China Unicom will abandon its handset subsidies policy for CDMA phones, in a move to cut costs, but could create a new subsidiary to sell mobile phones.
Russia's Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) says that it has reached an agreement with the Communications Ministry of Turkmenistan for its new subsidiary Barash Communications Technologies (BCTI), to resume operations in the country.
ViVo (Brazil) has launched 3G services in Brazil.
TOT (Thailand) has taken full ownership of the 1900-MHz bandwidth and all assets of Thai Mobile.
Indosat (Indonesia) will start trialing 3G service next month.
Orascom (Egypt) has bought the remaining 37% equity stakes in its Iraqi operation, Orascom Telecom Iraq (Iraqna).
Sprint and T-Mobile USA have signed an agreement that enables picture and video messaging exchanges between their respective subscribers.
Mobilkom Austria announced that its UMTS + EDGE network is now available Austria-wide. UMTS has 62% population coverage and EDGE can be reached by 97%.
Saudi Arabia regulator (CITC) has granted a 3G license to STC, the local incumbent, for $ 200m.
