Vodafone Ireland , 3 Ireland , the European Commission , Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), Telefónica SA (NYSE: TEF) and Apigee Corp. are just some of the names that feature in this Friday the 13th edition of our regional news selection.

Only weeks after announcing a major network-sharing deal with Telefónica in the U.K., Vodafone Group plc (NYSE: VOD) has struck a similar deal in Ireland. Vodafone Ireland and 3 Ireland are forming a joint venture that will operate and manage site assets and backhaul networks at 2,000 locations, while the operators will continue to manage their own spectrum, radio access and network core assets. (See Vodafone & 3 to Share Irish Network and Vodafone, Telefónica Merge UK Networks.)

The European Commission has decided not to force incumbent operators to lower their copper line rental fees, believing such a move might throttle investments in fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) rollouts. The decision has, understandably, pleased national operators and enraged the region's competitive service providers. The EC's decision can be read in full here.

As expected, Russia's regulator Roskomnadzor has granted new LTE licenses to complink Mobile TeleSystems OJSC (MTS) (NYSE: MBT), MegaFon , Rostelecom and VimpelCom Ltd. (NYSE: VIP). The licenses themselves do not carry a fee, but they come with quite particular coverage and investment conditions.

Telefónica's Digital unit is to use Apigee's API (application programming interface) management system to enhance the service provider's engagement with third-party developers, a process that is being managed by the Digital unit's BlueVia team. (See BlueVia Tackles the App Gap.)

AlcaLu has announced two new engagements in Europe. It is supplying its GPON gear to Vivacom in Bulgaria and its IP equipment (7750 Service Router and 5620 Service Aware Manager) to BT Ireland. (See Vivacom Deploys AlcaLu's GPON and BT Ireland Uses AlcaLu for VPNs.)

U.K. Ethernet service provider Exponential-e Ltd. has teamed up with education services specialist Lightspeed Systems Inc., which is to offer its secure online applications to British schools.

Eurofiber has deployed Infinera Corp. (Nasdaq: INFN)'s DTN platform to offer 100GigE services in Belgium and the Netherlands. (See Infinera Drives Eurofiber's 100GE.)

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading