Orange Slovakia has appointed Mariusz Gatza as its new CEO, replacing Federico Colom. Mariusz has been with Orange for more than 20 years, most recently in the hotseat at Orange Moldova.

BT has made Marc Overton managing director of its pretentiously named "Division X" unit, which has been set up, says BT in a statement, to "scale up and commercialise the development of unique customer solutions incorporating components such as 5G Private Networks, IoT, and Edge Computing, amongst others." Overton was previously at Sienna Wireless, a provider of IoT and enterprise networking products. In his spare time Overton is a British Army reservist, and is due to take over as the Assistant Chief of Defence Staff (Reserves and Cadets) later this year. Which sounds like a big job in itself…

Vodafone UK says its enhanced security measures, including a new SMS firewall, helped reduce average volumes of scam texts by 76% in December 2021, compared to May 2021, with more than 45 million phishing messages blocked since the end of August 2021.

Radware, the Israeli cybersecurity outfit, has hired Guy Avidan as its new CFO. He joins Radware from Kornit, where he steered the company to its initial public offering on the Nasdaq exchange.

UK altnet CityFibre has struck a deal with Swindon Borough Council, which will allow more than 10,000 council-managed homes to be connected to the town's new fiber network. CityFibre is investing £40 million (US$55 million) in its Swindon network, and to date service providers TalkTalk, Fibrehop, Zen, Giganet and Vodafone are all using it to offer broadband to residents.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading