Eurobites: Proximus strikes wholesale deal with Digi and Citymesh

Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Salt savors its second quarter; Trustly buys SlimPay; open Wi-Fi boost for South Africa's cricket fans.

Belgium's Proximus has struck a five-year wholesale mobile deal with Digi Communications Belgium and Citymesh Connect. In addition, InSky, the company responsible for deploying the infrastructure of both Digi and Citymesh, is expected to acquire around 400 mobile sites from Proximus over the next four years.

Swiss mobile operator Salt saw second-quarter EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) climb 5.4% year-over-year, to 142.7 million Swiss francs (US$161.2 million), on operating revenue that rose 3.4%, to CHF228.4 million ($258.1 million). Postpaid mobile subscribers increased by 27,600 during the quarter, bring the operator's total postpaid customer tally to more than 1.5 million. In May, Swiss Post announced that it had chosen Salt as its exclusive partner to provide telecom services to its customers from 2024, while during the same month Lycamobile customers began using the Salt network.

Trustly, the Stockholm-based fintech company, is to acquire direct-debit specialist SlimPay. The deal, says Trustly, will complement its existing direct-debit capability in the UK and Sweden and provide a "comprehensive pan-European recurring payments service."

South Africa's Supersport Park cricket stadium has deployed an open Wi-Fi network infrastructure from Telecom Infra Project's OpenLAN Project Group to improve the spectator experience and open up new commercial opportunities. The 22,000-capacity venue, otherwise known as Centurion Park, regularly hosts international matches across formats for the South African national teams.

Heliot Europe, which operates a Sigfox IoT network in the UK and mainland Europe, has appointed Gareth Mitchell as its UK partner manager. The appointment follows Heliot's acquisition of WND UK's 0G network operations. Heliot claims to serve more than 1.3 million IoT-connected devices across Europe.

Swedish-owned Spotify suffered the third-largest outage globally during the first half of 2023, with more than 489,000 "issues" reported on the Downdetector website on January 14. That's according to Ookla, the company behind Downdetector, which reports that Instagram topped the list of outage shame, with more than 2.4 million users complaining that they couldn't drool over other people's holiday snaps on May 21. A dark day indeed…

Companies thinking about where they ought to place electric vehicle charging infrastructure could do worse than follow the example of how telcos approached the challenge of 5G rollout. That's according to Mark Winn, head of EV strategy at SMS, who told Fleet News: "5G masts are typically going into new locations and so the big challenges are finding the right place for them to go and figuring out where the power is coming from … It's the same challenge fleets are looking at when planning for the future with their charging infrastructure."

Precise-positioning technology from Deutsche Telekom is enabling an autonomous swimming robot to clean up garbage from rivers, canals and beaches. The snappily named WasteShark, powered by two electric motors, "swims" through areas of polluted waterway, gobbling up plastic bottles, bags and any other filth that shouldn't be there. Telekom's tech enables the robot to be remotely positioned to within a few centimeters, using a cloud-based service from Swift Navigation.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading