China Mobile has blamed the increasing prevalence of OTT services for a 9% drop in its Q3 net profits.

Vodafone is reportedly looking to buy out Telecom Egypt’s 45% stake in Vodafone Egypt for as much as $2 billion.

PCCW Global has signed an international IP VPN Network-to-Network Interconnection (IP VPN NNI) agreement with PLDT ALPHA Enterprise, the corporate division of Filipino operator PLDT.

Venezuela’s consumer agency has prevented Telefonica subsidiary Movistar from increasing its prices in the face of an annual national inflation rate of nearly 50%.

Ken Hu, the deputy chairman of Huawei, has publicly decried allegations that the Chinese vendor breaches cyber security via hacking on behalf of the Chinese government.

Bharti Airtel has bought Qualcomm’s stake in the two firms’ Indian joint venture, giving it full control of the Wireless Business Services Pvt business with a 100% stake.

ZTE Corporation has been awarded a more than 60% share of the contracts in China Mobile’s group tender for 100G Optical Transport Networking products for 2013, exceeding the combined total of all other vendors.

Telefonica has stated that it is “exploring strategic options” that may lead to the sale of its Czech operations.

The government of Mexico has reached an agreement with several licence holders that enables it to assume control of a 130MHz block of unused 2.5GHz spectrum.

China Unicom and China Telecom have reportedly been allocated spectrum that can be used to offer FDD-LTE services.

India’s Department of Telecoms has awarded Idea Cellular a Unified Licence for 7 of the country’s 22 telecom circles – Assam, Jammu & Kashmir, Kolkata, North East, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal.

Indian operator Reliance Jio Infocomm has received approval from the country’s telecoms ministry to use its nationwide 4G spectrum to provide high-speed LTE services for voice and mobile broadband.

Deutsche Bank has partnered with the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) to acquire a 2.7% stake in the Russian fixed-line operator Rostelecom for RUB7.7 billion ($240 million).

Following suggestions that TIM’s Brazilian operations could be acquired by Vodafone, Telecom Italia has dispelled claims that it is negotiating a sale of the operator in order to reduce its debt.

Russian private lender Bank Rossiya is reportedly looking to acquire a 50% stake of operator Tele2 Russia.

ZTE has been selected by U Mobile Sdn Bhd to provide a disaster recovery (DR) system to strengthen the resilience and robustness of Malaysia’s most dynamic and innovative 3G mobile network.

Brazil’s largest telco Oi has agreed to merge with its major stakeholder Portugal Telecom (PT) to create a combined entity called CorpCo.

French group Vivendi has extended its deadline for a binding offer on its 53% stake in Maroc Telecom, as talks with Etisalat progress.

The African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) has received a $US1.4 million grant from Accenture to develop a pilot mobile health training program for community health workers in Kenya.

The mobile phone company Tigo announced this week that it has acquired more than 250,000 new customers in less than three months following its return to two troubled eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Axiata has confirmed that it has agreed a deal to acquire the Indonesian operator Axis, having struck a “conditional sale and purchase agreement” with Axis’ current owner STC.

The Pakistani arm of China Mobile has stated that it is interested in acquiring local operator Warid Telecom, which is already the target of some major operators looking to consolidate their position in the Pakistani market.