Additional expenses of the largest Ukrainian mobile operator Kyivstar to ensure its energy independence in the face of problems with external energy supply exceeded UAH 350 million, including the company replacing over 20,000 batteries at base stations to extend their battery life up to 4-6 hours.

As company president Alexander Komarov said at this week's Business Wisdom Summit, batteries had already been replaced at 2,000 sites (base stations and other facilities) out of 14,000, by May-June there would be up to 5,000, but the company appealed to the supervisory board with a proposal expand this program by another 4,000.

The president of the company noted earlier that the consumption of one base station was 6-7 kWh, new modern lithium-phosphate batteries allow not only to keep the 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 had been using about 10,000 liters of fuel per day on average, and its total expenses had already amounted to about 1 million liters.

According to him, national roaming also helps cope with disconnection problems: on the peak day of November 23, Kyivstar accepted 1 million subscribers of other operators, while 1.3 million Kyivstar subscribers used the networks of competitors. In total, during the operation of national roaming since March 7, 2022, subscribers of other networks spoke in the Kyivstar network for 1.2 billion minutes.

In addition, the company also invested UAH 50 million in uninterruptible power supplies for Home Internet services: more than 10,000 homes were equipped with uninterruptible power supplies, which guarantees them the availability of the Internet, even in cases of new power outages.

Komarov specified that the total investment in the development of telcom services last year amounted to UAH 5.9 billion, and some 659 new base stations were built, which corresponds to the level of 2021.

He recalled that during the war, 18% of the company's base stations were completely destroyed, 20% were damaged, and more than 1,200 km of fiber optic lines were damaged.

According to him, the company now has 24.8 million subscribers, of which 3.3 million are internally displaced persons. Komarov specified that 2.2 million subscribers have gone abroad, of which 1.4 million remain subscribers of the company, including 95% using the "roaming like at home" service provided in 27 countries.

Kyivstar President noted that at the beginning of the war there were 10 million subscribers of the company outside their places of residence.

"Industry and Kyivstar did a very decent job: the network performance is very close to the pre-war period, the energy sector has stabilized, and the network has stabilized," Komarov summed up.