International carrier Vodafone has sold 5.5 per cent of Indian operation Vodafone Essar to Indian medical services provider Piramal Healthcare for $640m. Vodafone is required to divest the stake to bring it back below the 74 percent ownership threshold, which is the Indian limit for foreign investment within a company. In July Vodafone acquired Essar’s holding in the operation, taking it beyond that threshold.

euNetworks, a fibre-optic infrastructure provider has announced a network supply deal with Vodafone Germany. As part of the agreement, euNetworks will deliver fibre services to the operator in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Berlin and Munich. The deal will enable Vodafone Germany to enhance its backhaul for its LTE network, which it is continuing to roll-out since in launch in December 2010 and now reaches more than four million homes. euNetworks owns 13 fibre-based metropolitan networks across Europe and according to a statement the deal will, “enable Vodafone to benefit from euNetworks extended footprint”.

A research project conducted by Ford has demonstrated that LTE is highly suitable for automotive communications applications. The findings of the CoOperative Card Extended (CoCarEX) research project were demonstrated yesterday in Dusseldorf, Germany and proved that LTE latency is low enough for it to provide time-critical driver assistance functions.

With the developer community becoming more important than ever, many carriers are faced with the same issue as consumers taking their first plunge into the world of apps – how to find the gems of quality amid the worthless stones. Vodafone’s answer is an annual competition, Mobile Clicks, which aims to identify and develop the best, most innovative mobile internet start ups. Telecoms.com caught up with Hemant Madan, Vodafone’s head of developer marketing and the company’s Android app store, ahead of this year’s event.

Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) accounted for the lion’s share of complaints to the country’s telecoms ombudsman in the last quarter. On the day the company was due to hold its annual general meeting, the ombudsman recorded 14,670 customer complaints about VHA between January and March this year – an increase of 96 per cent over the previous quarter.

The second and third-placed mobile operators in the Irish market, incumbent Eircom and Telefonica’s O2, have announced that they are to share networks in a deal that Eircom described as the first of its kind in Ireland. Eircom said that the deal will “result in an unrivalled mobile experience for customers” as the two carriers seek to meet growing demand for high bandwidth services.

O2 has staked its claim to be the first UK operator to switch on a 3G network over 900MHz spectrum in London. Taking advantage of recent licensing changes, this latest rollout in London follows on the heels of similar deployments in Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester; the London deployment is expected to deliver a 50 per cent increase in capacity and a 30 per cent increase in speed.