Swisscom is claiming to be the first European provider in Europe to enable its customers to enjoy LTE roaming on another continent. As from Friday, Swisscom customers who happen to be in South Korea (can there be many of them?) will be able to surf the Internet on their mobiles, and about a week later this service should also be available in Canada and Hong Kong. (See Swisscom Offers 4G Roaming and Euronews: Ericsson Readies Swisscom for LTE.)

Yesterday it was Huawei, and today it's Microsoft's turn to be linked to a potential purchase of Nokia. The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. software giant, which has a close mobile OS partnership with the Finnish giant, was recently in "advanced discussions" with Nokia about buying its devices business, but that the talks faltered. Any other companies out there planning a conference call with Espoo? Come on, don't be shy… (See Euronews: Does Huawei Have Designs on Nokia? and Nokia Poll: Microsoft Merger Expected.)

Dutch carrier KPN International has teamed up with Huawei to introduce what it calls the second generation of soft-decision forward error correction (SD FEC) technology on its pan-European 100G WDM backbone. The new version of SD FEC allows a transmission distance of 4,000km, which is a 1,000km longer than the original iteration.

Iliad (better known by its brand Free Mobile) is offering a femtocell module to its fixed broadband customers that provides a strong indoor 3G signal. The femtocell can be self-installed by users that have the operator's Freebox home gateway. Details (in French) are here.

Deutsche Telekom AG has launched kits for programmers interesting in developing cloud-based machine-to-machine (M2M) applications. The kits come with either an Arduino or a Cinterion board with a GSM chip, a SiM card and access to the developer platform.

Canonical Ltd., the U.K. company led by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, has announced the formation of a carrier advisory group to help develop Ubuntu, its free, Linux-based operating system, for smartphones. Founding members of the group are Deutsche Telekom, Everything Everywhere Ltd. (EE), Korea Telecom, Telecom Italia SpA, LG UPlus, Portugal Telecom SGPS SA, SK Telecom and "the leading Spanish international carrier." Guesses on a postcard, please. (See Ubuntu Creates Carrier Advisory Group and 5 Challengers to Apple & Android.)

German policy and charging software vendor Orga Sytems has formed a partnership with EDMI, a smart-grid specialist based in Singapore, with a view to offering that old favorite, the "end to end solution." (See Orga Teams With Smart Grid Specialist.)

BSkyB Ltd., the U.K. satellite broadcaster and triple-play provider, is to face an investigation by regulator Ofcom into the way it makes its sports content available to rival broadcasters, reports the BBC. The probe comes after a complaint from one of those rivals, BT Group plc, which is miffed that BSkyB is making the supply of its two sports channels to BT conditional on BT making its own much-trumpeted sports channels available to BSkyB in return. (See BT's Got Balls.)

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading