Eurobites: KKR offers euro 1.8B for stake in TIM’s ‘last mile’ – report | Light Reading

30 Jul Eurobites: KKR offers euro 1.8B for stake in TIM’s ‘last mile’ – report | Light Reading

Also in today’s EMEA regional roundup: TIM teams up on tech VC fund; UKCloud unveils new services; Ericsson scores in Indonesia.

A US investment firm, KKR, has offered 1.8 billion (US$2.1 billion) for a 38% stake in Telecom Italia’s “last-mile grid,” according to a Reuters report citing two unidentified sources. The report suggests that the deal could be the prelude to a merger of Telecom Italia’s last-mile assets with those of Open Fiber, the wholesale broadband provider owned by Enel and state lender CDP. The Italian government has for some time been trying to set up a deal between Telecom Italia and Open Fiber to smooth the way to a broader and faster fiber rollout, but to date talks have run into the sand. (See Eurobites: Italy considers independent ‘broadband champion’ and Telecom Italia crumbles like a Roman ruin.)

In other Telecom Italia news: The operator’s venture capital arm, TIM Ventures, has signed an agreement with United Ventures, an independent venture capital manager specializing in investments in digital technologies, to launch a new fund to support investments in “late stage” tech startups in Italy and elsewhere. The fund, UV T-Growth, will focus on areas such as cloud services, the Internet of Things, edge computing, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, cybersecurity applications and on-the-move payment systems.

UKCloud, the multicloud services provider that specializes in the public sector, has released an expanded range of managed services that includes “Managed Monitoring as a Service” (service assurance for workloads in the cloud), “Managed VM Recovery Point” (disaster recovery for virtual machines) and “Patching as a Service (routine OS patch management on UKCloud’s multicloud platform).

Ericsson has landed a core network gig in East Indonesia with XL Axiata as the operator prepares for a 5G-inspired data surge. According to the June 2019 edition of the Ericsson Mobility Report, average data usage per smartphone is set to increase tenfold on 5G devices in Indonesia.

The UK’s streaming video on-demand (SVoD) market is still growing, but nowhere near as fast it was in the peak-lockdown weeks following the launch of the Disney+ service. Figures from Kantar, cited by Broadband TV News, show that in the second quarter 826,000 new SVoD subscribers signed up, compared to a surge of around 6 million in the three months to April. Amazon Prime is now leading the UK subscriber-growth race, with a 45.1% share of all new SVoD subscribers in the three months ending June 2020.

Telefnica UK (O2) has launched what it’s calling a “digital guru service,” allowing customers beset by telecom tech issues to talk, on a one-to-one basis, to a (hopefully) helpful human being, albeit online. O2 says the move is in response to a poll that showed 59% of people are unsure about visiting or unable to visit their local high street, where O2 and its rivals have their stores. The scheme is initially being run as a pilot.

Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading