It was also the week in which Telenor said it was seeking damages from the Indian government following the cancellation of 2G licenses held by Indian joint venture Uninor.
While Telenor said it hasn’t specified a target amount, the Times of India reported that reported the carrier is seeking $14 billion in damages and threatened to take the government to international arbitration. Telenor is the second company to seek compensation for cancelled licenses – Russia's Sistema invoked the provisions of a treaty between India and Russia last month to recover some of the investment sunk into its own 2G joint venture, Sistema Shyam.
One company that isn’t bailing from an Indian JV this week is NTT DoCoMo, which is reportedly considering increasing its 26% stake in Tata Teleservices using a call option. However, India's Financial Express reports that Tata Teleservices is said to be considering mounting an offer to buy back DoCoMo's stake in the company.
Meanwhile, India’s telecoms-related legal woes aren’t over yet – a parliamentary panel reportedly took the Department of Telecom to task this week, claiming that there are now around 500 illegal telecom networks operating in various parts of the country, and that the DoT has taken a cavalier attitude to the situation.
In other news this week, Nokia unveiled its first Windows Phone smartphone tailored for the Chinese market, in collaboration with China Telecom: the CDMA Lumia 800C, which will hit the shelves next month for 3,599 Yuan ($570) contract free.
In cloud news for the week, Macau telco CTM said it plans to launch the city’s first public cloud services (offering IaaS and cloud-based unified communications service built on Cisco's CloudVerse framework) next month; China Telecom said its internet data center revenues jumped 34.8% year-on-year in 2011, thanks to the strong growth of its cloud services; and Gartner predicted that global SaaS sales will hit $14.5 billion this year, up almost 18% year-on-yea, fueled by demand from horizontal applications with common processes, virtual workforces, and Web 2.0 activities.