Eurobites: Telecom Italia leads the 5G pack, says Opensignal

Word that sports streaming service DAZN had put in a bid for BT Sport prompted shares in the UK incumbent operator to climb by 2.7% on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday morning. As the Evening Standard reports, citing the Financial Times, the talks have reached the "advanced" stage and a deal looks likely "within weeks." DAZN has made its name largely through its boxing and NFL coverage, but if it bagged BT Sport it would get access to a sizable slice of English Premier League soccer rights and increase its UK profile massively. Since Philip Jansen took over from Gavin Patterson as CEO in early 2019, BT has fallen out of love with TV soccer, not least because of all the massive cost and uncertainty that always surrounds rights deals. (See BT Sport sale would aid fiber rather than football focus.)

Away from the glamour and hyperbole of televised sport, BT is now offering Cisco's ThousandEyes analytics – or "experience monitoring," if you prefer – product as a managed service to multinationals. The system is intended to help corporate IT teams monitor application performance, identifying faults before people start complaining about them. Customers can choose from three service levels, from fully BT-managed and controlled to "you're on your own, mate" in-house operation by their own IT team.

The European Commission is about to get into a fight with Apple over mobile phone chargers, according to a Telegraph report. The problem is that the Commission, to cut down on waste and generally tidy things up, wants all phones sold in the European Union to share a common charger – the USB-C type – but Apple, being Apple, wants its users to use its own Lightning connector. As the Telegraph reports, the Commission will launch its legislation this week: Let battle commence.

A1 Austria has done a deal with Vivendi-owned Canal+, which will see Canal+ enter the Austrian market in partnership with A1now TV. Canal+ is one of the world's largest TV platforms, with more than 22 million subscribers, 14 million of which are in Europe.

Huawei and others look like being frozen out of the Baltic state of Lithuania after the defense ministry there recommended that its populace refrain from buying Chinese mobile phones and throw away the ones they already own, according to a Reuters report (paywall may apply). A government report apparently found that the devices had "built-in censorship capabilities."

You mess with the names of cultural venues at your peril. Mobile operator Three thought it had pulled off a marketing stroke of genius with its rebranding of Dublin's historic Olympia theater to "3Olympia," but, as the Guardian reports, the move has prompted allegations of "cultural vandalism" and widespread derision. A petition against the new name has been organized by the family of the theater's late owner, Gerry Sinnott.

Telefónica Tech has teamed up with Alias Robotics to create what they claim is the world's first laboratory dedicated exclusively to innovation in cybersecurity for robots at the Wayra Innovation Hub in Munich. The launch forms part of the integration of Alias Robotics within the investment portfolio of Telefonica Tech Ventures.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading