Investment group Crest Financial has made a final plea to Clearwire shareholders not to support Sprint’s takeover of the wireless broadband operator just a day before their vote takes place.

In a letter sent to Clearwire (Bellevue, WA, USA) shareholders, Crest argues that a decision on Clearwire’s future owner should be delayed until Sprint’s own status is resolved.

Australia’s auction of spectrum for use with 4G services has raised a total of A$2 billion ($2.01 billion) for government coffers, according to a statement from the country’s telecoms regulator.

Announcing the results, the Australian Communications and Media Authority revealed that incumbent operator Telstra (Melbourne, Australia) had spent the most on frequencies, coughing up more than A$1.3 billion for 40MHz of 700MHz spectrum and 80MHz in the 2.5GHz band.

SoftBank Corp President Masayoshi Son may get a frosty reception when he comes to the United States this week to meet Sprint Nextel Corp's major shareholders, as he tries to drum up support for the Japanese company's proposed takeover of the No. 3 U.S. wireless service provider.

T-Mobile Austria claimed partial victory on Monday in its legal battle against the allocation of radio frequencies resulting from rival Hutchison Whampoa's takeover of Orange Austria.

The Deutsche Telekom (Bonn, Germany) unit said in a blog entry on its website that an administrative court in Vienna had referred the case to the European Court of Justice.

T-Mobile said this confirmed its view that it had suffered a decisive competitive disadvantage by the spectrum allocation, which it says gives its rivals a major head start in building next-generation networks.

Chinese telecom operators will start awarding contracts for super-fast mobile networks this year, kicking off the third wave of a global investment cycle that is reshaping the competitive landscape among telecom equipment makers.

China, the world's biggest mobile market with 1.1 billion subscribers, is likely to further alter the picture at the expense of European suppliers by giving a huge boost to Huawei (Shenzhen, China) and its smaller Chinese rival ZTE (Shenzhen, China).

MetroPCS shareholders have given their blessing to the proposed merger of the operator with T-Mobile USA, removing the final obstacle to the deal, which is now expected to close by May 1.

According to a statement from T-Mobile USA (Bellevue, WA, USA) owner Deutsche Telekom (Bonn, Germany), a majority of MetroPCS (Richardson, TX, USA) shareholders voted in favor of the merger on Wednesday.

China Mobile has reported net profit of RMB27.88 billion ($4.5 billion) for the first three months of 2013, just 0.3% higher than in the same quarter of 2012, as efforts to increase the usage of smartphone data services ate into its revenues.

The rate of growth is the lowest that China Mobile (Beijing, China) has reported in three quarters and came despite a 5.7% increase in quarterly revenues, to RMB134.7 billion.

South Korean operator SK Telecom claims to have broken through the 10-million mark for its LTE subscriber numbers just one year and nine months after first launching the service.

The country’s biggest operator said it reached the milestone on 19 April and would aim to have signed up a total of 15 million customers by the end of this year.

It also expects to introduce a commercial service based on LTE-Advanced – a standard that promises even faster connection speeds than LTE – in September.