On Thursday, SK Telecom announced a deal with Ericsson to extend its LTE network.  According to SK Telecom, demand for LTE services in South Korea has increased rapidly since the commercial launch of the technology in the country in July 2011.  As of today, SK Telecom provides 2.4 million of its 26 million subscribers with LTE technology.

India's Telecom Commission is seeking clarity from the sector regulator on some of its 2G airwaves auction proposals including the base price, which mobile carriers want to be cut by 80%.

R. Chandrashekhar, the top bureaucrat in the country's telecoms ministry, said the Telecom Commission did not have a view yet if the proposed near 10-fold rise in auction starting price from what carriers had paid in a 2008 sale was "too high."

Accuris Networks, a provider of mobile technology interworking, and Acme Packet, a provider of session delivery network services, on Monday announced a partnership to launch a Wi-Fi Mobile Interworking service, which gives mobile operators a way to extend network coverage and network capacity to Wi-Fi, provide carrier-grade security and offer value-added services even when users offload to Wi-Fi networks.

The top three U.S. telecom carriers, Verizon Communications, AT&T Inc and Sprint Nextel Inc, recently released financial results for the first quarter of 2012.  All three carriers reported higher-than-expected financial results for 1Q2012. 

In the past, satellite was dismissed as a wireless backhaul technology, mainly for cost reasons; but as pricing for wireless data increases and carriers shift away from unlimited plans, there is now a compelling, and profitable argument for Ka Band’s use in LTE network backhaul. Ka Band plays well with LTE’s all-packet architecture.

The first places to receive LTE coverage in Germany were not large cities like Berlin or Munich, but towns of 5,000 inhabitants or less. Now that rural areas have been covered, German providers will now start to update urban areas with LTE coverage this year.

On Tuesday, AT&T Inc reported a higher-than-expected quarterly profit as iPhone sales declined, reducing the amount of cash it had to pay Apple Inc and boosting its margins.

At the time of Russia’s presidential election in March, allegations of election fraud were prevalent across much of the nation, as well as the world.  In an attempt to legitimize the election, the Russian government authorized and provided $500 million for the deployment of about 200,000 cameras in approximately 90,000 polling stations across Russia.

China Mobile Ltd's Hong Kong unit has launched 4G LTE (long term evolution) mobile data services in the Chinese territory, allowing cross-border data sharing plans when roaming in China.

On Monday, Deutsche Telekom announced it has signed a partnership with Lookout Inc., a smartphone security company, to deliver a mobile security application to Deutsche Telekom's European customers.