Ukraine's stressed mobile providers prepare for more and longer power cuts
Operators snap up generators and batteries to maintain coverage
President orders review of mobile providers' activities
Operators advise clients to limit mobile usage during blackouts
By Olena Harmash
KYIV, July 26 (Reuters) -When Russia attacks Ukraine's energy system, it not only knocks out electricity and running water - but also, often, phone signals.
Moscow's renewed assault on power grids and transmission lines in the last three months has knocked out about half Ukraine's available generation capacity, causing daily blackouts of up to 12 hours in major cities including the capital Kyiv. Once winter boosts energy use, the situation will only get worse.
As the big mobile operators struggle to keep their base stations running, official pressure is growing; President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has ordered a review of their activities and the regulator says that, by February, they must be able to cover an outage of up to 10 hours - rather than four, as now.
All are rushing to buy more generators and batteries for Ukraine's tens of thousands of stations but say that the longer the blackout, the more complicated the job of maintaining full coverage.
Analysts say the review may reflect Zelenskiy's desire to show that he understands the critical need for good communication during challenging times, rather than any big failings on the operators' part. But the review may also call for further investments.
Early in the war, the mobile providers set up national roaming to switch calls to another operator if the subscriber's one was unavailable.
Now, despite the investments in resilience, they are advising clients to limit usage and stick to simple communications like text messages to save bandwidth when others may have more pressing needs.
"Maybe if you avoid watching TikTok during the blackout, your neighbours will be able to call an ambulance in a critical situation," Vodafone, one of three major mobile providers contacted by Reuters, said in a message to users.
BATTERIES AND GENERATORS HELP KEEP COMMUNICATIONS GOING
The sector has already had to deal with a major cyber attack as well as damage to its equipment during the war with Russia, now nearly 30 months old.
Three companies accounting for the majority of users - Vodafone, Kyivstar and Lifecell - have planned to invest 2.7 billion hryvnias ($66 million) to mitigate the impact of Russian drone and missile strikes on the power sector.
They have already installed tens of thousands of new accumulators and bought hundreds of generators to boost their networks' resilience.
Kostyantyn Sotnikov, who heads network maintenance at Lifecell, said more than half its base stations across Ukraine had been fitted with new lithium batteries since 2022, and hundreds were being connected to generators.
Two other operators - Kyivstar and Vodafone - said they had made similar improvements.
Kyivstar is the largest Ukrainian operator with about 24 million subscribers, and is owned by Amsterdam-listed Veon VON.AS.
After spending over a billion hryvnias on network resilience, it says it has more than 2,300 generators and plans to buy another 848 soon.
Vodafone Ukraine, the second biggest operator with about 16 million clients, said it planned to channel 438 million hryvnias into energy equipment.
Reporting by Olena Harmash; Editing by Kevin Liffey
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