FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) is gathering momentum in Europe, according to new figures from the FTTH Council Europe announced at the ongoing Broadband World Forum in Paris. In the first half of 2011, the region enjoyed a 24 percent rise in FTTH subscribers. At the end of June 2011, there were 4.6 million FTTH subscribers in Europe (which includes EU member states and various other countries) and 5.6 million subscribers in Russia and CIS countries. Total homes passed reached 39.8 million. Lithuania tops the European FTTH ranking with 26.6 percent of households subscribing to FTTH, followed by Norway, Sweden, Slovenia and Russia. (See Europe's Back in Love With FTTH and Brakes Stuck on Europe's FTTH Ride.)

Virgin Media Business is beginning its foray into the cloud computing market with the launch of the Virtual Private Data Centre (VPDC), which, says the company, allows IT managers do deploy their own private data center in "just a few clicks." (See Virgin Makes Cloud Foray and Virgin's Business Broadband Broadside.)

Handset giant Nokia has dropped U.K. operator Telefónica UK Ltd. (which trades under the O2 brand) from its list of stockists for its first range of devices powered by the Windows Phone operating system, reports Mobile News. Apparently the operator would not agree to some of the terms and conditions laid down by Nokia. (See Nokia Shells Out for Windows Phone Development and Nokia Cuts 4,000 Jobs, Sheds Symbian.)

Topping the "but then he would say that" category this morning comes news that Picochip CTO Doug Pulley has claimed that those in charge of London need to install 70,000 small cells across the city if they are to have "genuinely world-class" LTE mobile broadband, including 2,000 nodes covering the underground train network by 2015. A bit of air-conditioning on the Tube first would be nice. (See picoChip: London LTE Needs 70K Small Cells.)

More Londinium news: Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) has signed a seven-year lease on a building close to the English capital's so-called Silicon Roundabout with a view to using it as an advice center and testing ground for startups and developers, reports Reuters.

Belgian incumbent Belgacom SA (Euronext: BELG) may be prevented from acquiring one of the country's top mobile phone retail chains, The Phone House Belgium, by the competition watchdog, reports Reuters.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading