It’s hard to keep up with the fast paced Spy-vs-Spy world of Internet financial journalism, and the Verizon – Vodafone drama is no less dynamic.  But it seems like Verizon is going to acquire the 45% share of Verizon Wireless for a $120B deal of stock and cash(debt). 

The rumor mill wheels turned a bit louder this past weekend as Nokia has been tipped to launch a Windows RT tablet.  Dubbed "Sirius", the 10.1" slate would be Nokia's first tablet since it ventured outside of handsets with a netbook and MID a few years back.

India’s two major satellite TV operators, Reliance Digital TV and Sun Direct TV are set to merge in near future according to sources. 

Tom’s Hardware has a good review of an early engineering sample Intel Xeon E5-2697 V2, 12-core, 22nm processor (here) fueling speculation that it will appear in the next generation Mac Pro.   Now that the Xeon processors are moving to the 22 nm node on the Intel roadmap, when will mobile broadband operators benefit from this performance gains in their infrastructure equipment?  If mobile operators and their vendors embrace the commercial IT and SDN/NFV paradigms, then they can very quickly reap benefits by adding this processing capability to their server farms.  WebScale firms will take advantage of the performance boost as soon as the commercial IT kit gets through the pipeline.

In 1Q 2013, 43.3 million units of consumer Wi-Fi equipment, including access points, routers, gateways and network interface cards were shipped. 802.11n protocol accounts for more than two thirds of total shipment. It was noticeable that newer 802.11ac standard-based devices have started to enter Wi-Fi market.

Telefonica acquires E-Plus and merging with O2 will make the largest mobile operator in Germany, so let me do the math:

O2 UK will start to switch on 4G network from 29^th August 2013, firstly in London, Leeds and Bradford with five million people covered, and then extend to 13 cities by the end of year to reach 98% of the UK population both indoor and outdoor in its 2G, 3G and 4G networks. 

On July 30, NSN provided an update on the virtualization progress of their Liquid Core / Liquid Network development.   NSN has been an early leader with the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) virtualization with their Proof of Concept activity using commercial off-the-shelf equipment.  The initial virtualization developments were on the ATCA platform, and commercial deployments were TBD. 

SIM card manufacturers (and the secure IC manufacturers) employ a variety of security and encryption methods to protect data and prevent physical and logical attacks on the cards.  DES has been known to be used although it is difficult to say on what proportion of cards this is still employed as a standalone method of encryption (I am trying to verify this with MNO and vendor contacts).  It is safe to say that high-end cards typically employ 3DES and AES, and in some instances PKI as used in our e-passports.  As well as meeting the requirements of groups representing the major payment card brands and high value multimedia content; some are also being tested to house government ID cards and all these applications require the highest levels of security for SIM cards and devices.