Optus has appointed Hugh Humphrey, formerly a senior Vodafone executive as marketing director, enterprise mobile and converged services in Optus Business and Jim Jaques as marketing director of its Consumer business.

The adoption of new mobile applications and services in the Chinese market offers future opportunities for mobile UC vendors and service providers as China’s SMEs are forecast to continue to spend more on mobile services rather than fixed services.

After Telstra’s indignant response to Optus’ claims that it’s now able to go “head to head” with Telstra’s Next G network, Optus has hit back saying that it’s simply getting on with the job and that Telstra is “threatened”.

Yet another massive mobile broadband offering has landed in Australia, this time from iPrimus, promising not only a 6GB and a (consumer-level) unmatched 12GB plan, but also the promise of a speed-limited service after the download limit is reached, banishing those super-expensive excess download charges. What’s the catch?

BT has unveiled plans to launch BT Corporate Fusion, a fixed mobile convergence offering for corporate customers in Australia and other Asia Pacific markets.

Vodafone NZ mobiles can act like a fixed phone with a fixed number and fixed line rates when you use them at home, and the key technology behind the service comes from a small Australian company, Seeker Wireless.

Vodafone's one-stop shop converged offering for small business, Vodafone Business One , is truly  an ambitious move. It certainly brings to small business an offering with a level of integration and 'one-stop-shopness' that is unprecedented and the technology Vodafone is using has the potential to support a wide range of business applications.

Vodafone Australia, Cisco and the company behind the BlackBerry, Research In Motion (RIM) have teamed up to offer a one-stop shop communications service for small business combining fixed and mobile voice and data services, IP PBX, Blackberry and a converged fixed and mobile communications functionality. It will be sold, billed and supported by Vodafone on a fixed cost per month per user basis with no upfront fees.

US telco Sprint is finally moving ahead with its WiMAX plans and will have a WiMAX 4G network installed in Baltimore and Washington DC by the end of 2008, after a year of endless testing - but two cities is far from complete US coverage.

The trend towards building HSPA modems directly into laptops goes into overdrive as Ericsson launches a new HSPA and GPS equipped notebook module, with Dell the latest major international customer, after Lenovo earlier this year. Who needs dongles and cards, when built-in is better?