This week Skype and Australia\'s NBN continued to make headlines, with Skype heading for a possible IPO and Telstra considering divestment measures to get in on the NBN project - and we also learned that the world\'s biggest wireless operators are actually vendors.
eBay said it planned to spin off Skype in the first half of next year, just days after Skype\'s founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, told the New York Times that they were interested in buying the company back from eBay.
Telstra - still reeling from the Australian government\'s decision to roll out the national broadband network (NBN) project without it - says it might be willing to voluntarily separate its wholesale and retail divisions and sell some of its existing fiber assets to the new network in exchange for a minority stake in the government-owned NGN operating company.
Standard & Poor\'s was not impressed, downgrading Telstra\'s credit rating outlook to negative from stable as the NBN project calls Telstra\'s future into question.
Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks were revealed to be the world\'s largest wireless operators, thanks to the growth of their respective network management outsourcing businesses. The two equipment vendors operate networks covering a combined 355 million customers worldwide.
As analysts speculate on who might be next to make Sun Microsystems an offer after IBM failed to cut a deal, Cisco Systems chief John Chambers has ruled his own company out, saying if Cisco were interested in Sun he would have already made an offer.
In other buyout news, Tech Mahindra won the bidding for scandal-rocked Satyam, with an offer valuing the company at $1.2 billion, which works out to $1.13 per share.
Maxis and Visa launch the world\'s first commercial NFC-based contactless mobile payments service - albeit with just a single handset. But it works with both Visa payWave and the local Touch\'n\'Go payment system for transportation, toll booths and car parks.
In South Korea, SK Telecom said it will spend 3 trillion won ($2.25 billion) on the development of next-generation technologies and services by 2014, including LTE, cloud computing.