2010 has long been proclaimed the year of LTE deployment but TeliaSonera’s new networks, located in the Norwegian city of Oslo and Sweden, Stockholm, managed to beat that deadline by 17 days.

Ericsson supplied the Swedish network, while in Norway the kit was delivered by Chinese vendor Huawei.

Kenneth Karlberg, president and head of mobility services at TeliaSonera, said: “We are very proud to be the first operator in the world to offer our customers 4G services. The use of mobile broadband in the Nordic countries is exploding and customers need higher speeds and capacity. This is why we [have launched] 4G services in both Stockholm and Oslo.” As well as nationwide licences for LTE in Sweden and Norway, TeliaSonera more recently won a licence in Finland.

In October TeliaSonera named Samsung as its device partner for LTE and, as the carrier and Huawei were announcing the network launch on Monday, the Korean handset vendor revealed that its LTE dongle product was the launch device. Samsung’s GT-B3710 dongle, which uses the firm’s own modem chip, the Kalmia, is not backwards compatible. An updated version of the product, due out in the first half of next year, will allow connectivity over LTE, HSPA and EDGE.

TeliaSonera holds second place in the Norwegian market, with 2.15 subscribers to its Netcom brand in October this year, according to Informa Telecoms & Media’s WCIS, and second place also in Finland, with 2.83m subscribers as of September this year.

Regulatory approval allows France Telecom to consolidate its position in Egypt

Egypt’s financial regulator has granted approval for the purchase of the stake it doesn’t already own in the country’s leading carrier Mobinil by France Telecom’s Orange. For some time the deal has been the subject of a spat between France Telecom and Mobinil’s other principal shareholder, Egyptian player Orascom Telecom.

The dispute began in 2007, when Orascom initiated a lawsuit seeking to force the French carrier to transfer its Mobinil shares over to Orascom. However, the court ruled in France Telecom’s favour and required Orascom to transfer its stake in Mobinil’s holding company to the French incumbent.

Mobinil is about 51 per cent owned by ECMS, a holding company that was jointly owned by Orascom and France Telecom, but under was ruled in July to be owned exclusively by France Telecom. Orascom also owns 20 per cent of Mobinil directly.

Since the court order, France Telecom has been trying to pitch an acceptable offer to buy minority shareholders out of ECMS. However, the French firm has seen its efforts rebuffed by the Egyptian Capital Market Authority (CMA) for being too low.

Now, with an offer of 245 Egyptian Pounds per share, Orange, the CMA has finally given its blessing to the deal.

At the end of September 2009, Mobinil had 23.4 million subscribers, according to figures from Informa Telecoms & Media’s WCIS.

AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega says heavy data users may have to suffer premium charges

AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega has revealed that the US carrier may have to force its heaviest consumers of wireless data to scale back their usage through the introduction of tiered pricing.

At an analyst meeting in New York on Wednesday, de la Vega said that three per cent of the operator’s smartphone users generate 40 per cent of wireless data traffic on the network. The popularity of wireless data in key markets such as Manhattan and San Francisco has caused network performance issues for AT&T, he conceded. “We’re going to focus on giving incentives to that small percentage of users to reduce or modify their usage,” de la Vega said.

While de la Vega seemed to be suggesting that a greedy few are causing problems for a more reasonable majority, he has come under fire from US commentators for trying to foist the blame for his network’s shortcomings onto his own customers. AT&T has made much of its exclusive relationship with Apple and has heavily promoted the iPhone and associated unlimited data tariffs.

De la Vega said that “the iPhone has been very good to us,” and revealed that Q309 saw record activations of the iconic handset. But many customers have complained about the performance of the carrier’s network and the issue highlights the problems carriers face if they fail to scale their networks up to cope with the performance requirements of the mobile data boom they have for so long been hoping would arrive.

The USA now leads the world in terms of smartphones and mobile data, de la Vega said during his presentation, saying the market has 40 per cent of the world’s smartphone users. “What we’re seeing in wireless data is [being seen] nowhere else on the planet,” he said.

At Ericsson staff are coming in as fast as they are being told to leave

Ericsson made two announcements on Wednesday that underscored the firm’s strategic direction, and the challenges it faces in managing costs. First it revealed that it will be laying off some 950 Swedish manufacturing staff – five per cent of the entire workforce – and, second, it trumpeted a new managed service win with Romanian fixed carrier Romtelecom. This deal involves Ericsson taking on 400 workers from the Romanian telco.

The majority of the Swedish job cuts will centre on the firm’s infrastructure factory in Gavle, the firm said. “We must reduce our production staff because the labour requirement for our products is diminishing as we increase efficiency,” Ericsson Chief Executive Carl-Henric Svanberg said in a statement.

That is doubtless true. Ericsson has pledged to make savings of SEK10bn by the middle of 2010 and headcount reduction is a key part of this. A further 5,000 staff are expected to lose their jobs as part of the firm’s bid to meet this target.

But that reduction is not so easy to keep on track when the firm is absorbing staff from carrier customers that are signing multi-year managed services contracts with Ericsson. The industry leader in managed services, Ericsson’s 2009 wins include Du, O2, Zain, Vodafone, 3UK, T-Mobile and Sprint. The last of these saw Ericsson take on 6,000 Sprint employees as part of the deal.

While much was made of Bada’s status as a “new mobile platform for smartphones,” – to quote Samsung Electronics’ European president S.H. Shin – it is not actually a brand new operating system. Rather it is based on the existing Samsung proprietary OS and features an access layer on top that allows the vendor to open it up to a developer community that it is in the throes of building.

Samsung is careful to involve itself in a variety of top-tier smartphone OS community projects but the firm clearly believes that collaboration will not bring the smartphones to the mass market with sufficient alacrity, or at a cost point that will allow them to be bought by a wide audience. Bada, then, will “extend the smartphone experience to average users on mainstream devices,” said Thomas Richter, director of portfolio management, Samsung Telecommunications Europe.

That experience will be touchscreen based, Richter said, describing the touch interface as “the main focus of our mobile strategy”. He said that Samsung will have sold more than 40 million touch screen devices by the end of 2009, and predicted that the first Bada device will be available in the first half of 2010, when Samsung will be concentrating on “high performance and massive volumes” for its new device range.

Samsung said that, essentially, there is nothing new in the Bada proposition. An existing operating system, UI technology and industrial design expertise are the three prongs of the Bada trident – but they will not be effective without a thriving community of capable developers. The firm said that it will drive developer interest through cash prizes as well as events held in Seoul, London and San Francisco but whether or not this will be enough remains to be seen.

Samsung had some content partners on hand to weigh in with a few scripted plaudits, and these included Twitter, EA Mobile, Capcon, Gameloft and, oddly, onetime video rental market leader Blockbuster.

WiMAX Forum Congress Americas 2009 will address all elements of the WiMAX^tm ecosystem, with a particular emphasis upon latest developments of the U.S. Broadband Stimulus Package. Congress Americas will bring together the entire WiMAX ecosystem across North and South America, featuring an inspirational line-up of speakers from more than 30 WiMAX service providers, 13 analysts, 5 governments and 3 consumer electronics companies.

Among the sessions featured on the multi-track conference program are topics covering WiMAX business models and retail strategies, operational challenges, spectrum and regulation (including 3.65 GHz and 700 MHz), vertical market opportunities for WiMAX and the prospects for WiMAX in the CALA region. The event will also feature a Special Focus Day on the 1^st December on the Broadband Stimulus Package, which will explore how carriers can take advantage of NTIA BTOP funding to develop sustainable business models for rural broadband in the USA, our exclusive Analyst Breakfast Briefings as well as a brand new Press Conference Corner, to meet the press and pre-arrange interviews live on stage.