A UK broadband operator that twice tried and failed to buy TalkTalk's consumer business has asked the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to keep that business separate from BT, which acquired it in a government-brokered intervention.

Opus Broadband, an ISP based in the northwest of England, published an open letter to the UK government this week criticizing the decision to let BT take both TalkTalk's PXC wholesale division and its consumer operation. Mike Ellwood, Opus's chairman, does not dispute the need for state action: he says Opus supports the government's intervention to preserve connectivity for hundreds of thousands of vulnerable customers. His objection is to what the rescue handed over in the process.

"An emergency intervention to protect vulnerable customers should not result in the permanent transfer to BT of 1.5 million retail customers when a credible independent purchaser was available," Ellwood wrote.

The credible purchaser, in Opus's telling, is Opus itself. The company made the second of two rejected offers for TalkTalk's consumer business only last month. It now intends to make formal representations to the CMA, requesting — among other things — that TalkTalk's consumer business remains operationally and commercially separate from BT.

What does Opus actually want?

The letter stops short of demanding the deal be unwound. Instead, Opus is pushing for structural separation of the consumer unit from BT's broader operations, a position that would preserve a wholesale relationship for rivals while leaving BT's acquisition of the PXC wholesale division intact.

What the letter does not say is equally notable. Opus does not disclose the value of either of its rejected offers, nor explain why TalkTalk's administrators or creditors declined them. Without those figures, the claim that an independent sale was viable rests on Opus's own assertion.

The CMA has not commented on the representations. Whether the regulator treats Opus's submissions as a substantive competition concern or as a losing bidder's grievance will shape what happens next to the 1.5 million customers at the center of the dispute.

5G TV production trial gets a German outing

Away from the consolidation fight, Vodafone, Telefónica and Deutsche Telekom have teamed up with broadcaster RTL Deutschland to trial live TV production over mobile networks. Carried out at a soccer match between HEBC Hamburg and Borussia Dortmund, the trial used network APIs to keep voice communications stable between the production control room, camera crews and reporters. Network slicing secured bandwidth and a constant data rate for camera footage transmission.

The demonstration is part of the operators' broader push into network APIs, an area where vendors have promised new revenue streams for years without yet delivering them at scale. A single successful trial at a Bundesliga match proves the technology works; it does not prove a business model.

Arelion squeezes more spectrum from North Sea route

Sweden's Arelion has completed a live field trial on its 500km optical backbone route from Amsterdam to London using Nokia equipment. Arelion says the trial, using Nokia's Super C and Super L band technology, expanded usable optical spectrum by roughly 21% and increased capacity over existing fiber infrastructure.

That is a capacity gain on fiber already in the ground — roughly a fifth more usable spectrum without laying new cable. For a backbone operator, that economics matters more than any headline throughput figure, which Arelion did not provide.

Finland lands another hyperscale data center plan

France's Sesterce plans to invest more than €10 billion ($11.2 billion) in AI-supporting data centers on the site of a former paper mill in Jämsä, Finland. According to a YLE report, Sesterce has already signed a contract with the facility's future client but declined to name the company, saying only that it is one of two leading AI laboratories.

Sesterce CEO Youssef El Manssouri expects the construction phase to bring around 2,000 jobs to the town of Jämsä — a figure that falls to approximately 300 once the facility is complete. The jobs number, in other words, is mostly temporary; the permanent economic footprint is closer to a mid-sized employer than a transformational one.

Finland's cold climate has made it a favorite for data center operators. Google committed €13 billion ($15 billion) to AI-related digital infrastructure in the country over the next two years just last month. Sesterce has not published a construction timeline, and a signed client contract, while encouraging, is not the same as a financed project.

Deutsche Telekom demos distributed enterprise network

Deutsche Telekom has demonstrated what it calls a "globally distributed enterprise network" with AWS and VMware, combining DT's connectivity services with third-party connectivity, compute and storage at campus locations in Prague, Bonn and Seattle. The operator offered no commercial availability date, no customer count and no pricing — a demonstration, for now, of architecture rather than revenue.

Back in the UK, the immediate date to watch is whatever response the CMA gives to Opus's representations, which will determine whether BT's absorption of 1.5 million TalkTalk customers proceeds as planned or faces conditions.