RACO Wireless is set to announce two acquisitions that will significantly enhance its managed-services offering to M2M customers.

The M2M-focused MVNO had made clear its acquisition intentions last October, when private-equity group Inverness Graham Investments took a majority stake in the business, and has spent much of the intervening period examining potential takeover targets.

Dish Network Corp has rolled out an advertising campaign suggesting a deal by a Japanese company to acquire Sprint Nextel Corp could threaten U.S. national security, hoping to sway lawmakers and win support for its rival offer.

The campaign, which so far appears on the Internet and in Washington-area newspapers, is Dish's most public lobbying effort yet against Japan-based SoftBank Corp (Tokyo).

Russia-focused telecoms firm Vimpelcom's talks to sell a controlling stake in its Algerian mobile business Djezzy to Algeria are at a delicate stage but have not failed, a source with knowledge of the discussions said on Wednesday.

Algeria wants to nationalize Djezzy (Algiers, Algeria) and has pushed Vimpelcom (Amsterdam, Netherlands) into discussing a sale of a 51 percent stake.

A report by Dow Jones earlier said that talks had ended in failure, citing two officials close to the matter.

Telecom Italia is mulling spinning off its mobile unit along with its fixed-line network to bring new investors on board, three people, including a senior political source, told Reuters on Tuesday.

"The three-way split would allow the company to reduce debt and staff costs and favor the entry of new investors," the political source said. "It is a strategy that will allow the company to confront the market in the future more freely."

Later on Tuesday, the Italian phone company denied a break-up was under consideration.

Sprint Nextel Corp raised its buyout offer for wireless service provider Clearwire Corp to $3.40 per share, but the new bid was not high enough to impress some investors.

Clearwire (Bellevue, WA, USA) shares almost immediately traded around the new offer price, having consistently traded well above the old $2.97-per-share bid. Sprint (Overland Park, KS, USA) announced the revised price just hours before Clearwire was due to hold a special meeting for shareholders to vote on the original offer.

The first two days of this week’s CTIA Wireless Show in Las Vegas have been marked by a flurry of M2M announcements, with partnerships between MVNOs and network operators emerging as a major theme. M2M Zone provides a round-up of the most important news items.

Having flourished as a provider of network connectivity and devices in the asset-tracking market, satellite operator Orbcomm is ramping up activities at its newer solutions business, with international expansion a firm priority.

The company was recently named the biggest vendor of intermodal container tracking solutions by analyst firm Berg Insight, but Orbcomm (Rochelle Park, NJ, USA) is not resting on its laurels.

Axeda has been ranked as the leading M2M application development platform in new research from Strategy Analytics.

Axeda (Foxboro, MA, USA) stands out because of the scalability and flexibility of its platform, as well as its ecosystem of partner, according to the market-research company.

The company’s range of consultancy and integration services appears to be a further plus point.

Rivals ILS Technology (Boca Raton, FL, USA) and ThingWorx (Exton, PA, USA) also ranked highly and were described as “companies to watch” by Strategy Analytics.

Chinese manufacturing giant Huawei has teamed up with technology distributor Embedded Works in the M2M market, aiming to “simplify and shorten” the deployment of M2M services for its customers.

Announced at the CTIA Wireless Show being held this week in Las Vegas, the deal will see Huawei (Shenzhen, China) and Embedded Works (Santa Clara, CA, USA) collaborate to provide customers with embedded modules plus related wireless components and network services.

Wireless sensors specialist Monnit has launched a new M2M cellular gateway that it claims addresses the needs of a variety of M2M applications.

Unveiled at this week’s CTIA Wireless Show in Las Vegas, the gateway is has been designed in response to rising demand for low-cost and reliable “connect-from-anywhere” monitoring solutions, says Monnit (Midvale, UT, USA).