Eurobites: French radiation police remove iPhone 12 from sale

The Agence Nationale des Fréquences (ANFR), France's national spectrum agency, has demanded that Apple immediately withdraws its iPhone 12 from the French market, as the agency's measures show the phone's specific absorption rate – a measure of the rate at which energy is absorbed by a human when exposed to a radio frequency's electromagnetic field – exceeds limits set by EU regulations. The ANFR said that it would send out agents to Apple stores to check that the iPhone 12 was no longer on sale. As Reuters reports, Apple responded that the phone had been certified by numerous international bodies as complying with global radiation standards.

Deutsche Telekom has teamed up with Microsoft to launch a new private 5G network offering, Campus Network Smart, which Telekom describes as a scalable, cloud-based, "pay-as-you-grow" affair, at a price that it claims could introduce the campus network concept to whole new markets. The product is built on Microsoft Azure private multi-access edge compute (MEC), which includes the new Azure Private 5G Core service deployed on Azure Stack Edge. Campus Network Smart was tested with Microsoft in a lab environment in Bonn, Germany, last year, and the two companies then conducted a field trial with an unnamed German pharmaceutical company, beginning in February this year.

VEON has finalized the sale of its Russian operations to members of the PJSC Vimpelcom management team. If all goes to plan, VEON will be able to shut up shop and exit Russia completely by October 13, with no debt or assets left in the country. The operator began its process of de-Russification as soon as it could following Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

BT's Digital Voice rollout – which sees the operator moving from analogue to digital landlines – is moving to Northern Ireland after trundling into life in the East Midlands region in July and reaching Yorkshire and the Humber in August. Customers in Northern Ireland will be contacted at least four weeks in advance of the switch to ensure, BT says, they are ready to move to the new Internet-based setup. Some customers, notably those who use a healthcare pendant, only use landlines, have no mobile signal or have disclosed any additional needs, will be exempt from the switch. Last year BT decided to temporarily pause its rollout of Digital Voice.

A1 Austria has set out the timetable for the spin-off of its towers business, with the public listing of newly created entity EuroTeleSites AG scheduled for September 22. The move follows a European trend of debt-burdened telcos offloading mobile infrastructure.