French mobile phone operator SFR is preparing to hold an initial public offering in late 2014 or early 2015, according to a report from Les Echos.

SFR (Paris, France) chairman Stephane Roussel told the newspaper that SFR must re-organize to be more independent from parent company Vivendi (Paris, France), with an IPO.

Roussel had been chief executive of SFR since June 2012, but relinquished that role in late May to Jean-Yves Charlier – a change in governance that appears to have been motivated by the prospect of “an initial public offering if market conditions permit”.

New Zealand operator Chorus has lashed out at regulatory moves to slash wholesale prices for access to its copper broadband services, arguing it will put the “once in a generation” transition to fiber at risk.

Meeting with New Zealand’s Commerce Commission, as well as representatives of the country’s retail operators, Mark Ratcliffe the chief executive of Chorus (Wellington, New Zealand), said the regulatory proposals had led to a “dramatic flight of international capital out of Chorus and New Zealand”.

UK telecoms incumbent BT strengthened its position in the country’s broadband market in the first three months of the year, according to new research from Point Topic, gaining 0.28% market share to give it 30.3% of the market altogether.

The retail business of BT (London, UK) now serves more than 6.7 million broadband customers, 800,000 of whom are also subscribers to BT Vision, the company’s television service.

UK telecoms incumbent BT says it has slowed its sales decline on the back of rising demand for superfast broadband services.

The operator has reported revenues of £4.79 billion ($7.36 billion) for the fourth quarter of 2012, a fall of just 2% since the same period a year earlier.

The figure was boosted by a relatively strong performance at BT Retail amid continuing declines at the operator’s wholesale and IT divisions.

Even so, net profit slid by 6.3% to £591 million.

Telefonica Deutschland has signed an agreement to use new high-speed broadband services becoming available from Deutsche Telekom.

The two operators already have arrangements in place under which Telefonica Deutschland (Munich, Germany) rents local loops from Deutsche Telekom (Bonn, Germany) to provide broadband services based on legacy ADSL networks.

Under the new deal, the operator – a subsidiary of Spanish telecoms incumbent Telefonica (Madrid, Spain) – will rent capacity on VDSL lines that Deutsche Telekom is modifying through the use of vectoring technology.

AT&T Inc reported a net loss of cellphone subscribers in the first quarter as it lost market share to bigger rival Verizon Wireless, sending its shares down about 2 percent.

As a result AT&T's revenue missed Wall Street expectations as its subscriber growth was driven by tablet computer users who pay lower monthly fees than phone users.

Take-up of superfast technologies provided a significant spur to growth in the global broadband market in the final quarter of 2012, according to figures compiled by market-research firm Point Topic on behalf of the Broadband Forum.

The overall number of broadband connections rose by 8.6%, to nearly 644 million, compared with the fourth quarter of 2011, but connections served by fiber-based technologies – including VDSL and VDSL2 – grew by 27.5%, to more than 114 million.

Turk Telekom has reported a fall in profitability for the first quarter of 2013, with rising interconnection and personnel expenses eating into its revenues.

The Turkish incumbent reported a 12.9% fall in operating profit, to TRY1.15 billion ($643 million), compared with the same period last year, and a 31.8% drop in net profit, to TRY526 million, which it blamed on foreign-exchange losses.

The bottom-line setback came despite a 6.2% increase in revenues, to TRY3.14 billion, thanks to the continued growth of the operator’s mobile and broadband businesses.

Google Inc said on Tuesday it plans to bring its ultra high-speed Internet and television service to Austin, Texas, next year, prompting AT&T Inc to reveal its own plans to follow suit - if it gets the same terms from local authorities.

AT&T (Dallas, TX, USA) appeared to be making a political point to highlight the heavy regulations that encumber traditional phone companies, analysts said.

Deutsche Telekom has received conditional regulatory approval to upgrade its copper network via a process called vectoring, or VDSL2, in order to offer faster Internet.

The German federal network agency said on Tuesday in a draft decision that Deutsche Telekom (Bonn, Germany) would have to give its competitors access to the new technology but it could deny access in areas where alternative networks are available.