The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to intervene in a dispute between a Sprint Nextel Corp subsidiary and the utilities regulator in Iowa.

Sprint Communications Co (Overland Park, KS, USA) declined to pay access charges for calls carried by Iowa Telecom - now Windstream Iowa Communications (Newton, IA, USA) - that were transmitted over the Internet rather than the traditional phone network.

The Iowa Utilities Board, which regulates telecommunications in the state, said Sprint was required to pay.

The United Arab Emirates' top telecom operator Etisalat has stopped blocking the website of Skype, the world's No.1 internet-based phone call provider, although the move could put further pressure on the state-controlled firm's revenue.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers such as Skype allow for free internet-to-internet phone calls and messaging, while tariffs for internet-to-mobile or landline phone calls are dramatically cheaper than by conventional means.

Skype (Luxembourg) is owned by Microsoft Corp (Seattle, WA, USA).

Some Internet-based communication tools such as Skype and Whatsapp flout Saudi Arabia's telecom laws, the regulator said on Sunday, instructing telecom operators to quickly ensure these services comply.

The announcement from the kingdom's Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) follows local newspaper reports last week that claimed the government had asked telecom companies to look at ways to monitor or block these services.

The French telecoms regulator ARCEP said it had asked prosecutors to investigate Microsoft Corp's Skype for failing to register as a telecom operator.

Skype (Luxembourg City, Luxembourg) has not complied with the regulator's repeated requests to register as an "electronic communications operator", ARCEP said in a statement on Tuesday.

The regulator said that since Skype let users make voice calls to fixed and mobile numbers in France and around the world, it had an obligation to allow emergency calls and permit legal interception of calls when required.

Google Inc and its Motorola Mobility unit struck back on Wednesday against BT Group Plc, filing patent lawsuits against the British telecommunications group more than a year after BT launched its own lawsuit against Google.

BT (London, UK), Britain's dominant fixed-line telecoms group, sued Google (Mountain View, USA) in 2011 over six patents related to mobile technology. But in a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in a California federal court, Google asserted four patents of its own.

Rebtel, which says it is the world's second-biggest provider of voice calls over the Internet after Skype, could go for a stock market listing in the next two to three years if it meets its growth targets, its CEO said.

Voice over Internet (VoIP) players like Rebtel (Stockholm, Sweden) and Skype (Luxembourg) offer calls for free or at a fraction of the cost charged by traditional telecom operators and have been growing rapidly in recent years.

South Korea’s operators have launched joyn services in a bid to reclaim ground lost to ‘over-the-top’ (OTT) players, although there is some confusion over whether services are yet interoperable between the three companies.

In a press release on its website, SK Telecom (Seoul, South Korea) said that customers can now make use of joyn services like ‘Rich Call’ and ‘Rich Messaging’ – under the joyn.T brand – allowing images to be exchanged during voice calls and SMS to be used with more instant messaging features.

Mobile broadband revenues are forecast to grow at an annual rate of 19.2% and generate $122.9 billion in incremental revenue between 2013 and 2016 in new research from Ovum.

Despite these impressive gains, overall operator revenues are forecast to increase little over the next five years from a 2012 estimate of about $2 trillion.

Orange, the mobile brand of France Telecom, launched a global free calling and texting application on Thursday, in direct competition with services such as Skype, WhatsApp and Viber.

Telecom operators around the globe have suffered as free calling and texting services have proliferated over the past few years. The apps allow users to communicate without using their voice or text allotments, leading some operators like KPN (The Hague, Netherlands) to complain about the hit to their bottom line.