Eurobites: Salt adds 42K postpaid subs in Q2

Swiss operator Salt achieved a record 41,800 net adds in postpaid mobile subscribers in the second quarter across its residential and business services, driving operating revenue up 5.2% year-over-year, to 240.2 million Swiss francs (US$284.6 million), while EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) inched up 0.7% to reach CHF143.7 million ($170.2 million). By the end of Q2, Salt served 1,674,700 postpaid mobile subscribers, while its Salt Home customer base (incorporating Internet, TV and fixed telephony) was approaching 250,000.

France's Iliad is laying claim to be Europe's fifth-largest operator, with 50 million subscribers – 40 million in mobile and the rest fixed-line – across France, Poland and Italy after a first half of the year which saw its revenues climb 10.3%, to €4.90 billion ($5.43 billion). In February, Iliad agreed to take a 19.8% stake in Sweden's Tele2 for 13 billion Swedish kronor ($1.26 billion). On the back of these H1 results, Iliad confirmed its full-year 2024 target of achieving €10 billion ($11.09 billion) in revenues.

Deutsche Telekom has set up a 5G standalone private network for the Merseburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany after a seven-year project costing around €1 million ($1.1 million). The new network will enable the university to explore the potential of 5G applications, such as autonomous driving, logistics applications and the healthcare sector. Ericsson has supplied the bulk of the network equipment.

Openreach, the semi-autonomous network access arm of UK operator BT, is bringing full-fiber broadband to more than 4,500 homes let out by Wolverhampton Homes, an arm's length organization that is responsible for managing the majority of local authority owned homes across the city of Wolverhampton.

UK SD-WAN specialist Highlight has introduced a Service Observability Platform which, the company says, addresses the challenges thrown up by vendor-specific network management dashboards by aggregating network metrics directly from diverse SD-WAN vendor dashboards via APIs, alongside all supporting network infrastructure, which the platform then integrates into a unified, multi-tenant portal.