U.K. incumbent BT and targeted advertising vendor Phorm Inc. are to escape prosecution for the controversial "secret wiretap" trials they ran in 2006 and 2007, reports the Daily Telegraph. During the trials, broadband traffic was intercepted and scanned for keywords, without BT or Phorm having sought the affected users' permission. (See Poor Phorm, BT Drops Targeted Ad Plans, Probing Net Privacy and BT Targets Advertising Breakthrough.)

Still in the U.K., mobile tariff comparison site Billmonitor has produced research that shows, it says, that 76 percent of mobile users in the U.K. are wasting on average more than £194 (US$317) a year on their contracts, by either wildly overestimating the amount of call minutes they will use and so paying for a more generous contract than they actually require, or underestimating their requirements and getting hit by out-of-allowance calls, texts and data usage.

Orange Business Services has expanded its telepresence offering, Telepresence Community, through a tie-up with Tata Communications Ltd. 's Global Meeting Exchange. The agreement enables meetings to take place between Telepresence Community customers and those on the Tata Communications Global Meeting Exchange, and vice versa. (See Orange, Tata Team on Telepresence.)

Beleaguered Irish incumbent eir is deploying fiber demarcation devices from RAD Data Communications Ltd. to deliver symmetric Ethernet services to businesses across the Republic at speeds of up to 1 Gbit/s over fiber and copper. (See eircom Deploys RAD for Ethernet Services.)

In the Middle East, seven leading Israeli companies and five Israeli universities have announced the formation of the Tera Santa Consortium, which aims to develop the world’s first Terabit Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)-based optical network. The vendors signed up are ECI Telecom Ltd. , Finisar Corp. (Nasdaq: FNSR), Orckit Communications Ltd. (Nasdaq: ORCT), Elbit Systems Ltd. , MultiPhy , Optiway Inc. and Civcom Inc.

The Belarus government is planning to sell its 51 percent stake in its local mobile joint venture with Russian giant MTS, reports Reuters. And MTS is interesting in buying it -- if the price comes down.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading