MetroPCS has pushed back its planned launch of voice-over-Long Term Evolution (VoLTE) services to the second half of 2012, Ed Chao, senior vice president of engineering and network operations told FierceBroadbandWireless. Chao confirmed reports that MetroPCS is continuing to test VoLTE on an ongoing basis in an unidentified market
New Mexico-based Penasco Valley Telecommunications (PVT) has announced that it is poised to launch Long Term Evolution (LTE) services in its home state and in selected parts of Texas. Operating under the ‘Fuego Wireless’ banner, PVT claims that its footprint will include ‘expansive diverse terrain, rural agricultural communities, and metropolitan areas such as Santa Fe and Las Cruces’.
Cross Wireless, doing business under the ‘Sprocket Wireless’ brand, has announced that it has enlisted French-US equipment vendor Alcatel-Lucent to roll out a network based on Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology. Headquartered in Warner, Oklahoma, and operated by long-time regional Cross Telephone, Cross Wireless intends to deploy the network in the counties of Muskogee, Pittsburg, Choctaw, McCurtain and McIntosh during the first half of 2012
Lebanon’s Ministry of Telecommunications (MoT) promised yesterday that a project to upgrade state-owned PSTN operator Ogero’s domestic telecoms backbone with a new national fibre-optic network would be completed ‘within months’.
T-Mobile USA has hired New York bank TAP Advisors to help sell off wireless towers and raise cash for parent company Deutsche Telekom (DT), Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter. DT halted its plan to sell off some of its US assets last year after agreeing to AT&T Inc’s USD39 billion bid for T-Mobile, only for the deal to collapse in December because of insurmountable regulatory hurdles. A press statement issued by the operator acknowledged the plan, but stopped short of confirming the details: ‘T-Mobile USA continues to evaluate a tower sale as part of its self-funding strategy, but have no specific plans to detail at this time’.
The CEO of international operations at Saudi Telecom Company (STC), Ghassan Hasbani, said yesterday that his company still had a keen interest in bidding for a mobile licence in Lebanon, if the country ever gets around to privatising the cellular sector, currently a duopoly of two state-run firms managed by foreign operators. Hasbani, speaking to the Daily Star on the sidelines of the ArabNet Digital Summit in Beirut, said that Lebanon’s telecoms sector is ‘ripe for investments’, and ‘a very attractive market with a great potential’, but he noted that allowing a new foreign entrant rests on a decision by the Lebanese government
India’s telecoms watchdog, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has been criticised by a parliamentary committee for its attitude towards illegal network operations, amidst fears that the practice is ‘mushrooming’.
