Orange Austria, owned by France Telecom, is to be acquired by Hong Kong’s Hutchison, which competes with Orange through its 3 Austria operation. The deal, worth €1.3bn, consolidates the third and fourth players in the Austrian market.
UK communications firm Everything Everywhere, which owns and operates the British Orange and T-Mobile brands, has announced that it is to invest £1.5bn ($2.4bn) in a three-year network evolution programme. The project will accelerate the integration of the Orange and T-Mobile networks and ready them for LTE through the “implementation of 4G-ready technology following successful trials,” the firm said.
International mobile operator Orange has announced a collaboration with Facebook on a range of sub-€100 handsets described by Facebook’s head of mobile, Henri Moissinac, as featuring “the best set of integrations so far” of any device the social networking firm has co-developed. Orange said consumers who buy the handsets, which are built by Alcatel, will get “unlimited” access to Facebook as part of their data plan.
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Telecoms.com talks to Patrice Slupowski, VP – Digital Innovation of Orange at Broadband World Forum 2011.
Orange’s Polish operation, PTK Centertel, and T-Mobile’s PolskaTelefoniaCyfrowa this week signed an agreement to share their radio access networks. The network will be managed by a new joint venture called NetWorkS! owned 50-50 by the two operators and responsible for the management, planning, support, development and maintenance.
Nordic and Baltic carrier TeliaSonera has joined the collaborative M2M programme announced by Orange and Deutsche Telekom in February 2011. The project was put in place to create seamless international M2M services across the portfolios of the German and French incumbents. At launch the agreement covered France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg, with the Netherlands and the UK joining subsequently. The addition of TeliaSonera adds Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Estonia and Lituania into the mix.
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ZTE’s Blade touch-screen handset has racked up sales in excess of two million, making it one of the best-selling smartphones globally. The device, which was first sold in the UK in 2010 under the brand “San Francisco” by carrier Orange, is sold in 30 regions, with ZTE saying it has “successfully penetrated Japan and Finland, the home markets of major ZTE competitors.” The uptick in sales for the Chinese manufacturer comes on the back of its announcement of projected sales of 80 million devices this year, up from 60 million in 2010.
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UK mobile broadband users accessing the web over dongles and datacards are getting average throughput of 1.5Mbit/s, according to research released Thursday by UK regulator Ofcom. But there were significant differences between the five carriers’ performance, with O2 delivering the best performance, and Orange the worst. 3UK outperformed T-Mobile, with which it shares a 3G network.
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In a week during which the UK distinguished itself as the “Whiplash Capital of Europe” thanks to its rep for filing dodgy insurance claims, The Informer is pleased to note that, in the technology world at least, injury-preventing U-turns have been the order of the day.
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The UK arm of France Telecom’s Orange has launched what it says is the first contactless mobile phone-based payment services, allowing customers to make purchases up to the value of £15. The service has been developed in conjunction with Barclaycard, and will use the credit card firm’s network of contactless readers, deployed in more than [...]
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