PayPal is extending its reach to more physical stores, having signed up 50 merchant acquirers which help process payments but the eBay Inc unit has yet to persuade Wal-Mart Stores Inc, the world's largest retailer.

PayPal's expansion into brick-and-mortar stores gives the company access to a market that is roughly ten times the size of the online payments sector where it got its start over a decade ago.

Verizon Communications Inc's chances of buying the 45-percent stake in Verizon Wireless owned by the UK's Vodafone Group Plc will hinge, at least in part, on the quality of tax advice it is getting.

Verizon (New York City, NY, USA), the No. 2 U.S. telecommunications company, may have found a way to structure a purchase of the stake so that Vodafone (Newbury, UK) can avoid a multi-billion dollar U.S. capital gains tax bill, sources familiar with Verizon's plans said. The possibility of a huge tax bill has previously been regarded by analysts as a big hurdle to any such deal.

Chinese telecom operators will start awarding contracts for super-fast mobile networks this year, kicking off the third wave of a global investment cycle that is reshaping the competitive landscape among telecom equipment makers.

China, the world's biggest mobile market with 1.1 billion subscribers, is likely to further alter the picture at the expense of European suppliers by giving a huge boost to Huawei (Shenzhen, China) and its smaller Chinese rival ZTE (Shenzhen, China).

Aurelius Capital, a big shareholder in U.S. wireless service provider Clearwire Corp, filed a lawsuit against Clearwire directors and Sprint Nextel Corp over Sprint's December agreement to buy out the portion of Clearwire it does not already own.

Aurelius (New York City, NY, USA), which says it owns 17 million Clearwire (Bellevue, WA, USA) shares, said Sprint (Overland Park, KS, USA), as Clearwire's majority shareholder, had dictated "manifestly unfair" terms for its Clearwire deal, in a filing at the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware on Friday.

Telecoms equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent has swung to a net loss of €353 million ($463 million) for the first quarter of 2013, from a net profit of €259 million in the same period last year, when its earnings were boosted by the sale of its Genesys call-center business.

The company reported a narrowing of its operating loss to €202 million, from €290 million a year ago, with revenues creeping up by 0.6%, to €3.23 billion, over the same period.

Telecom Italia is considering whether to float its fixed-line network in a move seemingly aimed at keeping it separate from a possible deal with Hutchison Whampoa, according to a report from Italy’s Il Messaggero newspaper.

The former state-owned monopoly is looking into a tie-up with Hutchison Whampoa (Hong Kong) under which it would absorb 3 Italia (Rome, Italy), the Hong Kong-based company’s Italian telecoms business, in return for giving Hutchison Whampoa a 29.9% share in Telecom Italia (Rome, Italy).

Indian telecoms executives Sunil Mittal and Ravi Ruia will not have to appear before a special court set up to investigate irregularities in the allocation of spectrum more than a decade ago, following a ruling by India’s top court that will see the hearing deferred by at least six weeks, according to a report from Dow Jones Newswires.

New Zealand Telecom is to ramp up its activities in the burgeoning market for cloud services following a $96.5 million ($82.5 million) takeover of infrastructure and data center specialist Revera.

The New Zealand telecoms incumbent said it would fund the acquisition through cash and existing borrowing facilities and expects the deal to close in May.

It will continue to run Revera (Auckland, New Zealand) as a standalone business, providing customers of Gen-i –New Zealand Telecom’s ICT services division – with access to additional cloud capabilities and data center capacity.

Strong demand for mobile broadband equipment in Latin America will keep Ericsson's plant in Brazil at full capacity this year, says a senior executive at the telecom equipment manufacturer.

Mobile phone operators in Brazil are scrambling to improve their networks after heavy scrutiny from regulators because of poor service and a lack of investment in mobile infrastructure in recent years. The problems came despite a ballooning client base in Latin America's biggest economy.

Cellular operator Digicel Group Ltd jumped into Myanmar early and big, hiring staff, funding local sports, negotiating land deals for thousands of cell tower sites and signing up hundreds of partners for retail outlets.

The strategy helped propel it onto the shortlist for a mobile license in one of the world's last mobile frontiers, putting an operator that ranks 65th globally in terms of customers up against giants such as Vodafone Group Plc (Newbury, UK).