France pockets 936 mn euros in 4G frequency auction

France on Wednesday kicked off auctions for frequencies to build high-speed fourth generation mobile telephone networks needed to keep up with the explosion of Internet-capable smartphones.

Europe's first auction of "fourth generation" frequencies, which promise to revolutionise what mobile phones can do, raised more than 4.3 billion euros (5.3 billion dollars), authorities said Thursday.

The Finnish government said Friday it has allocated extra frequencies to telecom firms TeliaSonera, Elisa and DNA to run the country's new, faster fourth-generation (4G) mobile network.

The European Union announced Tuesday an 18 million euro (25 million dollar) investment in an "ultra high-speed" internet system to underpin the next generation of mobile services.

France has delayed a tender for a fourth mobile phone licence to examine the conditions, a top official said Wednesday, as existing operators warned they could go to court if the price were set too low.

In 2000, at the height of the tech bubble, telecom operators fell over themselves to snap up 3G or third generation mobile licenses in an auction in Germany.

Google has become deeply involved in a series of projects to build and operate wireless networks in emerging markets including sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, a report said Friday.

A new branch of the Venezuela-to-Cuba undersea fiber-optic cable has reportedly come online, linking the island to nearby Jamaica, increasing Cuba's potential international communications bandwidth and providing a backup ...

Sprint said Tuesday it was hiking its offer for the remaining shares of broadband service firm Clearwire, in the face of a rival bid from satellite TV group Dish Networks.

Researchers of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics and the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology have achieved the wireless transmission of 40 Gbit/s at 240 GHz over a distance of one kilometer. ...

The Supreme Court has affirmed the authority of federal regulators to try to speed local government decisions on proposals to build or expand cell phone towers.

Mexican phone giant America Movil, owned by billionaire Carlos Slim, announced Monday that its US unit reached a deal to acquire US mobile phone company Start Wireless Group.