Euronews: Slim's Euro Bets Fall Flat

Carlos Slim, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and Tele2 AB (Nasdaq: TLTO) lead us off in today's trawl of the EMEA headlines.

Carlos Slim's investments in European telecom have proved less-than-outstanding to date, with his two big bets -- on KPN Telecom NV (NYSE: KPN) and Telekom Austria AG (NYSE: TKA; Vienna: TKA) -- both failing to pay off, reports Bloomberg. Shares in KPN have slumped 39 percent and in Telekom Austria by only a little less since Slim's América Móvil S.A. de C.V. took large chunks of each carrier. (See Euronews: Slim Takes a Breather and Euronews: Slim's Stealthy Expansion .)

T-Mobile Austria and Huawei have demonstrated LTE-Advanced, the next version of 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE), at the operator's test center in Vienna. By combining different frequencies -- a technique called carrier aggregation -- operators will be able to achieve faster mobile broadband downlink speeds than are possible on today's LTE networks. In the Vienna test, T-Mobile combined frequencies in the 1800MHz and 2.6GHz bands and clocked a downlink speed of 289 Mbit/s. Check out this video (in German) for more about the demo.

The Russian unit of Sweden's Tele2 is being tipped as a takeover target for Rostelecom , reports Bloomberg. Konstantin Malofeev, the principal shareholder in the Russian operator after the Russian state, says that Tele2 would make a "perfect fit" for Rostelecom.

Two neighboring English counties, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire, have clubbed together to agree a £56.6 million (US$91.7 million) deal with BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA) which should see 90 percent of homes and businesses in the two counties gaining access to fiber broadband by the end of 2016. The partnership is the latest to be announced under the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) program. (See Euronews: UK's Broadband Plan Gets EU Nod and UK Govt Allocates Broadband Funding.)

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading