Spiceball Leisure Centre in Banbury has applied to fit 115 photovoltaic panels on its south‑east facing side elevation.

The array, measuring almost 35m long by 10m wide, will form a 51.75kWp system and is expected to generate 45,000–55,000 kWh of electricity a year.

Spiceball Leisure Centre is one of four sites that will receive upgrades (Image: Cherwell District Council)

This output is roughly enough to power around 15 family homes annually, cutting energy bills and carbon emissions at the site.

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Decarbonisation work has already taken place at Spiceball and three other centres as the council pushes towards its climate target, set after it declared a Climate Emergency in 2019. This latest solar scheme is expected to be equivalent to planting 407 trees every year.

Spiceball Leisure Centre could get 115 solar panels on its south-east facing side elevation (Image: Cherwell District Council)

The upgrades are being funded through a £1.1 million grant secured by Cherwell District Council in 2025 from the government’s Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme, with the authority also contributing £560,911 in match funding from existing capital budgets.

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Recent eco‑friendly enhancements at the leisure centres include replacing fossil‑fuel heating systems with air‑source heat pumps and improving building insulation to cut heat loss.

Councillors say the programme is expected to deliver annual carbon savings of 234 tonnes of carbon dioxide, comparable to driving a car for more than 820,000 miles.

Together, the solar installation and other measures aim to lock in long‑term reductions in energy use and emissions while keeping running costs down for the council and local taxpayers.

SOFIAH NICHOLE SALIVIO

News Editor

HCLTech and Nokia have launched four jointly developed AI-driven rApps on Nokia’s Service Management and Orchestration Marketplace, expanding their partnership in radio access network automation.

Designed for operators managing 5G networks, the applications target automation tasks at the network edge. They cover anomaly detection, energy use, massive MIMO interference mitigation and traffic balancing.

The tools will sit within Nokia’s autonomous networks portfolio and be available through the vendor’s open, standards-based marketplace. The arrangement is intended to make deployment easier for communications service providers operating in multivendor environments.

The software focuses on operational issues that network operators face as traffic patterns become harder to predict and radio environments grow more complex. One application, the Anomaly Detector rApp, monitors key performance indicators and network signals to identify and correlate irregularities across cells and users.

Another, the Energy Optimizer rApp, adjusts base station resources during periods of lower traffic. Its aim is to improve energy efficiency without affecting service quality, an issue that has become more prominent as operators seek to curb electricity costs while maintaining network performance.

The mMIMO Interference Mitigation rApp addresses inter-cell interference that can weaken signal quality, particularly for users at the edge of a cell. The software is designed to ease that interference and improve network efficiency.

The fourth tool, the Traffic Balancer rApp, analyses network conditions and redistributes traffic across available paths to reduce congestion and latency in areas where demand fluctuates rapidly.

Open ecosystem

Placing the software on Nokia’s marketplace reflects a broader push in telecoms towards open radio access network architectures and software-based operational tools. Operators have long pursued greater automation in network management, but implementation has often been slowed by integration challenges among equipment providers, software vendors and existing operational systems.

By using a standards-based marketplace model, the two companies are positioning the applications within an ecosystem that extends beyond a single-vendor setup. That may appeal to operators seeking to avoid lock-in as they introduce more software-led control across 5G infrastructure.

The partnership also includes a longer-term co-innovation plan to develop additional rApps for 5G and later network architectures. Neither company disclosed commercial terms of the expanded arrangement.

HCLTech is a large technology services group with more than 227,000 employees across 60 countries. It reported revenue of USD $14.7 billion for the 12 months to March 2026.

Nokia has been expanding its Service Management and Orchestration platform as operators look for ways to manage increasingly complex radio networks through applications rather than manual intervention. The use of rApps, designed for the non-real-time RAN intelligent controller layer, has become a central part of that strategy.

For operators, the practical question is whether such applications can move beyond limited trials and deliver measurable gains in live networks. Energy savings, interference management and congestion handling are among the more immediate use cases because they can directly affect operating costs and customer experience.

Hari Sadarahalli, Corporate Vice President and Global Head, Engineering and R&D Services at HCLTech, commented on the partnership.

“Autonomous networks require a strong ecosystem approach built on openness, intelligence and innovation,” said Hari Sadarahalli, Corporate Vice President and Global Head, Engineering and R&D Services at HCLTech. “Our partnership with Nokia enables us to bring scalable, AI-driven rApps to the forefront, helping operators accelerate network automation, improve efficiency and confidently advance toward self-driving networks.”

SOFIAH NICHOLE SALIVIO

News Editor

Wavestone has published its seventh annual Cyber Benchmark of large organisations, finding a wide gap between AI security policy and protection against AI-specific attacks.

The consultancy assessed more than 200 large organisations representing nearly 7 million employees against the NIST CSF v2.0 and ISO 27001 cybersecurity standards. Average cybersecurity maturity reached 55.3%, up 1.3 points from the previous year, though year-on-year progress slowed.

The report comes as the UK faces a higher volume of serious cyber incidents. According to the National Cyber Security Centre, the country is now experiencing four nationally significant cyber attacks each week, more than double the level recorded a year earlier.

AI emerged as the clearest weakness. While 76% of organisations surveyed have a dedicated AI security policy, only 10% have deployed defences against attacks aimed specifically at AI systems, including prompt injection.

That leaves a large gulf between governance and operational readiness as companies adopt AI tools more widely. The benchmark warns that attackers are using AI to automate phishing and refine attack methods, increasing pressure on organisations that have set rules but not deployed technical safeguards.

Dedicated teams focused on AI incidents also remain uncommon. The study describes the emergence of such teams as an early trend, reflecting the need for organisations to build more specific responses to AI-related risks.

Regulation effect

The strongest results came from sectors with heavier regulatory obligations. Finance recorded cybersecurity maturity of 67.6%, up 5.1 points, which Wavestone linked to rules such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act and continued spending on security.

Elsewhere, progress was weaker. The gap between regulated and non-regulated sectors reached 8.8 points and widened by 2.1 points, while non-regulated organisations showed no significant improvement.

The findings also suggest that compliance with the European Union’s NIS 2 framework remains difficult even for large organisations. None of those assessed could yet meet NIS 2 requirements fully and sustainably, and average maturity against those requirements stood at 60%.

This has relevance in the UK as lawmakers consider the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill. The benchmark indicates that a substantial compliance gap remains at a time when regulatory expectations are rising alongside the threat level.

Slower progress

The overall increase in average maturity was modest compared with the scale of the threats identified in the report. For businesses, that suggests security improvements are continuing, but not at a pace that matches changes in the attack environment.

Wavestone’s methodology covered large organisations across sectors and used internationally recognised standards as the basis for assessment. The overall picture is one of uneven preparedness, with some industries pushed forward by regulation while others lag behind.

The contrast is especially sharp in AI security, where written policy is moving faster than practical controls. As more organisations use generative AI in internal systems and customer-facing services, that gap may become harder to defend.

Florian Pouchet, Partner and Head of Cybersecurity and Operational Resilience at Wavestone, commented on the findings.

“The threat environment is changing faster than most organisations can adapt. Geopolitical tensions and AI-powered attacks are intensifying precisely as regulatory pressure mounts. What the benchmark tells us is that the market knows this. The next step is to accelerate security measures,” said Pouchet.