This week the telecom industry went on a continuous loop as Nokia made more cuts, India again delayed its 3G auction and more Nortel parts were snapped up.
Ciena bid $769 million to win Nortel’s Ethernet and optical assets. Ericsson added Nortel’s North American GSM business to its collection.
Nokia twice announced job cuts, unloading hundreds of R&D staff in Europe and Japan, and hooked up with Infineon for LTE product development.
India’s 3G auction faces yet another delay as telecom and defense officials work to make spectrum available, while Indian cellcos went through another bout of price-cutting.
Ericsson and NEC withdrew their complaints to the EC over Qualcomm’s licensing practices.
The first malicious iPhone worm appeared in the wild, while the device will go on sale at UK supermarket Tesco by Christmas.
Tata Communications signed up five Middle East telcos for a future Gulf cable.
NTT DoCoMo announced plans for a nationwide network of environmental sensors to measure CO2, pollen and other items.
CSL began LTE field trials in Hong Kong. SmarTone will deploy HSPA+ in Macau. Ofta will sell more spectrum for mobile data.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp considers removing its news content from Google and making it exclusively available through Microsoft’s Bing.
In one year, Android has won 11% of smartphone web traffic.
Wikileaks issued transcripts of 500,000 pager messages sent in New York on 9/11.
Microsoft appointed a new CFO. Inmarsat acquired Segovia to help expand its US military and government business.
France Telecom merged its Swiss unit, Orange, with TDC’s Sunrise to create a bigger competitor against Swisscom.
The Australian government failed in its goal to get its bill to split Telstra passed by Christmas, and will try again in February.
A Soros fund and other investors stumped up $350 million for a pan-African mobile towers venture.
Google apologized over an offensive photo of Michelle Obama that appears prominently in the image search results for the US First Lady, but said it would not remove it from its index.
Italian prosecutors called for prison sentences for Google executives over the posting on YouTube of a video of youths bullying a disabled boy.
A couple crashed a White House state dinner in honor of the Indian prime minister and later posted about it on Facebook.
And Long Island police arrested a singer for not using Twitter to disperse an unruly crowd.