The Italian Ministry of Economic Development has sent a document to the country's operators proposing details of the fiber-to-the-home joint venture, to be called FiberCo, that will aim to hook up 50 percent of Italy's households with a 100Mbit/s connection by 2020, reports Business Online. The Italian operators have been discussing a joint project for some time, and it seems the FiberCo venture will focus on the areas of Italy where the economics are challenging for the likes of Telecom Italia (TIM) and Wind Telecomunicazioni SpA to build out their own fiber access networks. In the meantime, the country's carriers continue to roll out high-speed broadband services in the dense urban markets. (See Fastweb Hits 100Mbit/s, Telecom Italia Launches 100Mbit/s Trial and Italians Unveil FTTH Project.)

Telecom Italia's controlling shareholder, Telco SpA (a consortium that includes Telefónica SA (NYSE: TEF)), is believed to be reviewing the value of its holding in the Italian incumbent with a view to writing down its holding by more than 50 percent, reports Reuters.

MLL Telecom Ltd. is offering the U.K.'s mobile operators a managed Long Term Evolution (LTE) backhaul services using microwave connections and the spectrum it holds licenses for in the 32GHz and 40GHz bands. (See MLL Offers LTE Backhaul Service.)

Norway's communications services market grew in value to 2.2 percent to 33.26 billion Norwegian Krone (US$6.07 billion) in 2010, reports the country's regulator, the Norwegian Post and Telecommunications Authority. The operators grew their overall revenues from mobile voice, mobile broadband and fixed broadband, but, not surprisingly, fixed voice revenues dipped nearly 7 percent. More surprisingly, perhaps, the number of people using broadband telephony services in Norway, which is home to around 5 million people, fell by 1.1 percent to 513,189.

TDC A/S (Copenhagen: TDC) and the Danish operations of Telia Company , Telenor Group (Nasdaq: TELN) and 3 Group have formed a joint company to develop mobile payment services using near field communications (NFC)-enabled SIM cards, reports Finextra.

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading