This week the Australian government told Telstra to separate or separated, while Taiwan Mobile became the island’s biggest cable guy.
Australia’s communications minister Stephen Conroy showed off new legislation that would force Telstra to split its retail and wholesale businesses if it did not do so voluntarily. Telstra said it was disappointed.
The New Zealand government delivered a similar warning, telling Telecom NZ it would have to separate if it wanted to be a part of its next-gen broadband project.
After a $1 billion share swap with private equity group Carlyle, Taiwan Mobile merged with cable firm kbro to become the island’s biggest pay TV operator.
NTT DoCoMo exited struggling Malaysian cellco U Mobile for the same price it had paid two years ago.
Millicom rejected an offer for its Sri Lankan operator, Celltel, but sold its Laos business to Vimpelcom.
Huawei and Alcatel-Lucent look set to pick up some next-gen broadband contracts from StarHub’s new offshoot Nucleus Connect. Huawei collected $422 million in GSM deals from Hutchison CP Telecom in Indonesia.
Hutchison Hong Kong signed Nokia Siemens to a five-year deal to upgrade to HSPA+. Ericsson won MetroPCS’s LTE business.
Verizon boss Ivan Seidenberg said his business was about video over fiber, not voice over copper.
With the deadline for merger agreement just two weeks away, South African politicians spoke out against Bharti’s proposed integration with MTN. Indian cellco Aircel signed a $400 million deal to share its towers with Datacom.
The US government opened its own App Store to provide cloud computing and apps to public agencies. China Mobile’s new app store received poor early reviews.
Richard Li finally called off the legal pursuit of his rejected PCCW privatization scheme. Skype’s founders took eBay to court, claiming the auction house and Skype’s new investors have broken patent laws over its core VoIP technology.
Facebook said it had gone free cashflow positive and had added 100 million members in the last six months.
IBM told its 360,000-strong workforce to stop using Microsoft Office and switch to the Open Office-based Symphony.
Several US states and the federal government filed complaints about Google’s deal with authors and publishers.
Bing grabbed 10% of the search market.
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And the New York Times – and its readers – were victims of scammers who placed malware in an online ad.