Some bad news for France Telecom this morning: The European Court of Justice has upheld a 2004 European Commission ruling that the operator received illegal state aid between 1994 and 2002. And now it's payback time. The amount to be recovered is thought to lie somewhere between €798 million (US$1.06 billion) and €1.14 billion ($1.52 billion), plus interest. (See France Telecom in Scrap Over State Aid.)
The Financial Timesreports that Nokia is to sell Vertu, its "blingphone" subsidiary that specializes in serving the niche -- and frankly more-money-than-sense -- market for "handmade" mobiles containing various shards of precious metals/stones and costing thousands of pounds. (See The Vertu Vanishes and Paltrow's Massive Wedge.)
Several Russian wireless service providers have made formal partnership agreements with each other as part of a drive to share a single Long Term Evolution (LTE) network. WiMax operator Yota has signed agreements with MegaFon and Rostelecom, while the latter has also brokered a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) relationship that will allow it to offer LTE services to its 100 million or so users. Mobile TeleSystems OJSC (MTS) and VimpelCom Ltd. are expected to join the party in due course. (See Russian Into LTE and Russian Ops to Share LTE Network.)
Navx, a France-based provider of "geolocalized" content for smartphones and GPS systems, is suing Google in the Paris Commercial Court for €23 million ($30.7 million) in damages for what it sees as the search behemoth's abuse of its dominant position. The case centers on how Google's pay-per-click Adwords system showed -- or failed to show -- Navx's advertisements. (See Navx Seeks €23M in Damages From Google.)
Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:
Single tags
These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.
<br> Defines a single line break
<hr> Defines a horizontal line
Matching tags
These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>
<a> Defines an anchor
<b> Defines bold text
<big> Defines big text
<blockquote> Defines a long quotation
<caption> Defines a table caption
<cite> Defines a citation
<code> Defines computer code text
<em> Defines emphasized text
<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form
<h1> This is heading 1
<h2> This is heading 2
<h3> This is heading 3
<h4> This is heading 4
<h5> This is heading 5
<h6> This is heading 6
<i> Defines italic text
<p> Defines a paragraph
<pre> Defines preformatted text
<q> Defines a short quotation
<samp> Defines sample computer code text
<small> Defines small text
<span> Defines a section in a document
<s> Defines strikethrough text
<strike> Defines strikethrough text
<strong> Defines strong text
<sub> Defines subscripted text
<sup> Defines superscripted text
<u> Defines underlined text
Network Computing encourages readers to engage
in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task.
However, Network Computing moderates all comments posted to our site,
and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory,
offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM.
Network Computing further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating
in said activities.
