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The annual Smart Grid Customer Education Symposium brings together utilities, stakeholders, regulators, and solutions providers who have a vested interest in rolling out successful smart grid communications and customer education. 

Verizon said on Tuesday it plans to invest $100 million in solar power and fuel cells at 19 facilities in seven U.S. states to cut its carbon footprint and make its operations more resilient to storms and other disasters.

The energy project should be complete by next year, with installations at corporate offices, call centers, data centers and central offices of the telecommunications giant in Arizona, California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and North Carolina.

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).

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.

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.

Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, the world's No.2 telecoms equipment maker, toned down its long-term target for networking equipment sales to enterprises, saying a prior figure was too optimistic.

Eric Xu, Huawei (Shenzhen, China) executive vice president and one of its rotating CEOs, also voiced frustration with security issues that are thwarting the Chinese company in the key U.S. telecoms equipment market.

ZTE Corp, China's second-largest telecoms equipment maker, has essentially stopped doing business in Iran after a U.S. investigation into alleged sales of embargoed equipment, the company's chairman told Reuters on Thursday.

ZTE (Shenzhen, China) said in March 2012 that it would curtail business in Iran following a report by Reuters that it sold Iran's largest telecoms firm a powerful surveillance system capable of monitoring telephone and Internet communications. The company is now facing a U.S. criminal investigation over the issue.

The European Union's trade chief will seek the backing of EU states to investigate Chinese telecoms equipment makers Huawei and ZTE, even without a complaint from European manufacturers, EU diplomats said on Tuesday.

The European Commission, the EU's executive body, has been collecting evidence to prepare a possible case against Huawei (Shenzhen, China) and ZTE (Shenzhen, China) over state subsidies it says allows the companies to undercut European firms.

Network equipment maker Netgear Inc estimated first-quarter revenue and earnings below analysts' expectations, citing lower-than-planned shipments of its new network attached storage product.

Shares of Netgear (San Jose, CA, USA) fell as much as 8 percent in trading after the bell. They closed at $30.88 on the Nasdaq on Monday.

"The late introduction (of ReadyNAS) was not expected to have such an impact on revenue in the quarter," BWS Financial analyst Hamed Khorsand told Reuters.