Eurobites: Kyivstar turns to GenAI to help with economic recovery in UkraineEurobites: Kyivstar turns to GenAI to help with economic recovery in Ukraine

VEON's Kyivstar has teamed up with Amazon Web Services to open a generative AI lab to aid economic recovery in war-battered Ukraine. The facility, which will be powered by AWS' cloud smarts, is intended to help the country's businesses introduce AI technologies, such as text and visual content generation, augmented intelligence-based chatbots and virtual assistants. In addition to serving Ukrainian businesses, Kyivstar and Kyivstar Tech will also offer services such as cloud migration and analytics internationally. As part of its commitment to Ukraine's recovery, VEON and Kyivstar recently announced a five-year, $1 billion investment plan at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Berlin. (See Kyivstar to invest $1B while keeping Ukraine connected and Eurobites: Kyivstar helps Ukrainian businesses migrate to cloud.)

France's four main mobile operators – Bouygues Telecom, Free, Orange and SFR – have together launched two network APIs through the GSMA's Open Gateway initiative to help online businesses combat fraud and digital identity theft. KYC Match will allow businesses to cross-check customer-provided information with the verified records maintained by the user's mobile operator, while SIM Swap can be used to check whether a give phone number has recently changed SIM cards. The APIs have been tested in the French market with several financial institutions, BforBank and Fortuneo among them, having used KYC Match to screen new customers.

There's yet more cable damage up in the Nordics – though this time it's on dry land rather than subsea. YLE reports that a fiber optic cable connecting Finland and Sweden was damaged on Monday at two points between Espoo and Vihti, causing a major outage in Finland. The damage follows two incidents last month, when two separate cables in the Baltic Sea were severed. Those two incidents are still being investigated. (See Eurobites: Sabotage suspected after latest subsea cable cut.)

Deutsche Telekom and 1&1 share the dubious honor of making it into the top ten of major European outages in the first nine months of 2024. According to Downdetector data analyzed by Ookla, 218,000 1&1 service users reported being hit by an outage on May 27, while 209,000 Deutsche Telekom customers similarly suffered six days previously. The Bohemian Rhapsody of this particular chart, however, was Facebook, whose March 5 outage affected at least 3.4 million Europeans.

OK, this is getting boring now. UK mobile operator EE has been named the winner of the Umlaut Connect mobile network test for the tenth year in a row. The methodology involved both drive and walk test across an area comprising more than a quarter of the UK population, with voice and data performance measured across 19 cities and 27 towns, as well as over the UK's rail and road networks.

UK altnet CityFibre has completed the primary phase of its fiber network in Hartlepool, the northeastern English town chiefly known for its aversion to monkeys. More than 33,000 homes in the town and its surrounding areas are now covered by the CityFibre network following the £21 million ($26.5 million) build. CityFibre is now exploring opportunities to connect more properties in the area.

Movistar, the Telefónica subsidiary that offers broadband, landline and pay-TV services in Spain and parts of Latin America, is integrating the Apple TV+ streaming service into its TV offer. As from December 20, miMovistar Fiction package customers will be able to access Apple TV+ as part of the platform's main navigation and also on-demand.