www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Telstra shareholders have been requested by Telstra’s second-largest shareholder, fund manager Australian Foundation Investment (state-backed NBN would be permitted to offer retail services) not to sell the firm’s fixed-line assets to the government at a bargain basement price. It has been felt that Telstra is entitled to get appropriate value for its assets, including its customer traffic and the company can expect a   “fair outcome” by the government.

Telstra’s copper network is eyed by the Federal Government as part of its controversial next-generation fiber network project, costing A$43 billion ($39.26b). According to the government, it will force Telstra to sell its 50% stake in pay TV operator Foxtel and forbid it from bidding for LTE spectrum if it fails to ink a fixed-line sale deal with NBN Co.

AFI managing director Ross Barker, on the other hand warned that there was a risk that the state-owned NBN could become a government-legislated monopoly. State-backed NBN would be permitted to offer retail services under the draft bill.

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www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Telekom Austria has contracted French equipment vendor Alcatel-Lucent (Alca-Lu) for the deployment of its triple-play service delivery architecture. This will bring smaller communities the same triple-play services today provided to customers in larger metropolitan areas.

Telekom Austria will also be provided with the bandwidth, scale and service awareness required to support the growing market for more personalized broadband services such as ‘aon TV’. ‘aon TV’ is the service provider’s IPTV offering.

According to Walter Goldenits, CTO at Telekom Austria, the rollout of the second mile ethernet aggregation network with Alca-Lu service routers enables us to confidently and economically offer converged data, voice and video applications throughout the whole country, to the furthest reaches of the network, over a single and homogeneous platform.

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www.WirelessFederation.com/news: For delivering speeds of 100Mbps in the city of central Stockholm, the mobile broadband base stations have been upgraded by Swedish mobile operator Telia.  Upgradation process of the rest of its LTE base stations will begin this spring.

The upgradation will help the customers to access the web with practical speeds of up to 80 Mbps. Currently, central parts of Stockholm, as well as Stockholm’s districts Alvsjo, Kista and Hammarby Sjostad is covered by Telia’s LTE network. Launch of LTE in 25 locations in Sweden are also on Telia’s cards.

In the third quarter, LTE network will be expanded to Lund, Vasteras, Malma, Gothenburg, Uppsala and Linkoping. LTE network will be expanded to Lund, Vasteras, Malma, Gothenburg, Uppsala and Linkoping while other cities will be covered by the network by the end of the year by the end of the year. Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks deliver Telia’s LTE network.

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www.WirelessFederation.com/news: The preparatory work for the deployment of Long Term Evolution (LTE) services has been started by Israeli mobile network operator Partner Communications. A tender is supposed to be held by Partner for proposals on an upgrade to its existing core network. Besides a tender would also be held for an additional network components that would enable it to launch commercial 4G services as soon as it received the requisite frequencies.

Israeli Defence Force is expected to release fourth-generation spectrum by early 2012. 900MHz band of spectrum currently held by Partner is also resolved to be used by the operator. At present, 2100MHz band is used by Partner for its third generation services. Vendors other than its current main supplier Ericsson will be considered by the firm. Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), Huawei and Alcatel-Lucent have all been mooted as possible vendors of interest.

According to an official at Partner, NSN and Huawei are companies that have shown that they have impressive solutions for rolling out an LTE network, alongside Ericsson and the company will upgrade its core network to IP so that it can unite voice and data, and the firm will upgrade the network to speeds of 21Mbps and 42Mbps in the future.

www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Nine bidders have qualified for the Dutch auction of 2.6GHz radio frequency licenses which will start on 20 April. The applications from potential bidders have been evaluated by the spectrum regulator Agentschap Telecom. The government has already held the trial auction in the month of December and the other will follow before the final bidding.

The government expected to issue the licenses in late May or early June depending upon how long the auction runs. The licenses are available for Wimax or LTE services and are expected to open the way for at least three new service providers on the market.

Out of 190 MHz, 135MHz will be received by the newcomers. A cap of 20 MHz has been subjected upon the existing mobile operators Vodafone Netherlands, KPN and T-Mobile Netherlands. The operator’s existing holdings in the 900, 1800 and 2100 MHz bands have been taken into account, among which Vodafone has the smallest amount.

Unpaired licenses are offered in blocks of 5 MHz while licenses for paired use will be offered in blocks of 2×5 MHz. Out of 25 blocks, 13 are for paired use, 12 are for unpaired use, and 38 licenses are available.

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Zain Jordan considers LTE roll out

www.WirelessFederation.com/news: A number of offers by international equipment vendors are currently being studied by Zain Jordan for the introduction of Long Term Evolution (LTE). Offers to build 4G infrastructure from companies like Motorola, Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia Siemens Networks is on Zain’s cards.

According to Zain CEO Abdel Malek Al Jaber, he is awaiting a decision by the telecoms watchdog, the TRC, on the award of the necessary licenses which will hopefully lead to the launch of a trial network later this year, ahead of an official launch in early 2011.

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www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Telefonica O2 and Nokia Siemens Networks will test LTE technology in Slovakia. The test will be based on assigned frequencies in the 2.6 GHz band and will be performed in 2010 in the region of Banska Bystrica.

With the latest move, Telefonica O2 Slovakia joined the other Telefonica Group companies involved in testing LTE networks.

A live demonstration has been made by Telefonica O2 and NSN of the LTE-based mobile broadband connections at MWC 2010 in Barcelona.

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59 operators commit to deploy LTE- GSA

www.WirelessFederation.com/news: LTE network has been committed to be deployed in 28 countries by 59 operators. All network commitments and each deployment status have been listed in the latest update of Evolution to LTE report by Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA).

It has also been forecasted that by 2012, 37 LTE networks will be commercially launched and 22 LTE networks will have entered commercial service by end-2010. Sweden and Norway were the first to commercially launch LTE networks in December 2009.

Additional operators currently engaged in technology tests or trials of LTE are also included in the report from which additional commitments to deploy are expected to follow.

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www.WirelessFederation.com/news: December 2009 witnessed the launch of first commercial LTE network by TeliaSonera at Stockholm and Oslo and 2010 will see the continuation of the trend with commercial launch of several LTE networks, including large operators such as Verizon Wireless in the United States and NTT DoCoMo in Japan.

As LTE deployments begin to pick up pace, WiMAX continues its steady progress. Several operators, including Sprint in the United States, have chosen to go with WiMAX as their 4G network of choice.

According to ABI Research analyst Bhavya Khanna, while LTE does promise data speeds greater than 50Mbps, they have yet to be achieved by live or trial networks, whereas mobile WiMAX is now a tried and tested standard. ABI research 242 WiMAX, compared to only 38 for LTE.

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www.WirelessFederation.com/news: The billing method of South Korea’s largest mobile network operator by subscribers, SK Telecom (SKT) will be altered and it will start charging its customers for calls on a per-second basis.

SKT has charged for calls on a ten-second basis since it first launched commercial services over an analogue network in 1984, as its current rivals, KT Corp and LG Telecom (LGT) both also do. It’s the first move of the company to alter the billing startegy and in total it expects the change to save its subscribers up to KRW16.8 billion (USD14.5 million) each month.

The decision is expected to be seen as a step in the right direction keeping in mind that the high cost of mobile services has been an area of focus for telecoms regulator the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) in recent years.

According to LGT, it too will restructure its billing and implement per-second charges in the near future but KT has not revealed any such plans.

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