Motorola Inc. savored a victory in its fraud lawsuit against Turkish carrier Telsim as a U.S. federal judge ordered the Uzan family to pay the vendor $4.26 billion, plus post-judgement interest. Both Motorola and Nokia Corp. filed fraud and racketeering lawsuits against the Turkish operator related to $3 billion in vendor financing loans.
The Federal Communications Commission and Canadian telecom regulator Industry Canada have reached an interim agreement that will allow for the deployment of wireless communications service-mostly fixed broadband-to be offered along the Canadian border. The agreement calls for coordination and cross-border sharing agreements. Since 1962, the FCC and Industry Canada have reached agreements on spectrum use along the border.
The first call using the Chinese homegrown technology TD-SCDMA was demonstrated using a live network by RTX Telecom and Prisma Engineering, according to the companies. “This is a very important milestone toward our goal to enable our customers to mass produce the first TD-SCDMA phone by mid-2004,” said Jorgen Elbaek, chief executive officer of RTX Telecom.
Siemens AG said it plans to cut 2,300 jobs in its mobile communications division, and 500 of the cuts will take place in Germany. The company, however, said it plans to step up its UMTS investments. “The world market for mobile communication networks has already declined by 15 percent last year. This year, the market will contract by up to 20 percent,” said Rudi Lamprecht, a member of the managing board of Siemens.
NTT DoCoMo Inc. said it signed an agreement with AT&T Wireless Services Inc. to send five employees to provide technical support for AT&T Wireless Services Inc.’s planned network trial of W-CDMA services in Dallas. DoCoMo said the agreement runs from Aug. 1 to Oct. 31 and is part of AT&T Wireless’ planned launch of W-CDMA services in four markets by the end of next year.
