Eurobites: Harrison to step aside as CEO of TalkTalk

Tristia Harrison is to step down as CEO of TalkTalk from March of next year as part of a company reorganization that sees the UK broadband provider being split into three independent companies covering, respectively, wholesale telecom services, residential broadband and connectivity for small businesses. Harrison joined TalkTalk in 2003 and was part of the management team that separated the business from Carphone Warehouse in 2010. From March 1, 2024, she will move to be a non-executive director of the wholesale unit, while Tom O'Hagan, founder of Virtual1 and current MD of TalkTalk Business Wholesale, will become CEO of the wholesale unit and Adam Dunlop, former MD of iD Mobile and current MD of TalkTalk Consumer and Supply & Partnerships, becomes CEO of TalkTalk Consumer. The organizational changes will lead to a "limited number" of redundancies, TalkTalk said in a statement.

A court in Munich has ruled that Netflix is infringing a Broadcom patent relating to HEVC/H.265 video coding, specifically the "366 Patent" which Netflix employs to provide Ultra HD content to its users. The court issued an injunction requiring the streaming company to "cease and desist" all further infringement in Germany. The two companies have been in dispute since 2018.

EU bigwig Thierry Breton had another pop at Apple for its "walled garden" way of doing things. As Reuters reports, Breton met with Apple CEO Tim Cook in Brussels, emerging from the high-powered pow-wow to tell journalists: "The next job for Apple and other Big Tech, under the DMA [Digital Markets Act] is to open up its gates to competitors. Be it the electronic wallet, browsers or app stores, consumers using an Apple iPhone should be able to benefit from competitive services by a range of providers." Of course, the EU and Apple have form on this kind of thing, with antitrust tussles never very far away.

Sparkle, the international services arm of Telecom Italia (TIM), has switched on the terrestrial section of the BlueMed cable connecting Aqaba in Jordan to Sparkle's Mediterranean backbone as well as direct service availability between Aqaba and Milan using new BlueMed segments. The BlueMed cable is part of the Blue & Raman Submarine Cable Systems, built in partnership with Google and other operators, and that will ultimately extend to Mumbai in India.

Telecom Egypt has launched its new WeConnect cable "ecosystem," providing access to Egypt's subsea cable infrastructure. The WeConnect platform enables users to "click to order" cross-connectivity between the 14 subsea cable systems landing in Egypt's ten cable stations, linked via the ten terrestrial routes spanning the country.