At a glance: resistance and resilience while running a business and evolving infrastructure
Mobile operators are the biggest investors in the economy of Ukraine. During last five years they have invested more than 70 billion UAH (€1.769 billion) in developing new technologies.
As an industry, it has restored connectivity to thousands of settlements in Ukraine, repaired and restored work of over 1,200 base stations and built over 1,500 new base stations, fixed 3,200km of fibre connectivity, helped tackle more than 2,000 cyberattacks, met the challenge of power blackouts by powering 5,600 sites with generators which require constant maintenance.
Ukrainian operators have joined forces for national roaming and kept the country connected throughout the past 12 months in collaboration with the vendor community. With the collaboration of our European operator partners, the operators jointly kept 4.2 million Ukrainians connected to their homeland and loved ones in Ukraine. Also, during 2022, mobile operators invested over UAH 8 billion in developing their networks.
Kyivstar’s running repairs
- Kept the network running inside Ukraine (see *new investments further down):
- Kyivstar’s technical team has performed 144,000 emergency and restoration works caused by different incidents, that is twice the amount in the previous peaceful year. The vast majority of the emergency work fell in the last quarter of 2022 when Russia started rocket attacks on energy infrastructure. The number of emergency and repaired works performed October to December 2022 reached almost 90,000.
- 600 damaged sites have been reconstructed and repaired – about 5% of the total pre-war site count – and 815 settlements have been reconnected to Kyivstar’s network during the war so far – picture shows Kherson in November 2022. Connectivity has been provided to 1,450 shelters and 832 modular houses for displaced people.
Cyber warfare
- Since the beginning of the war, Kyivstar has prevented: 450 DDoS attacks on its network; and more than 13,000 phishing attacks
- Set up than 1,700 VPN connections for employees to the company’s corporate network from different parts of the world.
- In 2022, the intensity of phishing attacks rose by 300%, DDoS attacks by over 200% and malware attacks by up to 400%. Cyberattacks have become longer and stronger – one DDoS attack successfully repelled by Kyivstar lasted 29 hours
Outside partnerships
- Most notably European operators have helped keep Ukrainian refugees connected to home with live-like-home offers: 2,699,000 Kyivstar subscribers are roaming, 1,458,000 are active users of roaming services. Since March 2022, Kyivstar has been providing Roam like at Home service in 27 European countries, for 1 million subscribers
- Partnered government and other operators to establish early warning systems based on Cell Broadcast solution (this system is being testing until March 2023), and partnered with government organisations to send out SMS communication about matters of public concern
- Kyivstar channels have sent out 504 million SMSs emergency warnings and threat notifications to governmental institutions, SBU and DSNS)
- Recently joined a campaign run by Thompson Reuters warning against human trafficking
Keeping the power on
- Tackled the challenge of energy resilience as 30% of total Kyivstar site repairs in 2022 were caused by the attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, with up to 20% of base stations affected by power outages in late October.
- Kyivstar strengthened its network by building energy redundancy, providing four energy sources for each core network operation
- When blackouts occur, base stations run on back-up batteries which were designed to last up to 2 hours in peace time, but now the company has begun the updating its batteries to those that can run for up 7 hours
- 20,000 new batteries have already been installed across Ukraine, powering 1500 sites
- Kyivstar now has 1,340 diesel and fuel generators having increased the number of generators by 70% over 2021
New and sustainable
- Kyivstar hasn’t shied away from investing in a sustainable future for disaster-stricken communities, not only with connectivity but also with digital services
- Around 700 4G new base station have been built across the country and 7,000 upgraded to the latest 4G technology, so serving 1 million more 4G subscribers a month than a year previously
- Investment in fixed internet infrastructure continues
- Kyivstar TV serves 1.1 million Ukrainians with local content on a monthly active basis, which is a 51% increase, year on year
- 88,000 people have watched 50,000 hours of educational content on Kyivstar TV since the war began
- The operator has invested in Helsi, Ukraine’s leading digital health platform that enables access to 1,600 public and private medical institutions including 49,000 doctors; it has enabled 290,000 medical consultations online over the course of the year.
- Total number of registered users of Helsi are 23 million, with 4 million people using the service via the mobile app.
Charity and support
- 300 million UAH provided for the presidential Program United 24 for the renewal of Ukrainian digital infrastructure
- 130 million UAH donation to the Charitable Funds for humanitarian purposes and support of elderly people, refugees, hospitals
- 78 million UAH have been collected for humanitarian purposes from charitable events organised by Kyivstar
- The company maintains 4,000 working premises
- 330 new employees were recruited in 2022
- 138 employees joined the armed forces
- 1,200 employees are engaged in voluntary work and corporate charitable projects
- 410 million UAH financial support of employees.