Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Salt's second quarter is no great shakes; Serbia Broadband extends gigabit service; Safaricom's bad apples.

Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe

August 23, 2019

2 Min Read
Eurobites: A1 pilots cryptocurrency payments

Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Salt's second quarter is no great shakes; Serbia Broadband extends gigabit service; Safaricom's bad apples.

  • Austrian operator A1 is conducting a pilot that allows its customers to pay for goods and services with their phones using cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dash in certain stores, TechXplore reports.

    • Salt, the Swiss mobile operator, saw second-quarter EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) fall 10% to 109.9 million Swiss francs (US$111.3 million) on revenue that was down 2.3% to CHF254.5 million ($257.7 million). On a mildly brighter note, Salt's postpaid mobile customer base stood at 1,229,000, up 1,200 during the quarter, while on the fiber front Salt reached the 50,000-customer mark during the quarter.

    • Serbia Broadband (SBB) is expanding gigabit services to the city of Kragujevac as from next month, Broadband TV News reports. Kragujevac is the fifth Serbian city to get SBB's gigabit treatment, following Belgrade, Novi Sad, Subotica and Gornji Milanovac.

    • Kenya's Safaricom has revealed that it laid off 18 employees for corruption and fraud-related misdemeanors in the financial year ending March 2019. As the Star reports, this sounds bad but it is an improvement on the 43 dismissals in 2018 and 52 in 2017.

    • BT has been attacked by a Scottish politician for removing phone boxes where there may still be some demand for them and where there is possibly no mobile phone coverage. The Scotsman reports that South Scotland MSP Colin Smyth said: "It's fine for BT to say that most people now have mobile phones but that isn't the case for everyone and coverage isn't always great. BT should at least give a clear guarantee that no phone box will be removed in an area where there is not good mobile phone coverage from several providers in that area."

    • EE is extending its smartphone "expert set-up" and delivery service to more parts of London as well as to Birmingham and Manchester, with eight other UK cities lined up for inclusion by the end of 2019. The free service, set up in partnership with Enjoy, allows customers, via telephone or online, to tee up their new smartphone so it arrives tweaked to their preferences, with anything they want from their old phone safely transferred over to their shiny new one.

      — Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading

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About the Author(s)

Paul Rainford

Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading

Paul is based on the Isle of Wight, a rocky outcrop off the English coast that is home only to a colony of technology journalists and several thousand puffins.

He has worked as a writer and copy editor since the age of William Caxton, covering the design industry, D-list celebs, tourism and much, much more.

During the noughties Paul took time out from his page proofs and marker pens to run a small hotel with his other half in the wilds of Exmoor. There he developed a range of skills including carrying cooked breakfasts, lying to unwanted guests and stopping leaks with old towels.

Now back, slightly befuddled, in the world of online journalism, Paul is thoroughly engaged with the modern world, regularly firing up his VHS video recorder and accidentally sending text messages to strangers using a chipped Nokia feature phone.

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