Bouygues Telecom has revealed plans to pilot LTE services in Lyon from June 2012, with plans to host LTE on a further 5000 sites by the end of the year. The LTE network will then go live early next year and the company is aiming to cover all of France’s main cities by the end of 2013. Bouygues will also be expanding its HSPA+42 service to 50% of the French population by mid-2012.
MTN Zambia is reportedly planning to invest approximately $3 million in a connection to the EASSy submarine cable. MTN Zambia’s CMO, Ernst Fonternel, told local sources that the operator is looking to enhance its mobile internet services through EASSy with the goal of becoming Zambia’s largest operator by 2015. MTN is Zambia’s second largest operator with 31.6% market share in December 2011. The country’s largest operator, Airtel Zambia, had 52.9% market share at that time.
Telecom Italia subsidiary, TI Sparkle, has launched four roaming services for mobile operators worldwide. The services are designed to help mobile operators deliver more effective roaming to their customers. TI Sparkle launched its next-generation SMS platform on Tuesday, and plans to roll out three other services by May 8 2012.
BT Wholesale has added mobility and customer relationship management (CRM) integration to its IP voice services portfolio. The mobility service will allow BT’s communications provider customers to offer the ability to make and receive IP calls from devices using a single IPVS number. BT’s CRM services will allow communications provider customers to integrate their CRM and IP telephony systems. Research from iLLUME forecasts that the UK-hosted voice market will be worth £1 billion by 2015.
MTN Nigeria, a subsidiary of MTN Group, has selected ZTE to upgrade and expand its GSM/UMTS mobile network in two regions. ZTE will provide its SDR-based Uni-RAN solution, which it claims will help to reduce operating costs. "ZTE will provide a seamless cutting-edge network solution to MTN,” said ZTE VP Xu Ming. “The company will continue to strive to improve the quality of the Nigerian network."
Australia’s NBN Co has announced the first stage of the country’s National Broadband Network plans. Phase one will see construction underway or completed at 3.5 million homes across the country over the next three years. This equates to approximately a third of Australia’s homes and businesses. The entire NBN is expected to take a decade to complete, with 93% of premises receiving broadband via fibre, 4% via fixed wireless and 3% by satellite.
Caribbean operator Digicel is leading a $16 million subsea cable project that will provide connectivity to Haiti from July 2012. Columbus Networks and Alcatel-Lucent are partners in the 200km FibraLink Extension which will link to 21 other countries in the Caribbean region, including the main internet backbone gateway in Florida, US. It is claimed that the cable will dramatically expand the range and quality of fixed and mobile broadband in the country, which was devastated by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake two years ago.
Deutsche Telekom has announced the deployment of an FTTH network for German housing association, Deutsche Annington Immobilien, in the city of Bochum. For the first phase of the project approximately 42,000 apartments in North Rhine Westphalia will be connected to the fibre network, which will support maximum data speeds of 200MBps by 2013. Approximately 171,000 Deutsche Annington Immobilien apartments in 600 locations across Germany will be connected to the fibre-optic network in total.
