Euronews: Austrian Debut for AlcaLu Vectoring

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), Telekom Austria AG (NYSE: TKA; Vienna: TKA) and Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC) give us something for the weekend in today's helping of EMEA telecom news headlines.

Telekom Austria's domestic subsidiary, A1, is claiming a world first with the deployment of Alcatel-Lucent's VDSL2 vectoring technology for commercial services. Adding vectoring to VDSL2 can, in theory, boost the speed of a copper broadband connection to 100 Mbit/s downstream, compared with the current maximum VDSL2 speeds of 40-50 Mbit/s. (See T Austria Does Vectoring With AlcaLu, AlcaLu Launches VDSL2 Vectoring and AlcaLu Speeds Up Its VDSL2.)

Ericsson has appointed a new CTO in the shape of Ulf Ewaldsson, the vendor's current head of Product Area Radio. He replaces Håkan Eriksson, who stepped down in December. Ewaldsson, however, will not be the Head of Ericsson Silicon Valley, a role his predecessor also held. (See Ericsson Appoints New CTO, Analyst Acclaims New Ericsson CTO and Euronews: Ericsson's CTO Steps Down.)

European Commission regulators have restarted their antitrust review of the Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)/Motorola Mobility LLC deal, and have set a new deadline of Feb. 13 for a final ruling, reports Bloomberg. The review had been suspended on Dec. 6 while more information was gathered from the two parties involved. (See Google Didn't Want All of Motorola Mobility , Microsoft Takes Moto Back to Court, Euronews: Nokia Hopes for Google/Moto Boost and Google Buying Moto Mobility for $12.5B .)

Vodafone Group plc (NYSE: VOD) has won its $2.2 billion tax battle with the authorities in India, giving its share price a 1.7 percent boost to 177.45 pence in morning trading on the London Stock Exchange. For more details, see this Light Reading India article.

Netgem , the French set-top box company, saw its 2011 full-year revenues dip 37 percent year-on-year to €84.6 million (US$109.2 million), though this decline was largely attributable to the massive one-time set-top box hardware order placed by triple play service provider SFR during 2010. In markets outside France, Netgem's revenue was actually up 20 percent year-on-year. (See Netgem Reports International Growth.)

Vodafone's Qatar unit made a loss of 122 million riyals ($33.5 million) in its fiscal third quarter ending December 2011, reports Reuters, though this was an improvement on the same period a year ago. It added 15,000 subscribers in the quarter to take its total to 797,000 customers.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading