UK telecoms incumbent BT says it has slowed its sales decline on the back of rising demand for superfast broadband services.

The operator has reported revenues of £4.79 billion ($7.36 billion) for the fourth quarter of 2012, a fall of just 2% since the same period a year earlier.

The figure was boosted by a relatively strong performance at BT Retail amid continuing declines at the operator’s wholesale and IT divisions.

Even so, net profit slid by 6.3% to £591 million.

AT&T Inc reported a net loss of cellphone subscribers in the first quarter as it lost market share to bigger rival Verizon Wireless, sending its shares down about 2 percent.

As a result AT&T's revenue missed Wall Street expectations as its subscriber growth was driven by tablet computer users who pay lower monthly fees than phone users.

Take-up of superfast technologies provided a significant spur to growth in the global broadband market in the final quarter of 2012, according to figures compiled by market-research firm Point Topic on behalf of the Broadband Forum.

The overall number of broadband connections rose by 8.6%, to nearly 644 million, compared with the fourth quarter of 2011, but connections served by fiber-based technologies – including VDSL and VDSL2 – grew by 27.5%, to more than 114 million.

Turk Telekom has reported a fall in profitability for the first quarter of 2013, with rising interconnection and personnel expenses eating into its revenues.

The Turkish incumbent reported a 12.9% fall in operating profit, to TRY1.15 billion ($643 million), compared with the same period last year, and a 31.8% drop in net profit, to TRY526 million, which it blamed on foreign-exchange losses.

The bottom-line setback came despite a 6.2% increase in revenues, to TRY3.14 billion, thanks to the continued growth of the operator’s mobile and broadband businesses.

Google Inc said on Tuesday it plans to bring its ultra high-speed Internet and television service to Austin, Texas, next year, prompting AT&T Inc to reveal its own plans to follow suit - if it gets the same terms from local authorities.

AT&T (Dallas, TX, USA) appeared to be making a political point to highlight the heavy regulations that encumber traditional phone companies, analysts said.

Deutsche Telekom has received conditional regulatory approval to upgrade its copper network via a process called vectoring, or VDSL2, in order to offer faster Internet.

The German federal network agency said on Tuesday in a draft decision that Deutsche Telekom (Bonn, Germany) would have to give its competitors access to the new technology but it could deny access in areas where alternative networks are available.

Vodafone is in talks with Deutsche Telekom on a wholesale deal that would allow the British company to offer its German customers TV over superfast broadband, a person familiar with the situation said.

Vodafone (Newbury, UK), traditionally a mobile-only company which has to rent fixed lines in some markets to offer broadband, has come under pressure from investors and analysts to show how it can compete with cable TV groups and telecom firms who can lure customers with a combined offer for mobile, fixed calls, broadband and TV.

India’s Ambani brothers have come together on a network-sharing deal that represents their first collaboration since the Ambani business empire was divided between them in 2005.

Under a contract signed this week, Anil Ambani’s Reliance Communications (Mumbai, India) will share its fiber-optic network with Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio Infocomm (Mumbai, India) in exchange for a one-off payment of INR12 billion ($220 million).

Reliance Communications will also be allowed to use the infrastructure of Reliance Jio Infocomm.

The European Commission has set out rules aimed at reducing the cost of building high-speed broadband networks, in a move that shows how Brussels is seeking more power over the telecoms sector.

The initiative is important because European leaders are worried that debt-laden telecom operators' slow pace of investment is saddling the region with weak infrastructure that over time could hobble its already recession-wracked economies.