Airtel names CFO for Asia region
Bharti Airtel, India’s largest mobile operator, hired rival Aircel’s CFO Badal Bagri as CFO for its India and South Asia operations.

Badal, who starts next week and will report to Airtel CFO Nilanjan Roy, will lead the finance teams across India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

This will be Badal’s second stint with Airtel: he served as chief controller for the consumer business as well as global financial controller from 2010 to 2014. After leaving Airtel, Badal moved to handset maker Micromax and then Aircel.

China Mobile, Ericsson partner on cloud RAN
China Mobile Research Institute and Sweden-headquartered vendor Ericsson agreed to collaborate on the development of cloud RAN technologies.

The two organisations signed a two-year agreement to collaborate on defining cloud RAN use cases, conduct joint research on key technologies related to network functions virtualisation-based cloud RAN and develop cloud RAN architecture.

MediaTek’s 2016 revenue jumps 29%
Taiwan-based MediaTek’s revenues increased 29.2 per cent year-on-year in 2016 to TWD275.5 billion ($8.6 billion), after closing the year with double-digit growth in December.

The fabless semiconductor company’s consolidated revenue last month rose 15.3 per cent year-on-year to TWD21.4 billion. Revenue was down 9 per cent in December on a sequential basis.

SmarTone partners with Cisco Jasper on IoT
SmarTone, Hong Kong’s smallest mobile operator, partnered with Cisco Jasper to launch an Internet of Things (IoT) platform designed to enable local businesses to introduce new services and revenue models.

Cisco Jasper deployed its Control Centre managed connectivity platform, which allows companies of any size to offer connected services, the company said in a statement.

The company said it is working with partners with more than 30 mobile operator groups and over 120 mobile networks on IoT projects.

LG Uplus deploys NFV-based routing platform
South Korea’s third largest mobile operator LG Uplus selected Juniper Networks to build out a carrier-grade virtual routing platform using the vendor’s vMX router and Ethernet switches.

The operator, which has a 19 per cent market share, said the deployment is part of a broader infrastructure upgrade, which supports its evolution towards 5G.