Jayhun Mollazade was a man with an idea. As an Azerbaijani citizen living in the USA he saw an opportunity to dramatically improve the ageing and archaic soviet telecoms infrastructure of the former Soviet state. Over the past five years, Azerbaijan has put an emphasis on developing its ICT sector and as a result the country now has three mobile carriers along with several ISPs offering ADSL based fixed-line internet connectivity. While the broadband market was growing by 30-40 per cent each year only one of the local carriers was offering 3G services and Mollazade and his partners saw that there was a real opportunity to offer high speed wireless data services.

Qualcomm stands to lose over $1bn and its wireless broadband service permits in India, after a spokesperson for the Department of Telecoms (DoT) said that the company’s application for licences was invalid. A senior official from India’s DoT has said that the company did not apply for and acquire licences within three months of the wireless broadband airwaves (BWA) auction.

As CTO of US carrier Sprint Nextel, Stephen Bye presides over one of the most complex combinations of network technologies within the mobile industry. Bye talks to Telecoms.com about his preparations for the next phase of the carrier’s technological evolution and the long-awaited, yet still not officially announced, move to LTE.

LTE has been hailed by the Global Mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) as the fastest growing mobile network technology ever, outstripping all previous standards in terms of the pace of deployment. But while LTE is a global standard, there are variations in how it is being deployed around the world. Chief among these variations is the choice, depending on spectrum allocations, between Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD) and Time Division Duplexing (TDD).