Deutsche Telekom and AT&T kick started this week with news the US carrier will buy T-Mobile USA for $39 billion (€27.5 billion), while initial estimates revealed the Japanese earthquake knocked out a quarter of the world’s wafer supplies.
The AT&T deal provides a welcome out for Deutsche Telekom from its struggling US mobile business, but allows the German incumbent to maintain a presence in the country through an 8% stake in AT&T.
Analysts said the acquisition dramatically alters the US mobile landscape, but predicted AT&T will need to make sweeping concessions to competition regulators to gain clearance for the deal.
Component manufacturers in Japan took stock of the damage to their production lines following an earthquake and tsunami a fortnight ago. IHS iSuppli estimated up to 25% of the world’s wafer production is impacted, but said vendor’s PCB inventories would likely last until plants re-open.
UK regulator Ofcom proposed minimum and maximum allocation arrangements for 4G licenses, as part of plans for an auction of spectrum in the 800MHz and 2.6GHz frequencies. The regulator believes the proposals will offer a level playing field for all carriers in the market.
India’s government revealed it is considering financial aid packages for local telecoms equipment makers to boost their competitiveness. The aid would follow similar lines to that offered by China to its domestic manufacturers.
The majority of Indian chief information officers rate cloud computing as their main priority for 2011, a Gartner study showed.
PCCW navigated through a fiercely competitive Hong Kong market to grow profits 28% to HK$1.93 billion (€174 million). Rival Hutchison Telecom Hong Kong Holdings generated profit of HK$755 million, a 61% increase on 2009.
Search giant Google stoked the flames in an increasingly tempestuous relationship with China, accusing the country of orchestrating an attack on its Gmail service that slowed some services and prevented access to others entirely.
Strong growth in China’s broadband subscriber numbers is powering Asia Pacific to a leading position in the global market, the Broadband Forum announced. The region is set to knock Europe off the top spot in broadband and IPTV subscriber numbers during 2011.
European fiber operator Interoute revealed carriers in the region are gearing up for IPv6 with more capex allocated to the new technology due to IPv4 address exhaustion.
Vodafone NZ, Kordia, Orcon and Maxnet are among 13 companies to express an interest in accessing New Zealand’s UFB dark fiber network as retail service providers.
And security experts accused Iran of masterminding an attack on the Web’s SSL security layer that would have allowed hackers to impersonate leading firms including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Skype and Mozilla.