongside it.

The news site stated NTT GDC, which is the world’s third-largest data centre provider outside of China, has started sending marketing materials to prospective long-term investors including pension and infrastructure funds, with a formal sale process expected to launch in the coming weeks.

Bloomberg explained the establishment of a development company which owns and manages pre-revenue early-stage assets, gives data centre builders the flexibility to target a broader pool of long-term investors, who in turn can demand higher returns for taking on early-stage project risk.

The news site stated the talks are at an early stage, with details including timing and the final size of the fundraising subject to change.

In May 2025, NTT Data announced it bought land across North America, Europe and Asia to support nearly a gigawatt of planned data centre capacity, including new sites in the US states of Oregon and Arizona.

NTT GDC CEO Doug Adams told Bloomberg in March 2026 the company is working on 34 projects which will double its capacity within two years, with total capacity set to reach over five gigawatts within five years.

Also in March, NTT Data announced a multi-year plan to invest more than $10 billion by 2027 to deliver infrastructure capable of supporting dense AI workloads.

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Nokia positioned the forthcoming addition of an agentic AI framework into its network services platform (NSP) as giving operators the ability to adopt agents using trusted data within secure boundaries.

The vendor stated the move would provide the means for customers to introduce AI operations for IP networks, with agents able to take guided, explainable actions based on real network data.

Commercial availability of the functionality is expected by the end of the year.

Nokia’s NSP is its management and automation platform for multi-vendor IP networks. It asserted the addition of the AI framework supports communication with external agents and would aid operators on their routes towards employing fully automated networks.

The company explained “while AI has the potential to transform network operations, many operators have remained cautious due to concerns around explainability, trust and risk in production environments”.

Its approach to ease these concerns is by “embedding agentic AI capabilities directly into the platform that already serves as the authoritative controller for IP networks”.

The vendor announced the first agent able to use the framework is a troubleshooting bot designed to help operators identify the root causes of problems faster and resolve complex issues.

Nokia VP and general manager for IP network automation software Sasa Nijemcevic said the move would “have a major impact on the way operators manage their networks, and will enable them to enhance their operations significantly and accelerate their journey toward autonomous networks with focus on solving real operational problems”.

“This is an incremental, pragmatic step toward AI‑native networks,” he added.

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UK operator Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) and Mavenir completed a proof-of-concept trial of technology designed to improve call clarity for customers suffering hearing issues without having to make changes on their phone.

Unlike device-based accessibility features or third-party apps, the service works entirely within the operator’s network. This allows participants to make and receive calls without needing to change their device or how they use it.

In the test participants completed a short, automated hearing test to identify how they perceive different sound frequencies. Personalised hearing profiles were then generated and securely linked to their mobile numbers, enabling the network to adapt how speech is delivered to them during calls in real time.

Following the trial, nearly 90% of participants reported improvements in call clarity, with many noting reduced listening effort, fewer misunderstandings and a more natural calling experience.

Jorge Ribeiro, director of core networks at Virgin Media O2, stated the trial was about using intelligence within the network to improve the experience without asking customers to do anything differently.

“We are encouraged by the early results from this proof-of-concept and are excited to explore how this type of technology could support more accessible services for our customers in future,” he said.

While still at an early stage, O2 said it is encouraged by the results and is exploring how the technology could be developed further to support accessible services at scale.

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Managed services provider MetTel completed a rapid network capacity upgrade for the US General Services Administration (GSA), equipping 11 federal offices across the country with connectivity infrastructure to support the Trump administration’s return-to-office mandate.

The project, delivered under the GSA’s Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions contract, involved the installation of 22 high-capacity network circuits alongside SD-WAN technology and VoIP services, enabling hundreds of federal employees to return to fully connected work locations.

Among the most demanding elements was a 10-gigabit circuit requiring entirely new carrier infrastructure, which was completed in under 60 days to meet the expedited timeline of a Telecommunications Service Priority order.

Don Parente, vice president of public sector at MetTel, said the mandate created an urgent, real-world test of the company’s capabilities.

“Our operations team delivered fast, reliable network modernisation, meeting the Administration’s Executive Order to return to work,” he said.

The SD-WAN architecture, which MetTel had previously deployed for the GSA, was a key enabler of the fast turnaround. The technology provides intelligent traffic management, enhanced resiliency and centralised network visibility, while high-capacity circuits were tailored to the specific needs of each site.

Bandwidth was sized for future growth, building in capacity to support evolving workforce and digital requirements without requiring additional infrastructure overhauls.

The Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) programme under which the work was delivered, is a 15-year, $50 billion government-wide vehicle designed to help federal agencies modernise their telecommunications and network infrastructure.

US-based MetTel has held EIS contract authority since January 2020, delivering network modernisation, managed services and communications transformation projects throughout that period.

The upgrade underscores the broader infrastructure pressures facing federal agencies as the return-to-office push accelerates demand for reliable, high-capacity government networks.

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Global data centre capital expenditure is on course to exceed $1 trillion in 2026 according to new research from Dell’Oro Group, as hyperscale AI deployments accelerate and rising memory and storage costs push overall server spending higher.

The research company raised its worldwide data centre capex outlook for the year following a strong Q1, citing a combination of AI expansion, continued investment in general-purpose infrastructure and component cost inflation as the primary drivers.

Baron Fung, senior research director at Dell’Oro Group, stated rising memory and storage pricing substantially increased overall server system costs in the quarter and will likely remain a major capex growth factor throughout the year.

“At the same time, AI infrastructure deployments continue to accelerate rapidly, while hyperscalers also expanded general-purpose infrastructure to support public cloud growth, agentic AI workloads, and rising AI-related storage requirements,” he said.

The scale of spending among the largest cloud providers is striking. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, the top four US hyperscalers, increased data centre capex by 78% year-on-year, reflecting the intensity of the AI infrastructure race.

On the supply side, Dell led server OEM revenue followed by Supermicro and Lenovo, though white-box vendors serving the hyperscale market accounted for most overall server revenue. Nearly all server vendors benefited from higher memory-driven system pricing.

Despite already exceptional spending growth in the first half of the year, Dell’Oro expects capex growth to accelerate further in the second half, driven by the ramp-up of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform and refresh cycles for hyperscaler custom accelerator platforms.

Beyond the major cloud providers, Fung noted select enterprise verticals and sovereign cloud providers are also increasing AI infrastructure adoption, “though growth remains constrained by uncertain returns and infrastructure readiness”.

“While near-term demand remains healthy, some spending may have been pulled forward ahead of expected price increases later this year,” explained Fung.

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SK Group, NTT and Chunghwa Telecom were among the parties to form an AI investment fund expected to reach $500 million, with the aim of backing companies working on technology related to optical and wireless networking.

The IOWN AI Fund has been established alongside Catalight Capital, a company set-up to manage the project from offices in Japan and the US.  

Other current financiers are Development Bank of Japan, and Young Sohn, an entrepreneur who is founding managing partner of VC company Walden Catalyst Ventures and former chief strategy officer of Samsung Electronics.

In a joint statement, the companies and Sohn revealed more than 20 parties around the globe had expressed an interest in contributing to the fund, which is expected to reach $500 million in size.

Businesses apparently mulling the opportunity include KDDI, NEC, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, Sony, Fujitsu and various VC companies.

Catalight Capital will be charged with hunting down promising start-ups for investment. Targets will be in technologies related to the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) ecosystem.

It intends to invest in companies working in areas including: photonics; AI processors and advanced packaging; light source and modulators; management technology for distributed AI infrastructure; software; AI models and inference; and applications and services.

Global push
SK Group chair Chey Tae-won stated he hoped the fund would: “play a key role in identifying and fostering AI start-ups not only across Asia but around the world”, noting “to emerge as a competitive AI nation, proactive and large-scale investment in AI infrastructure is essential, and trust-based global cooperation is equally important”.

NTT President and CEO Akira Shimada added “to realise AI-native infrastructure, it is essential to combine the optical and networking technologies that NTT has cultivated with advanced technologies and the strengths of partners”.

“Through the IOWN AI Fund, we will promote business collaboration with promising startups, work together with our global partners to build the IOWN ecosystem, and contribute to the creation of a new industrial foundation”.

IOWN is a vision initially pushed by NTT to drive next generation ICT infrastructure which uses optical networking technology to vastly cut electricity use while delivering high performance. The associated IOWN Global Forum has 170 member organisations.

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Anthropic launched a public version of its Mythos AI model, but with guardrails in place to block its use in sensitive areas such as cybersecurity.

The AI player stated its Claude Fable 5 model is its most powerful to date on its launch yesterday (9 June), which is two months after Anthropic first unveiled its Mythos-class model.

The limited Mythos preview sent shockwaves through the industry after the model uncovered thousands of software vulnerabilities.

Last week Anthropic expanded the reach of its Mythos AI model to an additional 150 companies across more than 15 countries.

The startup describes Fable 5 as state-of-the-art on nearly all tested benchmarks of AI capability, claiming exceptional performance across software engineering, knowledge work, vision and scientific research. The longer and more complex the task, Anthropic stated, the larger Fable 5’s lead over its other models.

Anthropic stated it has done extensive testing to ensure users cannot manipulate Fable 5 into bypassing its guidelines. Queries on restricted topics will instead receive a response from the company’s Claude Opus 4.8 model.

The AI player acknowledged the safeguards are tuned conservatively and will sometimes catch harmless requests but said they trigger on average in fewer than 5% of sessions.

“With more capable models arriving in the coming months, we’re working to improve our safeguards and reduce false positives as quickly as we can,” Anthropic stated.

For a smaller group of cyber defenders and infrastructure providers, Anthropic is simultaneously launching Claude Mythos 5, which is the same underlying model as Fable 5 but with safeguards lifted in some areas.

Mythos 5 will initially be deployed through Project Glasswing in collaboration with the US government. It carries what Anthropic described as the strongest cybersecurity capabilities of any model in the world.

Users who had access to the Claude Mythos Preview will be able to upgrade to Mythos 5, with broader access planned through an expanded trusted-access programme.

Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are priced at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, less than half the price of Claude Mythos Preview.

The rollout comes as Anthropic, now valued at $965 billion, looks to extend the momentum which has pushed its valuation above rival OpenAI, with both startups racing toward public listings.

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Axon Networks acquired Greenwave Systems, combining two companies with shared roots to create a more unified, AI-powered network orchestration platform.

The US-based company stated the deal strengthens its cloud-agnostic Axon Maestro platform, purpose-built for telecom operators, institutions and enterprise service providers.

Greenwave’s software-defined mobile network services, including its network-as-a-service orchestration portfolio, will be added to Axon Maestro.

Greenwave’s technology will be folded into the Maestro platform as dedicated modules, with its engineering team shifting focus to OSS/BSS product development with expanded support for mobile connectivity.

Financial terms are not available.

At the heart of the integration is Axon’s real-time digital twin technology, which the company said will serve as the foundation for next-generation network inventory management.

Axon CEO Martin Manniche, who co-founded Greenwave in 2008 alongside other current Axon executives, stated operators are too often constrained by legacy operational support systems which require heavy customisation and slow down innovation.

“This limits their agility and effectiveness, delaying innovation and time-to-market for new services,” he said.

The deal also positions Axon to capitalise on growing operator interest in fixed wireless access and low earth orbit satellite connectivity.

As those technologies gain traction in access networks, the company argues end-to-end orchestration from the mobile core to in-home devices will become increasingly critical for delivering a consistent subscriber experience.

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AST SpaceMobile decoupled from recent launch disappointments by scheduling the orbital deployment of its next three satellites on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The space-based mobile network company hopes to blast its BlueBird 8, 9 and 10 satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO) on 17 June. As ever, launches are dependent on various environmental and other factors, so precise timing is fluid.

AST SpaceMobile expects the latest satellites to deliver almost twice the data rates of its initial BlueBird models, which it noted recently hit 98.9Mb/s in the downlink.

Company president Scott Wisniewski said the significance of the satellites goes beyond expanding its constellation and coverage: they represent the culmination of an in-house manufacturing drive and bolster claims to having birds with the largest phase-arrayed antennas at LEO heights.

AST SpaceMobile stated the trio of satellites are already stacked using a proprietary architecture and ready to be integrated with the SpaceX rocket.

The scheduled launch is something of a firing back by AST SpaceMobile at commentators who questioned whether a recent failure of a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket during a test would impact a plan to conduct regular launches throughout 2026.

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Interview: AT&T completed a controlled introduction phase of its cloud RAN deployment, with roughly 25 sites running live traffic on Intel’s Sapphire Rapids processors as it plans to aggressively scale deployment when Intel’s next-generation Granite platform arrives over the coming months.

The Sapphire deployment is currently handling the TDD layers of the network, which represent the largest share of traffic, but not yet the full stack.

Rob Soni (pictured), VP of the operator’s RAN architecture, told Mobile World Live (MWL) Granite, which is already in AT&T’s labs, will enable a full stack covering FDD, TDD, NR and LTE from a single server design.

“This is all coming in phased pieces through the fall and early next year,” he said. “We plan to scale more aggressively on Granite than we did on Sapphire.”

He said AT&T expects to move from a few hundred Sapphire sites to thousands on Granite through 2026 and into 2028.

Performance on the Sapphire sites is matching traditional RAN on call drop rates and throughput, Soni said, and the team is beginning to utilise the platform’s promise of faster feature delivery.

The leading example is AI-driven link adaptation, developed with Ericsson, which replaces rules-based scheduling algorithms with a deep neural network.

Trials are showing roughly 10% gains in spectrum efficiency and 15% improvements in individual user throughput, with further benefits expected as AT&T tunes the global Ericsson model to its own network morphology.

“We’ve done a lot of trailing with the kind of global model of Ericsson,” Soni explained. “We’re now in the process of tuning the model to the AT&T morphology, the AT&T usage. That will change the nature, and we expect there to be more gain.”

Halfway point

In cellular networks, Soni stated a base station must determine on every transmission frame which users to serve, what modulation and coding scheme to use and how to balance competing demands across the spectrum.

It is a computationally intense optimisation problem, and the traditional approach has been to encode engineering judgment into static rule sets. The AI model Ericsson developed learns from network behaviour and adapts more fluidly to changing conditions.

Link adaptation is a critical algorithm for determining the overall multiple user performance in a cellular network,” he stated.

Rival T-Mobile US stated in May 2026 it is also trialling Ericsson’s AI-native scheduler with link adaptation on live 5G-Advanced traffic, but Soni noted AT&T has been trialling it since December 2025.

Soni told MWL AT&T is just past the halfway point for switching out Nokia’s RAN gear for Ericsson’s as part of a five year plan to transition 70% of its network traffic to run on open platforms by end of year.

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The Linux Foundation launched the open-source Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) six months ago to ensure protocols are standardised across enterprises, hyperscalers, and telecommunications companies.

The December launch spanned 49 companies, including co-founders Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, with additional support from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare and Bloomberg.

As of 3 June, it now has more than 200 member companies and is growing at twice the pace of the Linux Foundations CNCF Kubernetes project, AAIF executive director Mazin Gilbert told Mobile World Live.

“I think what is new that I have not seen before is that in every foundation I’ve been part of before, we used to go and ask, convince companies to join,” Gilbert said. “The phenomenon we’re seeing here is the opposite.

“Companies are coming on their own accord,” he added. “No outreach. They all want to have a say in this ecosystem.”

Being open source, all the members of AAIF benefit from the development of the tools and interfaces.

As the industry moves beyond chatbots and LLMs, Gilbert explained stakeholders need to agree on standard protocols and interfaces to deliver on agentic AI’s value.

Gilbert, whose career includes 22 years at AT&T and over four at Google, said there are roughly two million open-source models currently available, with open variants now only four months behind closed ones.

The infrastructure to run them is maturing fast but connecting those models to real applications, such as to self-healing networks, customer care systems and robotic platforms, requires standardised plumbing which nobody has built to date in a neutral, durable way.

“This foundation was created to ensure that the tools, the plumbing, the protocols are standardised,” Gilbert explained.

“I don’t need to know which language model out of the two million I should use,” he added. “I should be able to plug and play into any of them without any additional new code.”

He stated the real breakthrough will come from creating standard interfaces which enable AI agents to connect consistently with networks, databases, applications, microservices, other agents, and development tools.

When the plumbing is standardised, it will unlock a new ecosystem of interoperable agent-based systems, much like common internet protocols enabled the modern internet.

“We call it the internet of agents because now, suddenly, just like the internet, you can start to communicate, you can work with each other,” he said.

agentgateway
With the focus on plumbing, the AAIF welcomed agentgateway as its fourth hosted open-source project.

It is built on the A2A and MCP protocols and functions as what Gilbert calls a traffic light: routing agent-to-LLMa and agent-to-microservice communications, enforcing authentication, tracking token usage, and monitoring inter-agent channels.

For telcos, it offers a concrete path toward agentic network management without rebuilding their existing microservice estates from scratch.

“As far as the agents and the LLMs are concerned,” Gilbert said, “they look at the gateway as the endpoint.”

AI market
Setting aside the user application layer, Gilbert frames agentic AI as a four-layer stack: starting with AI-optimised hardware such as GPUs, TPUs and NPUs: moving up to AI-native infrastructure with Kubernetes, containers, service mech and data bases: then to foundation models, inference and model serving: and finally to the fourth agent applications layer where planning, reasoning and self-healing functions are expected to develop quickly over the coming months.

“We need to start populating what layer four is,” he said. “I expect the key work that we are doing now and over the next six months is to really make sure that we are looking at the agentic AI stack end-to-end.”

The roadmap for the next six months includes scaling 10 to 15 projects, a doubling of the working groups from the current eight, and the first production-scale deployments from member companies.

“We’re already starting to see some companies talking about thousands of agents already in production,” added Gilbert.

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