Mexican multi-billionaire Carlos Slim buying MVNO of US' T-Mobile

  

Regional wireless giant America Movil which is controlled by Mexican multi-billionaire Carlos Slim, announced on Thursday that it has agreed to acquire a 100 percent stake in U.S. wireless carrier Simple Mobile, Inc., a unit of T-Mobile USA. Simple Mobile is one of T-Mobile’s biggest mobile virtual network operators in the United States. T-Mobile USA is the subsidiary of Deutsche Telecom AG.

According to figures released in March 2012, America Movil is the largest provider of telecommunications services in the Americas with 246 million cellular subscribers.

The Mexico City-based company said the deal was subject to “certain conditions as well as the granting of certain authorizations.” said while filing with the Mexican Stock Exchange. The filing did not indicate the cost of the acquisition. Simple Mobile provides service to more than 1 million subscribers and offers voice, text messaging, data and wireless broadband services, the filing said.

Accordingly, Tracfone Wireless, U.S. unit of America Movil, will acquire California-based Simple Mobile “in the second quarter of 2012.”

The deal was made public three days after America Movil announcement that it was seeking a stake of up to 28 percent in KPN, a Dutch telecom company, to expand its presence in Europe.

America Movil, which operates in 19 countries across the Americas includes Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, the United States and Uruguay.

It was founded in the 1990s as a unit of Mexico City-based fixed-line giant Telmex but was spun off from its parent company in 2000. Over time, it became bigger than Telmex. In 2010, Carlos Slim, the world’s richest person with a net worth of $74 billion, unified control of his companies under America Movil.

STC picks Huawei for next-generation metro WDM networks in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Telecom Company (STC) selected world's one of the leading information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, Huawei, to supply new solutions to the company’s next-generation metro WDM networks in Saudi Arabia. 

According to STC, it is facing an urgent demand to construct “ultra-bandwidth” metro networks.

STC will be the first operator in the Middle East to leverage world-leading photonic integrated device (PID) technology to save on both space and power usage of its network operations. by utilising Huawei’s metro WDM products.

“The PID technology helps us construct advanced metro WDM networks, provide multi-granularity services quickly and easily, and serve our customers more agilely,” said Khaled I Al-Dharrab, transport network director of STC.

“Due to its simple design and structure, PID technology makes it easier to deploy and maintain next-generation metro WDM networks,” he said.

The technology greatly simplifies the WDM architecture by integrating multiple key photonic components of the WDM system - such as lasers, modulators, detectors, multiplexers and demultiplexers - into a 5cm PID chip. “Compared to a traditional WDM network, a PID-enabled WDM network can save up to 50% of space and power and 90% of the fiber connection,” Al-Dharrab added. 

Huawei, ranked number one in the global optical network market and the WDM/OTN market in Q4 2011, according to consultancy firm Ovum. Its also an industry leader in the area of WDM development and has successfully applied its PID technology around the world, including in Western Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America, and further abroad.