Orange deepened its push into the travel eSIM market through a global distribution deal with online travel agency Trip.com, offering mobile connectivity at the point of travel booking as demand for roaming services grows.

Orange Travel, an Orange Group subsidiary, stated the partnership will enable Trip.com users to buy Orange Travel eSIM packages directly on the agency platform, allowing customers to arrange connectivity before departure, pay in local currency and activate the eSIM upon arrival.

Trip.com customers will be able to buy packages covering France, Italy, Spain, the UK and Switzerland, with the partners aiming to target key European tourist markets. The pair noted the region accounts for more than 50 per cent of global tourist arrivals, led by France and Spain.

The packages on offer include calls, texts and data across 20GB, 50GB and 100GB options, with validity periods of ranging from a week to 30 days. Prices start at €8.99.

Orange Travel highlighted its eSIM services are supported by the Orange Group’s network reach, including connectivity in more than 200 destinations and 700 roaming agreements worldwide.

Orange Travel CEO Frederic Blehaut said the agreement demonstrates its “commitment to accelerating our growth in Asia and internationally through strategic partnerships”, adding the subsidiary offers “European eSIMs with a recognised quality of service backed by the Orange Group’s know-how”.

Chase Liu, general manager of international attractions and tours business at Trip.com Group, added: “With tailor-made offers and packages easily accessible on our platform, our customers can enjoy enhanced connectivity and greater convenience when they travel in this region.”

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Tech giants and nations stepped up measures to protect young users online as Poland moved to ban mobile phones in primary schools and Meta Platforms separately beefed up teen content controls globally.

Poland’s proposed ban, due to take effect on 1 September 2026, will apply to children aged 7 to 15 on school premises, including during breaks. According to Reuters, the proposed bill will also give schools a legal basis to create storage deposits for handsets.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the restriction aims to give parents and teachers more control over pupils’ device use. “We propose a ban on cell phone use in primary schools during lessons and breaks,” he said, adding, “this is not a perfect solution, we have no illusions about that, but we must address this serious problem, which is addiction to phones and the internet”.

Another bill proposed by Poland’s minister for digital affairs also imposes new obligations on pornography websites to restrict access by children.

Poland’s proposals come as social media platforms face mounting scrutiny over child safety across the globe.

Meta moves
Earlier today (2 June), Meta announced it is expanding its 13+ content settings for teen accounts on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger globally. The controls were initially launched in select countries in October last year and are designed to filter out content deemed inappropriate for underage users as the default for teenagers’ accounts.

A more restrictive “limited content” setting will also be made available on Facebook and Messenger later this year. In addition, Meta’s Instagram platform is also testing a feature to prevent teenage users from repeatedly seeing certain types of content to promote a more balanced social media feed.

In December, Australia became the world’s first country to ban social media for under-16s, while countries including the UK, Denmark, Greece, France, Malaysia, Norway and Spain are all weighing or advancing restrictions.

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SK Telecom (SKT) partnered up with Nvidia to use the chip company’s digital twin technology for semiconductor manufacturing environments operated by SK Hynix, pushing industrial AI deployments to achieve more automated factory operations.

The operator said it used Nvidia “Omniverse libraries” to adapt digital twins for complex, large-scale manufacturing environments, following a proof-of-concept completed last year at a SK Hynix semiconductor manufacturing site. It plans to commercialise the technology in stages as SK Hynix works to establish autonomous fab operations by 2030.

Using Nvidia’s Agent Toolkit, SKT developed Agentic Digital Twin Modelling technology to automate data processing, including site equipment and spatial structures, for use in digital twin systems. It also integrated Nvidia Omniverse libraries to make large 3D factory scenes load faster, run more smoothly and use GPU and memory resources more efficiently.

The set up aims to improve data conversion, scene optimisation and performance tasks required to build and run digital twins at scale.

SKT explained digital twins act as working replicas of real factories and equipment. In semiconductor plants, they can be used to test changes to processes or equipment layouts in advance, helping reduce costly trial and error in highly complex production sites.

Mike Geyer, head of industrial digital twins at Nvidia, said semiconductor fabs are “among the most challenging manufacturing environments”, citing “massive amounts of 3D data, complex equipment structures, and the need for high-level optimisation”.

Cho Ik-hwan, head of physical AI at SKT, added the collaboration demonstrates manufacturing digital twins can move “beyond simple 3D visualisation” into systems capable of “understanding and optimising large-scale 3D manufacturing data”.

SKT added the move bolsters its plans to expand its enterprise and public sector business with AI offerings spanning infrastructure, models and services.

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SoftBank Group overtook Toyota Motor as Japan’s most valuable company, as AI gains propelled the technology group ahead of the country’s largest automaker.

SoftBank shares rose 14% in Tokyo trading on Monday, taking its market value above JPY48 trillion ($306 billion), past Toyota’s nearly JPY46 trillion.

Bloomberg noted the shift marks the first time in more than two decades SoftBank moved ahead of Toyota on market value including treasury shares. According to the publication, SoftBank last briefly held the position during Japan’s internet bubble in 2000.

The move caps a sharp run for SoftBank, with its shares up more than 90% this year. Toyota has moved the other way, falling more than 10% as automakers face rising fuel costs and the expensive shift to electric vehicles and software-led platforms.

Meanwhile, SoftBank’s gains have been buoyed by ambitious bets on OpenAI; the company has committed close to $65 billion to OpenAI to date, giving it a projected stake of about 13% by October.

Earlier this year, OpenAI and SoftBank also jointly invested $1 billion in US digital infrastructure company SB Energy, which will build and operate a 1.2GW data centre for OpenAI in Texas. The trio are working to develop a new model for data centre builds, tied to the broader $500 billion US-led Stargate initiative focussed on AI and energy infrastructure.

SoftBank also announced an investment of up to €75 billion in AI data centre infrastructure in France earlier today (1 June), adding it will work with SB Energy and other strategic partners to deliver the projects.

Kazuhiro Sasaki, head of research at Phillip Securities Japan, told Bloomberg: “This epoch-making event symbolises the AI boom.”

Meanwhile, Tomo Kinoshita, global market strategist at Invesco Asset Management Japan, told the publication SoftBank had “concentrated its management resources on AI-related businesses” and “successfully ridden the broader global tech rally”.

For Toyota, higher oil prices linked to conflict in the Middle East also added to pressure on global auto demand, he noted.

“Over the longer term, AI-related companies are likely to command higher valuations,” Kinoshita added.

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Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon used his keynote at the annual Computex event in Taiwan to stake the company’s claim in the next phase of AI, arguing the technology will reshape demand for compute across devices, networks and data centres.

Amon described 2026 as the “year of the agent”, stating AI is moving from prompt-based interactions to autonomous systems capable of planning, reasoning and acting across smartphones, PCs, cars, robots and industrial equipment.

“Agents are not coming in the future. They’re already here,” he said, adding the shift is “changing a lot of the compute” and could generate “a lot of demand for new classes of devices and computing”, creating “one of the largest” upgrade cycles the industry has seen.

Amon said the smartphone will no longer sit alone at the nexus of the digital ecosystem. “Agents become the centre of your digital experience,” he stated, adding devices will increasingly become “endpoints for agents”.

Compute continuum
To this end, the executive laid out Qualcomm’s ambition to support the AI infrastructure transition. Amon pointed to the need for CPUs, GPUs, NPUs and connectivity designed to support AI workloads both on devices and in the cloud, stating the company can help scale AI compute from “sub-2 milliwatts” in devices such as earbuds to kilowatt-level systems in data centres.

He also stressed the engineering challenge around battery life and latency, noting devices must be able to support complex planning, reasoning and coordination. “I cannot emphasise enough the importance of power,” he said.

In addition, Amon framed 6G as a key part of the future AI architecture, noting it is the first wireless generation designed as an AI-native network connecting distributed, hybrid intelligence across devices and data centres.

During the event, the chief also unveiled Dragonfly, Qualcomm’s new data centre brand aimed at inference workloads. He said Qualcomm is already working with hyperscalers and global partners on deployments, adding the fresh brand will allow its portfolio to span “every single tier of the compute continuum”.

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NTT Docomo Global expanded its work with Accenture and AWS to build infrastructure for enterprise agentic AI focused on governance and ensuring trust in systems.

The collaboration is set to centre on further developing the NTT unit’s Universal Wallet Infrastructure (UWI), a platform developed with Accenture to manage digital identity, credentials, money and documents across different apps, wallets and services.

Under the latest pact, NTT will provide the UWI trust infrastructure layer, while Accenture will bring technology strategy, digital assets and product engineering. AWS will contribute cloud and AI services.

NTT stated the expanded work targets a growing governance gap as AI agents increasingly write and modify code across development environments. It argued traditional security and software supply chain approaches were not built to monitor autonomous systems operating continuously at scale.

The partners plan to embed identity, credential and policy controls into workflows, allowing AI actions to be verified, governed and audited. The focus is initially on software development, though the companies are eyeing broader enterprise applications.

The trio will also carry out joint go-to-market activities including customer workshops, product showcases and educational sessions.

NTT Docomo Global CEO Hiroki Kuriyama said “the next chapter of AI will depend on whether people, enterprises, and society can trust how intelligent systems behave and interact”.

AWS MD Asia Pacific, Japan and China Jaime Valles added customers want to move quickly with agentic AI, but need “trust and governance built in from day one”.

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Mobile World Live brings you our top three picks of the week as the European Commission (EC) earmarked a large proportion of mobile satellite spectrum for homegrown players, Telenor unveiled a restructured operating model and SpaceX secured a $2.3 billion US military deal.

EC proposes local players get bulk of MSS spectrum

What happened: EC EVP Henna Virkkunen set out the regulator’s proposal to allocate the 2GHz mobile satellite services spectrum band across the European Union, with a large slice potentially being allocated to local players.

Why it matters: Under the plan, one third of the band would be reserved for government and critical communications with the rest allocated to commercial D2D and IoT services. Non-EU companies would only be able to apply for half of the allocation for commercial services and none of the public sector portion.

Virkkunen said the watchdog aims to “boost Europe’s competitiveness”, “strengthen Europe’s security” and embrace “new technological possibilities”, adding the plan reflects “the current changing geopolitical context”.

She rejected suggestions the move disproportionately targets US companies, stating the process is “very transparent and fair”. Yet, BNP Paribas Equity Research senior analyst Sam McHugh told Reuters the plan could leave US players including SpaceX in a “structurally inferior” position. He added it is “a small positive for European telecom operators” because it further reduces the odds of SpaceX competing head-to-head with them.

Telenor pursues top-line gains with restructure

What happened: Telenor unveiled a group-wide restructure, replacing its Nordics, Asia, Amp and Infrastructure business units with a model focused on individual countries.

Why it matters: The plan aims to move decision making closer to customers and local markets. The operator stated the shift aligns with its long-term goals of pursuing top-line growth, greater efficiency and operational improvement. Under the new set-up, the chiefs of Telenor’s Nordics businesses will join group management, removing the current regional layer.

Telenor described the restructure as “simplified and sharpened”, adding it would “substantially reduce administrative costs” and accelerate long-term growth by improving cash flow and capital return in the coming years.

SpaceX bags $2.3B US military comms deal

What happened: The US Space Force (USSF) awarded SpaceX a $2.3 billion contract to build the backbone for a Space Data Network (SDN), a satellite communications system designed to connect military platforms and sensors.

Why it matters: USSF stated the SDN backbone will use low Earth orbit satellites to provide global connectivity for armed forces, acting as “an integrated network” delivering “robust, resilient, high-capacity and low-latency data transport”.

USSF acting portfolio acquisition executive for space-based sensing and targeting Colonel Ryan Frazier said the system would use “the best of commercial innovation” and provide “a strong foundation for the SDN mission” by acting as “a core communications layer” for USSF systems, delivering continuous, secure connectivity.

The deal comes at a pivotal moment for Elon Musk’s satellite venture, which recently submitted a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing detailing plans to launch a long-awaited IPO as early as next month.

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Meta Platforms prepared to test paid plans for its AI services and expand availability of subscriptions for WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, as the technology giant looks to diversify revenue streams during a period of heavy spending.

Naomi Gleit, Meta’s head of product, explained in an Instagram video the company is “starting to roll out Facebook Plus, Instagram Plus and WhatsApp Plus with enhanced features”.

She added users accessing Meta AI will be given “more to work with, more capacity, bigger, more complex requests, and more room to create for businesses and creators”.

Bloomberg reported the social media giant will trial two consumer AI subscription tiers from next month in Singapore, Guatemala and Bolivia, while retaining a free version of the Meta AI app and website.

Meta One Plus will apparently cost $7.99 a month and target users who regularly generate AI images and videos or make heavy use of reasoning features, while Meta One Premium will be around $20 and offer the same tools but with higher usage limits.

Specific products for businesses and creators, Meta One Essential and Meta One Advanced, are also set to be offered.

WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook offerings will be priced at around $2.99 to $3.99 a month depending on the market, Bloomberg reported. Users paying for Meta AI will gain access to those app-specific benefits.

“We’re offering premium tools that allow you to enhance presence, supercharge content, automate tasks and protect your brand” Gleit said, adding “eventually we see Meta One as the one place that brings our subscriptions together across all of our apps”.

The trials are Meta’s first attempt to charge consumers for AI features. Rivals OpenAI and Google already offer paid chatbot subscriptions.

Its move to generate subscription revenue comes during an aggressive AI investment drive.

Meta is pumping more than $10 billion into building a massive data centre campus in the US state of Indiana. Last month, the company also raised its capex forecast for 2026 to between $125 billion and $145 billion to fund AI infrastructure plans.

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UK operator Virgin Media O2 is set to switch on O2 Satellite for iPhones tomorrow (28 May), widening access to the direct-to-device (D2D) connectivity service it launched earlier this year.

Subscribers to the offering with compatible devices gain access to satellite connectivity when no mobile coverage is available. It enables messaging and data across a range of apps, including Messages, Apple Maps, WhatsApp, Messenger, X and location services.

VMO2 noted adding iPhone support would provide the means for millions of users in rural, coastal and remote parts of the UK to connect where traditional mobile coverage can be limited or unavailable.

It added availability of satellite connectivity could boost network resilience by helping customers stay connected during outages or natural disasters.

Compatible models are the iPhone 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 ranges as well as the iPhone Air. O2 Satellite is available as a £3 per month add-on for most contract customers, though is included at no extra cost for those on its Ultimate Plan.

Chris Bournes, commercial director at VMO2, said “expanding the service to iPhone users is a major step forward in making this new, groundbreaking technology accessible to more customers”.

VMO2 launched its O2 Satellite service in February 2026 using Starlink infrastructure in what it positioned as the first D2D satellite mobile data service to go live in Europe. The operator noted the technology has lifted its UK landmass coverage to 95%.

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Deutsche Telekom (DT) added 81 mobile sites to its footprint and upgraded capacity at 548 existing locations in Germany, as it continues to expand its 5G network, improve performance and bridge coverage gaps.

The work included 14 new sites in the southwestern state of Baden-Wurttemberg, 13 in North Rhine-Westphalia and 12 in Bavaria.

DT stated its 5G network now reaches around 99% of households nationwide, while 4G household coverage is almost 100%.

The operator also moved to strengthen 5G performance by ending dynamic spectrum sharing with LTE in the 2.1GHz band.

Telekom Deutschland CTO Alexander Jenbar explained the decision is because “5G has become the standard for our customers” and the changed would boost capacity and stability.

The network expansion is also set to benefit customers of its MagentaZuhause Hybrid services, which combine mobile and fixed network capacity.

DT stated the service can now deliver download data rates of up to 500Mb/s and upload of 50Mb/s without fibre access.

Ultra capacity
DT highlighted the upgrades would deliver higher data rates and more capacity, particularly in areas where fixed broadband speeds remain limited.

The boost forms part of a wider ultra-capacity network plan, which aims to deliver download capacity of 1Gb/s per cell to 90% of mobile sites.

DT also plans to expand fibre links to 85% of sites, and use low-band and mid-band spectrum to improve latency, coverage, capacity and network responsiveness.

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