Eurobites: Slim fattens up his BT stake

Carlos Slim's Control Empresarial de Capitales investment vehicle has upped its stake in BT from 3.16% to 4.30%. Slim and his family control América Móvil, which has its headquarters in Mexico City but operates through its Claro subsidiaries in several countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. BT isn't Slim's only European interest, however; last year América Móvil increased its overall stake in Telekom Austria by 5.55%, to 56.55%, and it also owns a 16.08% stake in Dutch operator KPN. Last month India's Bharti Enterprises said it plans to acquire the 24.5% stake in BT currently held by Altice founder Patrick Drahi.

Lise Fuhr is stepping down as director general of ETNO after nine years at the helm of the European telcos' lobby group. But she's not leaving until the fall, when she becomes CEO of GÉANT, the educational research network. A new leader will be announced later this month, said ETNO.

Nokia is teaming up with Ruckus Networks on campus connectivity, offering a joint product that combines Nokia's fiber-based optical LAN with Ruckus Networks' enterprise Wi-Fi and switching solutions. The integrated product can be deployed by telcos, cable companies and LAN service providers, says Nokia.

Arcep, the French communications regulator, is hoping to provide more accurate mapping of 4G mobile Internet coverage. At the moment, its coverage maps for mobile Internet are binary in nature, designating areas as either "covered" or " not covered." Under its new approach, there will be four levels of coverage indicated: no coverage; limited coverage, good coverage; and very good coverage.

The UK government is informally consulting with broadband network operators over what obstacles they are facing when they try to roll out fiber-based services to apartment blocks. As the Financial Times reports (paywall applies), a request for information sent out to a provider by the government in August sought to discover where potential barriers to deployment were "most pronounced" and how they could be "mitigated or removed." (See Eurobites: Openreach lobbies Labour Party on wayleaves – report.)

Eutelsat, the France-based satellite operator, has agreed a multi-year deal with Japan's SoftBank, under the terms of which SoftBank will be able to integrate Eutelsat's low Earth orbit connectivity services into its product offer to corporations and government entities. It will directly interconnect with SoftBank's closed network service, SmartVPN, for additional security communications.

French cybersecurity firm Custocy has embedded Enea's deep packet inspection and intrusion detection software in its AI-powered network detection and response (NDR) platform. According to the Swedish vendor, this will enable Custocy to improve the accuracy and performance of its platform, which uses AI to detect immediate threats as well as patterns of persistent attacks while reducing the number of false alarms.

The brick is back! New research from Vodafone shows that 67% of UK parents would prefer their child's first device to be a basic feature phone without apps. Surprisingly, more than a third of parents surveyed were unaware that feature phones were a thing – so it appears there's an untapped market out there…