Tele2 has told the UK’s Financial Times newspaper that it will seek further acquisitions after negotiating the sale of its Russian subsidiary to VTB, a state-controlled bank, earlier this month.

VTB (Moscow, Russia) paid $3.5 billion for the company after MTS (Moscow, Russia) and Vimpelcom (Moscow, Russia), Tele2’s biggest mobile rivals, had teamed up to offer as much as $4.25 billion.

France Telecom has chosen Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch to advise it on a potential initial public offering of EE, Britain's largest mobile operator, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Deutsche Telekom (Bonn, Germany) is expected to hire JP Morgan for the sale, multiple sources from the sector said, since the bank advised it in 2009 when the 50-50 joint venture with France Telecom (Paris, France) was formed.

Xavier Niel, the founder of French mobile-phone upstart Iliad, has suggested the operator may be preparing to launch 4G services during an interview with the Europe1 radio station.

“We will try to provide a surprise one day,” he is quoted as saying by Dow Jones Newswires.

The operator has been advancing rapidly in the 2G and 3G markets since launching services in early 2012 at a fraction of the prices charged by the country’s incumbents.

Bouygues Telecom will add 200 sales staff to its call centers after winning the right to re-use mobile frequencies once used for voice calls for superfast mobile broadband, its chief executive told Le Figaro newspaper.

The move is a shift from last year's plan to cut over 500 jobs to cope with an intense price war brought on by the arrival of low-cost mobile group Iliad (Paris, France) .

MetroPCS Communications Inc urged shareholders to support its proposed merger with Deutsche Telekom AG's unit T-Mobile USA after two proxy advisory firms recommended that shareholders vote against it.

Proxy advisers Glass Lewis (San Francisco, CA, USA) and ISS (Rockville, MD, USA) have backed efforts by two key activist investors to block the deal by recommending that shareholders vote against it at a special meeting on April 12.

MetroPCS Communications Inc urged shareholders to support its proposed merger with Deutsche Telekom AG unit T-Mobile USA Inc after two proxy advisory firms recommended that shareholders vote against the deal.

Proxy advisers Glass Lewis (San Francisco, CA, USA) and ISS have backed efforts by two key activist investors to block the deal.

MetroPCS (Richardson, TX, India) said in a letter to shareholders on Monday there could be no assurance that it would be able to deliver better shareholder value as a stand-alone wireless company.

UK mobile-phone operator EE says it has switched on its 4G network in another 13 cities and now covers half the country’s population with the superfast mobile service.

The joint venture between Deutsche Telekom (Bonn, Germany) and France Telecom (Paris, France) is racing to boost availability and take-up as its rivals prepare to launch their own 4G services.

T-Mobile USA said on Tuesday that it will start selling Apple Inc's iPhone on April 12, making it the last of the big national U.S. operators to sell the popular smartphone.

The No. 4 U.S. mobile provider, which is seeking to merge with smaller rival MetroPCS Communications (Richardson, TX, USA), is hoping the device can help stem customer losses. The launch follows a marketing overhaul that eliminates device subsidies and two-year service contracts favored by its bigger rivals.

A slowdown in network equipment and device markets has taken its toll on China’s ZTE, which has reported a net loss of RMB2.84 billion ($457 million) for 2012, compared with a net profit of RMB2.06 billion the year before.

China’s second-biggest network equipment maker, behind Huawei (Shenzhen, China), ZTE (Shenzhen, China) also reported a 2.36% decline in revenues, to RMB84.22 billion.

In a statement accompanying the figures, ZTE pointed to the slowdown in equipment investments by the global telecoms industry in 2012.

China's ZTE Corp, which helped bring the telephone to millions of homes during the Deng Xiaoping era, is counting on a new generation of tech-savvy smartphone users to drive at least $7.5 billion of 4G network projects and elevate its sagging fortunes.