Telcoflash: Telecom Market News

China Netcom and China Unicom complete merger for a value of about $24bn. Telecom NZ plans to upgrade its 3G services to countrywide coverage by June 2009. Zong (China Mobile in Pakistan) has expanded its GSM coverage in Pakistan. Verizon Business expands...

Analyst Corner: telecom stocks suffered from the crisis, with RBC lowering ATT price target to $32 (down 30%), Sprint price target to $7 (down 30%), Verizon Wireless down 16% to $31. RBC lowered also Broadcom by 40% to $22, Alvarion to $6 (down 40%)....

SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation) nations are meeting this week to find out new mechanisms to slash roaming rates in the region. China is planning to allocate additional radio spectrum to the homegrown 3G service. Cofetel (Mexico)...

Verizon Wireless has names Mark Harris vice president of National Government Sales and Operations. SFR: Michel Paulin (ex-Neuf Cegetel) quits SFR as well as Philippe de Cuverville and Jacques Veyrat . Pierre-Alain Allemand will be the new Networking GM,...

Change among top African markets, with Nigeria passing over S. Africa as continent leader. Nigeria had 51.7m mobile subscribers while S. Africa stood at 42.1m. Where S. Africa has almost 100% mobile penetration rate, Nigeria has yet plenty room to grow...

Day after day, more news confirm tough times for coming months. From financial, the crisis is now economical, and the telecom industry is not out. With the credit crunch, planned merger and acquisitions are questioned: Verizon Wireless and AllTel, TDC...

A few set of market information released this week: ABI Research predicts 54m CDMA EV-DO Rev. A subscribers and 25m CDMA EV-DO Rev. B subscribers by 2013. According to In-Stat, worldwide base station shipments are slowing despite 3G deployments and large...

Zain Tanzania currently has 3.3m cellular subscribers, and plans to have 3.8m by the end of the year. Brazil had about 24.3m residential internet subscribers by the end of August. Millicom International has 7.6m (+98%) mobile subscribers in 7 African...

RIM launches “Storm”, its latest touchscreen smartphone. Speculation raises that RIM could be bought by Microsoft. To be continued ...... Nokia and Nuance are teaming to deliver mobile speech and predictive text capabilities across Nokia mobile devices....

ECI Telecom will deploy its 9000 Ethernet switch router family and XDM multi-service platform for a fiber network project for Triton Telecom across Caribbe, including Florida. ADVA has been selected by THUS (UK) for providing intelligent Ethernet access...