Additional expenses of the largest Ukrainian mobile operator Kyivstar on ensuring its energy independence amid the problems with external energy supply exceeded UAH 350 mln and the company has replaced more than 20 thousand batteries at base stations to extend their autonomous operation up to four to six hours.
Alexander Komarov, the President of the Company, informed at Business Wisdom Summit held this week that the batteries have been already replaced at 2 ths sites (base stations and other facilities) out of 14 ths and by May-June it will be up to 5 ths but the company goes to the Board of Directors with the proposal to expand this program by 4 ths more.
Earlier the president of the company noted that consumption of one base station is 6-7 kWh. New modern lithium-phosphate batteries allow not only to keep voltage longer but also to recharge faster.
He added that Kyivstar also installed 1,790 generators, of which 700 were provided by businesses on crowdfunding terms. Their total capacity reached 40 MW.
Komarov specified that since November the company uses on average about 10 thousand liters of fuel per day, and the total consumption has already made about 1 million liters.
According to him, to cope with the problems of outages also helps national roaming: in the peak day on November 23 Kyivstar took 1 million subscribers of other operators, while 1,3 million subscribers of Kyivstar used networks of competitors. In total, during the operation of national roaming since March 7, 2022 subscribers of other networks spoke in Kyivstar network 1.2 billion minutes.
In addition, the company also invested UAH 50 million in uninterruptible power supplies for “Home Internet” services: more than 10 thousand homes were equipped with uninterruptible power supplies, which guarantees them the availability of the Internet, even in cases of new blackouts.
Komarov specified that the total investment in the development of telcom-services in the past year amounted to 5.9 billion UAH, 659 new base stations were built, which corresponds to the level of 2021.
He reminded that during the war 18% of base stations of the company were completely destroyed, 20% were damaged and more than 1200 km of fiber-optic lines were damaged as well.
According to him, the company now has 24.8 million subscribers, of which 3.3 million are internally displaced. Komarov specified that 2.2 million subscribers went abroad, 1.4 million of them remained the company’s subscribers, including 95 % that use the service “roaming as home”, provided in 27 countries.
The president of “Kyivstar” noted that at the beginning of the war there were 10 million subscribers of the company outside their places of residence.
“The industry and Kyivstar have done very decently: the network indicators are very close to the pre-war period, the energy industry has stabilized, and the network has stabilized,” Komarov summarized.
