Nets acquires
Polish online
payment
service
providers from
MCI Capital
Nokia and Orange apply cloud
benefits to radio access in
recent trial
N
ets, a market leader in the payments
industry, has announced the
acquisition of Dotpay/eCard that are
amongst the leading online payment
service providers in Poland. Andrzej Budzik
will continue as CEO of Dotpay/eCard and
report directly to Asger Hattel, Head of
Merchant Services in Nets, and the brands
of Dotpay and eCard will remain.
With this acquisition, Nets gains access
to the sixth largest country in the EU by
population, with a growing economy, solid
growth in e-commerce volumes and high
growth potential through cash to digital
payments conversion, well supported by
governmental cashless initiatives.
CEO of Nets, Bo Nilsson, said: “With this
acquisition, we extend our geographic
presence in Europe, especially within the
high growth merchant services area as
we now get better access to pursuing
opportunities in Poland. Dotpay/eCard have
performed very strongly in recent years,
achieving solid volume and revenue growth.
We aim to continue and strengthen this
development through both investments
into organic growth and potentially also via
further consolidation.”
Nets and Dotpay/eCard have a highly
complementary strategic fit. With a
comprehensive product suite, primarily
within e-commerce, Dotpay/eCard
complement Nets very well and both
Nets and Dotpay/eCard will benefit from
increased industrial scale and synergies
through joint innovation, for instance.
CEO of Dotpay/eCard, Andrzej Budzik,
commented: “With our offerings in the
e-commerce area we will further strengthen
our combined portfolio within merchant
services and as part of the Nets Group, we
will be able to speed up innovation building
on our joint capabilities to the benefit of
merchants and consumers.”
www.intelligentcio.com
N
okia has completed a live network
trial in Poland in collaboration with
Orange to validate the benefits of cloud-
optimised radio access networks for the
smooth evolution to next-generation
5G technologies.
away. As a result, Nokia’s AirScale Cloud
Base Station provided equally strong
network performance on both Nokia’s
reference cloud infrastructure and on
Orange’s own cloud environment.
The two companies trialled Cloud RAN
(C-RAN) technology to prepare for the
eventual introduction of a distributed
cloud architecture for 5G by Orange. A
distributed, cloud-based radio access
network architecture like Nokia’s AirScale
Cloud RAN provides capacity where
needed and prepares the network for the
deployment of new 5G access technology
as part of a multi-layered architecture. Nokia’s architecture splits baseband
processing functionality across the
radio cell sites and data centre using
its AirScale Cloud Base Station. Time-
critical functions are performed at the
cell site and connected via Ethernet
fronthaul – allowing the operator to use
its existing transport network – while
centralised software hosted at the data
centre cost-efficiently performs non-real-
time functions.
The trial took place from March to
the beginning of May in Poland, with
radio sites in the city of Chelm and the
virtualised part of the baseband running
in a data centre in Lublin, around 70 km Nokia AirScale Cloud RAN provides the
flexibility needed for future services and
requirements for 5G, Internet of Things
(IoT), low latency services and end-to-
end slicing.
INTELLIGENTCIO
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