The ongoing volatility of copper pricing has created a major concern for the telecommunications industry, in which telecoms operators traditionally use copper ground wire for network grounding and bonding. Rising copper prices negatively impact operating costs by increasing the price of wire and maintenance costs, as copper wire becomes an attractive target for thieves intent on stealing it for sale to recyclers, particularly in emerging markets...

A leading Thai mobile operator is updating its provisioning and activation software...

Customers of Russia’s leading operator will soon enjoy new services, faster, more reliable connections and improved coverage with better network performance...

Israel boasts one of the few markets in the Middle East with strong competition across all market sectors...

A major Bangladeshi cellular service provider has launched a mobile insurance premium collection service...

With Bahrain’s mobile market approaching saturation, the growth in the second quarter of 2011 was unexpected but is unlikely to stop...

To start off the new year, we here at Developing Telecoms thought it would be interesting to take stock of the market and identify what the top telecom trends in emerging markets will be during 2012. We decided that the best way of doing this would be to ask the people who really know: top executives at network operators, services providers and equipment vendors who work in the market and are experiencing developments first hand...

Sustainable energy has emerged as an important corporate agenda point and many organisations today communicate their efforts in strategic marketing campaigns. These campaigns bring across the importance of sustainability efforts and how this will make a difference...

The ongoing disagreement over the ownership of Algeria’s market leading operator Djezzy could soon come to a close, following the announcement that the country’s government is to become a majority stakeholder in the firm...

Growth has been steady in Pakistan although there have been setbacks to the country’s 3G licensing process which is due to take place this year...

Home to one of the world’s most isolated cities, the fabled Timbuctu, and with a generally challenging geography for the provision of telecommunication services, Mali has market penetration rates below African averages in all market sectors except mobile where it is now racing towards the 100% mark..

 As a result of heavy investments in the telecom sector since the mid-1990s, Tunisia has one of the most developed telecommunications infrastructures in Northern Africa and sports some of the continent’s highest market penetration rates...

With the demand for data exploding across developed and emerging markets, operators need to find ways of facilitating delivery while keeping costs down. Content Delivery Networks are emerging as a viable means of doing this; with a correctly installed CDN, operators are able to increase access bandwidth in order to provide faster access to cached data...

 Residential and business customers in Saudi Arabia will soon have access to fixed broadband services using Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) technology via a nationwide fibre network...

Low penetration in Tanzania leaves plenty of room for growth over the next five years, but operators need to capitalise on the rural market potential...

Adding its voice to the debate over Indian 3G roaming agreements, the state-owned operator BSNL has claimed that the spectrum-sharing alliances between private operators across the country are “illegal”...

Throughout 2011 the societal and political unrest in many Arab countries, termed the Arab Spring, fundamentally changed the progress and pace at which telecommunications infrastructure has, and will continue to be, developed in these countries...

Subscribers of Egypt’s largest telecom operator will soon enjoy a host of customised services...

2012 may be the year of the low-cost smartphone following the introduction of a 1GHz Android smartphone platform for TD-SCDMA and EDGE/WiFi...

A 354 kilometre under-sea link in Indonesia, critical to the country’s international connectivity, has been upgraded by Nokia Siemens Networks...

Kenya's mobile market during H111 has seen a significant slowdown in overall subscriber growth...

A leading operator in Tanzania is modernising its GSM and 3G networks nationwide to improve performance and capacity, with the aim of providing more reliable, faster mobile broadband services...

Deployment has begun on a fibre optic submarine cable network system in the Maldives...

Yota has launched the first commercial LTE network in Russia..

In this bylined article, Brian Carroll, CEO of Arantech, discusses how Customer Experience Management systems can help operators take advantage of subscriber growth in the emerging market of Africa...

Poland’s leading mobile operator has improved its mobile broadband services with better indoor coverage and wider reach beyond the nation’s larger cities...

 An intensifying battle between mobile and fixed-line services is increasing price-based competition in Indonesia, with the result that although subscriber numbers continue to rise, customers are spending less...

Although the Philippines has seen strong mobile subscriber growth this year, saturation looms and competition could soon be damaged by a major acquisition...

The Samoan Islands have passed a milestone with the launch of their first commercial 4G services...

A new series of cloud-based solutions for contact centres will allow operators in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to reduce their operational expenditure, as well as granting them a higher degree of control, greater design flexibility and simplified migration from on-premise environments...

The Indian government is reviewing its stance on mergers and acquisitions as a means of fostering consolidation in the highly competitive market – and this may lead to the market leader Bharti Airtel acquiring domestic operators...

 A number of international organizations have united in expressing their concerns over the Space Assets Protocol, a new international legislation sponsored by the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT)...

 A new residential broadband service capable of delivering speeds of up to 100 megabits per second has launched in Jamaica...

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has granted China Unicom permission to begin offering Apple’s latest iteration of the iPhone, the 4S model...