RIM also delivered a solution to allow monitoring of its messenger and personal email service for India , but reiterated claims it is currently unable to provide access to its highly-encrypted corporate emails.
In operator news for the week, Chunghwa Telecom reported a 1.6% increase in quarterly profit after a reduction in taxes and higher revenue from its internet services, while Thailand’s TOT said it expects to post a loss exceeding 1 billion baht ($32.8 million) for 2010 due to high expenses and the aftermath of the country’s worst floods in years, and Nepalese mobile operator United Telecom Limited (UTL) was told it may lose its license for alleged failure to pay royalties.
On the 4G front, SK Telecom gave a timetable on its LTE rollout, with plans to launch LTE services in Seoul in Q3, while Wimax officials promised that the next generation of the technology, Wimax2 (802.16m), will be commercialized this year.
In the vendor sector, ZTE touted its chops on LTE patents, Qualcomm promised 2011 will be the year of the Snapdragon for tablet PC makers, and HTC reported that its Q4 net profit almost trebled year-on-year on strong growth in smartphone sales.
And finally, it was the week in which we learned that North Korea has the highest adoption rate of 3G in the world. Almost all of North Korea’s mobile subscribers use monopoly 3G operator, Koryolink, according to TeleGeography.
Of course, it helps to remember that the TeleGeography figures represent 3G adoption by existing mobile users, that Koryolink has a little over 301,000 subscribers in a country of 24 million people, and that members of the public have been barred from subscribing to Sun Net, the country’s sole 2G network, since 2004.