Eurobites: Telia takes a punt on gambling company boss as new CEO

Nordic operator Telia has found a replacement for departing CEO Allison Kirkby, who is jumping ship to replace Philip Jansen as the boss of BT and returning to her native UK. Wielding the new broom at Telia is Patrik Hofbauer, currently the top man at a Swedish online gambling company but previously CEO at rival Telenor. Hofbauer will get his feet under Kirkby's old desk in February.

Nokia and Elisa claim to have completed the industry's first trial of cloud RAN powered by so-called "inline acceleration" technology, a technique which takes all the network Layer 1 functions off the server CPU and puts them on a separate chip. The trial took place at Elisa's headquarters in Finland and used its commercial 5G standalone RAN and 5G core. Elisa sees its future in network "cloudification" and envisages the first commercial deployments based on cloud RAN technology to take place over the next few years in Finland. (See Nokia tells Ericsson to put up or shut up on cloud RAN.)

In what could be the conclusion to a very long-running and convoluted saga, US investment firm KKR is on the verge of submitting a binding bid for Telecom Italia's landline grid ahead of Sunday's deadline, according to a Reuters report citing unidentified insiders. The final bid is expected to be in the region of €23 billion (US$24.2 billion), says the report. (See TIM starts formal talks with KKR, Eurobites: TIM/KKR deal off – for now and TIM starts exclusive talks with KKR over fixed assets.)

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has had a change of heart and approved Microsoft's takeover of gaming powerhouse Activision Blizzard after Microsoft bowed to the watchdog's demands and agreed to allow Ubisoft to buy Activision's cloud gaming rights. The CMA believes that this adjustment to the deal will stop Microsoft from "locking up competition" in cloud gaming, keeping prices down in the process. But Sarah Cardell, chief executive of the CMA, was keen to let people know that the watchdog hadn't been impressed by Microsoft's behavior over the past few months, saying in a statement: "…the tactics employed by Microsoft are no way to engage with the CMA. Microsoft had the chance to restructure during our initial investigation but instead continued to insist on a package of measures that we told them simply wouldn't work. Dragging out proceedings in this way only wastes time and money." Microsoft, however, probably won't lost too much sleep over this knuckle-rapping.

Middle East operator Zain has signed an agreement with Huawei to focus on deploying energy-efficient hardware and software to support the evolution of Zain into a more "sustainable" company. Last year, says Zain, Huawei helped it reduce the electricity consumption of its mobile networks by 28%.

It's official: Gen Z is scared of answering the phone. New research from pay-TV provider (and MVNO) Sky reveals that 20% of those surveyed aged 18-24 find it "weird" to receive a phone call of ye olde voice variety. Around one in five of them would only initiate a voice call "in an emergency" and, worse still, more than half of them admit to blanking calls from their parents. What a world we live in today.