The UK holding company for the Orange, T-Mobile and EE brands, Everything Everywhere, has seen its service revenue drop three per cent in the quarter ending September 30, 2012. Revenue fell to £1.50bn for the quarter, for which the firm blamed the impact of mobile termination rate (MTR) and roaming cuts. The company said that without these cuts service revenue would have grown by 3.1 per cent.

UK operator group Everything Everywhere’s LTE brand EE has announced the pricing plans for its service, which will go live October 30. The operator has chosen to base its tariffs around volume of data, rather than speed. The cheapest 4G tariff including the full price of a handset is £41 per month with a 1GB data limit on a 24-month contract.

The UK’s four mobile network operators have formed a company to speed up the deployment of the 800MHz frequency band vacated by the Digital Switchover. Regulator Ofcom announced early October that the spectrum, which will be used to roll out LTE services will be made usable earlier than planned, following peace talks between the UK government, the nation’s operators and the telecommunications regulator Ofcom.

The UK’s 4G saga may have reached its climax in August with Everything Everywhere receiving permission to launch its own LTE network early, but the story isn’t over yet. UK regulator Ofcom announced yesterday that it would move forward the auction for the Digital Dividend creating by switching off analogue TV, and that clearance of TV transmitters will be brought forward by around five months.

UK regulator Ofcom is holding peace talks with the country’s mobile operators today in a bid to diffuse the tension that surrounds the UK’s LTE licensing process. Vodafone and O2 reacted angrily to Ofcom’s decision in August to clear Everything Everywhere’s launch of LTE in re-farmed 1800MHz spectrum before the end of this year.

This week it was announced that a new species of monkey had been discovered in the Democratic Republic of Congo. To the untrained eye – and even to the trained eye – this new monkey bears a striking resemblance to species already in circulation. Nevertheless, close inspection revealed it to be distinct from its peers. The fact that the differences are less in evidence than the similarities has not dampened the sense of jubilation in the monkey-studying community, because new monkeys don’t come along all that often.