Morocco is the latest country to kick off the process of allocating 4G spectrum and aims to have LTE services live by the end of 2013. The regulator, ANRT, has set a deadline of August 23 this year for bids to be submitted and has appointed an adviser to finalize terms. The licences should be awarded at the turn of the year. The Moroccan market is led by Vivendi’s Maroc Telecom, which has 47% market share, followed by France Telecom affiliate Medi Telecom and Inwi, a joint venture of Zain. A price war is developing as the market reaches 110% penetration.
Pat Gelsinger, who achieved high profile in the mobile world during his stint as Intel’s CTO, has been appointed CEO of virtualization firm VMware, moving from the top job at storage company EMC. Meanwhile, VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz will join EMC as chief strategist, signalling closer ties between the two firms in the enterprise and cloud spaces.
European mobile operators have started building stockpiles of the new ‘nanoSIMs’ amid expectations they will be used in the next generation of the iPhone. The new SIM card design was recently approved by the ETSI standards body, based on a design backed by Apple.
Japanese WiMAX operator UQ Communications has crossed the 3m customer milestone, about five months after reaching 2m users in February.
Dutch operator KPN is considering the sale of thousands of cell towers used by its German subsidiary E-Plus, according to Reuters. Infrastructure funds are the most likely buyers for the assets in a deal that could be worth between €300m and €400m. E-Plus is likely to lease the towers back from the new owner. Last month KPN abandoned plans to sell E-Plus.
Martin Bouygues, CEO of French cellco Bouygues, says that the roaming agreement between new entrant Iliad (which owns Free Mobile) and France Telecom ‘should not be renewed after its expiration’ in 2018. In a letter addressed to members of Parliament, the CEO wrote: ‘The main explanation of the current imbalance of the mobile market is that the new entrant is the first and only operator in France to benefit, thanks to a roaming agreement with Orange, from the possibility of investing only in the profitable aspects of mobile network.’ He also wants to ensure the roaming deal is not extended to LTE in future.
Orange Poland has launched a Rev B upgrade across its entire CDMA2000 1xEV-DO network, increasing peak download speeds to 9.3Mbps. Orange’s CDMA packages are predominantly targeted towards businesses and the network runs in the 450MHz band, covering 85% of Polish territory.
Patent holding company, and serial litigator, Wi-LAN has acquired a portfolio of more than 40 patents and applications from Siemens, all related to telecoms network management and mobile multimedia under the 3GPP and ETSI standards.
There will be a long term shift in satellite backhaul services from legacy SCPC and TDMA systems to High Throughput Satellites (HTS) and O3b, according to a report from NSR. The global satellite backhaul market is expected to reach $2.3bn in 2021, up almost threefold from today’s $800m annual revenue base. The new technologies will reduce opex dramatically and allow for higher penetration levels, and there will also be a move to more affordable picocells at ground level and aboard ships and aircraft.
Apple needs to sell at least 100,000 new iPads in China to cover $60m in trademark settlement fees in the territory, say analysts. The vendor will start selling the iPad HD on July 20 but local observers are not expecting the kind of splash to which Apple is accustomed, because of the late launch date and the ready availability of overseas or grey market stock, often at lower than official pricing. The low-end Wi-Fi model of the new iPad is officially priced about $580 in China, 14% higher than on the grey market.
Malaysia’s Maxis and Redtone International have signed an infrastructure and spectrum sharing deal for LTE, and look to launch services early next year in selected areas of the Klang Valley, with other regions to follow soon after. Maxis said the partnership was formed in response to the Malaysian government’s call for telcos to reduce duplication of network assets, enabling operators to deliver better services. It already has a site sharing deal with U Mobile.
RIM has lost a patent case to Mformation and has been ordered to pay $147.2m in damages for infringing mobile device management software patents. Mformation filed suit in 2008, claiming RIM’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server infringed IPR it had held since the late 1990s. The smaller firm hints it may pursue further suits, noting the court decision does not cover future royalties, or device sales outside the US.
Facebook’s latest mobile acquisition is of bookmarking service Spool, a San Francisco start-up. Although the social giant will not keep the mobile bookmarks offering itself, it wants Spool for its five employees and their expertise in mobile content consumption, an area where it wants to improve as it seeks to drive revenues out of its huge presence on handsets.
Slovenian cellco Si.Mobil has launched the country’s first commercial LTE services in parts of the cities of Ljubljana, Brnik and Bled. It is offering the Huawei E392 USB modem and a data plan called Mobilni, promising data rates of between 30Mbps and 80Mbps, with a theoretical peak of 100Mbps. Last year Telekom Austria subsidiary Si.Mobil conducted a modernization of its network, which offers 3G to over 90% of the population, and it now has many base stations LTE-ready.
Korea’s SK Telecom says it has successfully tested LTE-Advanced and will launch commercial services next year. It ran tests in partnership with Nokia Siemens and Qualcomm. The carrier has 3.4m users, who use an average of 1.7Gbytes per month, and it expects subscribers to more than double to 7m this year.
Verizon Wireless is partnering with on-demand gaming platform Exent to introduce GameTanium, a new subscription service offering unlimited monthly access to more than 100 Android titles. Priced at $5.99 a month per Android device, GameTanium features ad-free smartphone and tablet games including hits like Fruit Ninja, Plants vs. Zombies and World of Goo alongside Exent editorial recommendations and a spotlight on new titles.
Dish Network’s plan to use itrs mobile satellite spectrum for an LTE network could get a final decision from the FCC in September. FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai said at a Congressional oversight hearing that the agency should issue rules on the 2GHz band ‘no later than the end of September’. He added: ‘Over the next 2.5 months, we should roll up our sleeves, hammer out the necessary details, and get this done.’ Dish Network owns 40MHz of spectrum in the 2GHz S-band, also called AWS-4 by the FCC, but needs a waiver to be allowed to operate terrestrial-only services in a satellite spectrum.If dual’mode satellite/terrestrial operation was mandated, it would not be economically viable. A similar LTE-over-MSS plan, by LightSquared, gained a provisional waiver but then fell foul of GPS interference concerns. Dish’s spectrum is further away from GPS than LightSquared’s L-band frequencies, but the FCC is taking a more cautious approach this time.
China Unicom has completed a tender to expand its W-CDMA network by 100,000 base stations, with Huawei and ZTE winning about 60% of the business between them, in a total deal valued at CNY6bn to CNY7bn ($950m to $1.108bn). Unicom intends to improve rural and suburban coverage to around 78% from its current 39%, whilst also strengthening capacity in urban areas.
ZTE has been selected by the newest entrant in the Peruvian wireless market, Vietnam’s Viettel, to build out a national 2G/3G network. The first stage of the roll-out will see the Chinese vendor install more than 2,000 base stations and the network, once completed, will cover all of Peru. ZTE will provide its Uni-RAN solution and management services.
Indian handset manufacturer Karbonn Mobiles is making a second attempt to sell a minority stake in the company to private equity investors after a previous attempt failed to attract interest. The company is looking to raise INR1,000 crore ($180m) from a sale of 15-20% of the company. The money would mainly be invested in a new handset factory in Chennai and an R&D facility in South Korea. Karbonn has about 5% share in its homeland.
Nokia has added three further patents to its lawsuit against RIM, originally filed with the Munich Regional Court in May, according to Foss Patents. The additional patents concern technology for ‘storing and transferring multimedia tags’, ‘updating the software of a mobile terminal using the air interface’, and ‘transferring resource information.’ Nokia has also added the first patent to its complaint against HTC in Mannheim. Nokia is suing the BlackBerry maker over seven patents in three Germany cities – two in Dusseldorf, two in Mannheim and three in Munich. It also has actions against HTC and Viewsonic in several German courts and the US ITC.
The depth of Nokia’s problems in former strongholds is highlighted by its latest reorganization, which includes job cuts in China. This is a market where the Finnish vendor has been dominant, and where there is significant growth potential for mobile players. But its most recent quarters have suffered from slowdown in China, and now Nokia is to merge its four sales regions for the country into two. That will involve an unspecified number of job losses, part of a total reduction of 10,000 posts worldwide by the end of next year. Chinese sales dropped by 18% last year compared to 2010, to $6.7bn ‘ by contrast, the 2010 figure had been 23% up on 2009. The western and eastern sales divisions in China, based in Chengdu and Shanghai, will now be merged into the northern and southern units, centered on Guangzhou and Beijing. Local reports said 300 to 500 Chinese employees would be laid off, mainly in sales and marketing.