Eurobites: Jansen banks £3.7M for final year as BT boss

Former BT boss Philip Jansen – who resigned from the UK operator last July – trousered a pay-plus-bonus package worth £3.7 million (US$4.7 million) for his last financial year at the company, the Guardian reports. The remuneration takes Jansen's total earnings at BT over a five-year period to £16.8 million ($21.5 million). Shortly before he stepped down, Jansen expressed the view that BT would be able to cut 55,000 jobs by the end of this decade, not least thanks to the efficiency/carnage generated by the widespread application of artificial intelligence in the company's systems. During his tenure at BT, Jansen managed to upset the UK's communications regulator, Ofcom, with unguarded comments about the likely demise of BT's fiber rollout rivals, having his knuckles firmly rapped as a result.

United Fiber is to build a new Greek fiber link between Athens and Thessaloniki, connecting Greece to United Group points of presence in Sofia and Belgrade and ultimately to Western Europe's main hubs. The new cable will cover 548km of network, passing through eight major Greek cities. Wholesale business relating to the new link will be managed by UGI Wholesale, United Group's new business unit.

Vodafone Group has landed 2Africa, which the company describes as the world's largest subsea cable system, at Bude in southwest England. With a capacity of up to 180 Tbit/s, 2Africa will provide increased connectivity for UK businesses wanted to provide digital services to Africa and vice versa, says Vodafone. Once complete, 2Africa will be 45,000km long. Bude, in Cornwall, isn't that far along the coast from Porthcurno where, in 1870, the first ever transoceanic cable was landed.

Deutsche Telekom has signed a cloud-based collaboration software deal with Mitel. Their joint offering, "Unify X powered by Telekom," allows mobile phone numbers and connections in the home office to be integrated into virtual systems, allowing employees to securely make calls from any location.

The German Broadband Association (BREKO) is calling for stronger competition in the European telecom market to achieve the EU's connectivity goals. In a statement, BREKO said that the "great diversity of companies within the European telecommunications market should be considered as a strength and not be sacrificed to benefit a few large corporations." BREKO added that copper network operators must not be allowed to use the transition from DSL to fiber to "transfer their existing power" to the fiber network.