At a recent industry event, a number of executives trotted out the latest variation on that old maxim of the telecoms industry: “Customers don’t really care about technical details; they just care about what technology can do.” In this instance, it was applied to broadband speeds: “Customers don’t really care that our network can’t deliver 8Mbps speeds, they just care that it allows them to access YouTube, Facebook, etc.”

This week we’re going to play a special version of the classic TV quiz show Going for Gold. Contestants must correctly identify what the show’s guest host, the Informer, is describing: Fingers on your buzzers.

Mobile advertising is almost ten times more effective on young consumers than other forms of advertising, according to research released by mobile ad firm JumpTap.

A meeting of minds between the Middle East’s media and telecoms industries is still some way off, it emerged at the Arab Advisors Group’s Media and Telecoms Convergence conference in Jordan’s capital, Amman, last week.

As expected, California’s king of cool gadgetry, Steve Jobs, delivered the goods on Tuesday.

The meaning of “open” is in the eye of the beholder. Clearly the mobile communications industry is opening up to new ideas, business models, device concepts and the like, but is it becoming truly open? With so many competing commercial interests, not to mention legal and regulatory issues, efforts to really change the business face numerous hurdles.

Earlier this year, US carrier Verizon Wireless (VZW) was suing its competitor Alltel over false advertising. Relations were decidedly frosty. Now, as if in the telecoms version of seminal rom-com When Harry Met Sally, they’ve gone and got it together, after Alltel faked a noisy orgasm in a restaurant. Vodafone - which holds a 45 per cent stake in VZW - confirmed the acquisition on Thursday, which will see VZW gobble up Alltel and its 13 million subscribers for $28.1bn.

The world’s biggest handset vendor, Nokia, and two outsiders, RIM (BlackBerry) and Apple, stand to gain most by pioneering fresh revenue streams for the mobile handset industry with their emerging push into value added services such as navigation, email and music.

China’s government has finally announced details of its restructuring of the local telecoms market, bringing to an end years of speculation, rumors and theorizing about its content.

European mobile operators have raised the price of roaming calls into the European Union by as much as 163 per cent as they seek to offset losses from reduced charges within Europe.