Eurobites: Cellnex revenues rise 7% in first nine months

Spanish towers giant Cellnex saw revenues rise by 7% year-over-year, to €2.90 billion (US$3.09 billion), in the first nine months of the year, with EBITDAaL (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, after leases) climbing 8.9%, to €1.72 billion ($1.83 billion), over the same period. Sites for operators made up 82% of these revenues. The company confirmed its full-year outlook for 2024 on the strength of these numbers, which were skewed by the sales of its Irish and Austrian units announced during the period covered as part of its "Next Chapter" strategy unveiled in March. As of the end of September, Cellnex had 113,741 operational sites across Europe. (See Eurobites: Cellnex reveals its Next Chapter, sells Irish unit and Eurobites: Cellnex offloads Austrian business.)

South African broadband provider Fibertime is to deploy Nokia's fiber technology to expand the reach of its network to underserved regions of the country. Fibertime hopes to connect the next 1.5 million customers with the help of Nokia's Lightspan FX optical line terminals and Wi-Fi 6 enabled optical network terminals. The deployment will initially cover Cape Town, Johannesburg, Gqeberha, Mangaung and Stellenbosch. Currently, fewer than 85% of South Africans have access to high-speed broadband, says Nokia.

Currency depreciation in Ethiopia was one of the factors behind a 1.2% year-over-year decline in service revenue at Vodacom, to 58.63 billion South African rand ($3.28 billion), during the first six months of the year. EBITDA fell 2.7%, to SAR26.56 billion ($1.48 billion). Customer numbers were up 4.2%, to 49.2 million. In prepared comments, Vodacom Group CEO Shameel Joosub said he was confident that the operator was "poised for a stronger second half performance."

A smart meter divide has emerged in the UK, the BBC reports, with devices in northern England and Scotland – which rely on long-range radio frequencies rather than the cellular technology used further south to send usage data back to energy suppliers – being much more prone to not working properly than their southern counterparts. According to the report, if the cellular connection fails it can be boosted by an aerial, but no such easy fix is available in the regions where the alternative radio technology is used.

Liberty Global has completed the spinoff of Sunrise, its unit serving parts of Switzerland. Liberty Global will continue to own and operate its Liberty Telecom businesses in Belgium, Ireland, Slovakia, the UK and the Netherlands. The spinoff is part of a wider "strategy update" that was announced in February that also included the formation of a new holding company for Telenet and VodafoneZiggo, and a "fixed NetCo" spanning 16 million homes served by the company's hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) and fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) networks. (See Liberty Global to spin off Sunrise.)

 Telefónica's Venezuelan unit has agreed to pay $85.26 million to settle a corruption case alleging the operator bribed officials with cash and a Caribbean vacation, among other goodies, Law360 reports (paywall applies).

Dublin City Council has teamed up with network testing firm Ookla to tackle the digital divide in the Irish capital. The project saw Ookla collect Speedtest network data across the city over two 12-month periods (June 2022-June 2023 and June 2023-June 2024) to help identify connectivity gaps, looking at how digital inclusion in the city could be improved by overlaying crowdsourced network performance data with socio-economic indicators. The resulting white paper can be downloaded here.