Oman Brunei Investment Company (OBIC) has acquired a majority stake in Omani MVNO Renna Mobile, injecting capital into the company. The investment is earmarked for Renna Mobile’s further expansion plans.

"Yes, I can confirm that we have finalised an investment agreement with OBIC to secure our growth plans in Oman and beyond,” commented Renna Mobile CEO, Joakim Klingefjord. “We are honoured by the fact that OBIC scrutinised several other similar investment opportunities before they decided in our favour."

Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) is to sell its Business Support Systems (BSS) business to Canadian billing and charging specialists Redknee for up to €40 million (US$52 million) – the latest in a long line of divestitures as NSN looks to slim down.

The vendor confirmed in September it was looking to offload the unit and said at the time it was in talks with several parties, thought to also include Ericsson and Amdocs.

The BSS unit supplies real-time charging, rating, policy, and customer care solutions and claims half of the top 100 global mobile operators as customers.

Under the terms of the deal, Redknee will acquire these customer contracts and other assets – and will inherit approximately 1,200 employees in Berlin, Bangalore and Wroclaw.

It will pay €15 million up front plus a maximum of €25 million over the next three years if certain targets are met. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2013.

The joint venture between Nokia and Siemens announced a significant restructuring in November 2011 in a bid to cut €1 billion in costs by the end of 2013. Measures included cutting 17,000 jobs, 23 per cent of the global workforce, and selling off various business units as the company moves to specialise in mobile broadband.

In the past year, NSN has sold its WiMAX unit to NewNet Communication Technologies, its Expedience proprietary fixed wireless broadband business to CN Tetragen, its fixed line broadband access unit to Adtran and microwave transport business to DragonWave.

Etisalat Group’s chief digital services officer, Khalifa Al Shamsi, believes the era of mobile network operators blocking the services of over the top (OTT) players is a bygone era, even in the Middle East.

Speaking at the Middle East Telco Summit in Dubai this morning, Al Shamsi said: “Network operators cannot block application providers as a sustainable strategy. Network operators themselves need to innovate and partner with OTT players and other innovators.”

His comments came on the back of estimates that application providers such as WhatsApp are eating into network operators’ service revenues at an increasing rate, having invested in none of the network infrastructure required to deliver their applications.

“At Etisalat, we are looking to work with partners in areas such as IP voice as we realise much of the innovation in our industry is coming from outside the industry,” Al Shamsi said.

Earlier this week it was reported that Facebook is in talks to acquire the mobile messaging platform WhatsApp.

The report did not reveal its sources, nor the potential size or nature of the takeover discussions, yet such a deal is seen as credible as Facebook seeks to bolster its mobile credentials.

WhatsApp is available as a smartphone app in over a hundred countries and according to reports has 100 million daily active users globally. At the end of October 2011, the last time the company released any usage numbers; it said it was serving 1 billion messages per day.

WhatsApp is currently the number-two paid app in the US version of Apple’s App Store, where it sells for US$0.99. On Google Play, the app is free for the first year, and then US$0.99 per year thereafter. Data from Google Play suggests that the app has been downloaded between 100 million and 500 million times to date.

ZTE has struck a US$20 billion financing agreement with China Development Bank (CDB), the Chinese vendor said.

The pair said the deal will allow “in-depth cooperation in all areas between industry and finance by closely integrating the strengths of CDB in investment and financing and those of [ZTE] in industrial technologies.”

The so-called ‘Development Financing Cooperation Agreement’ builds on an initial deal between the two firms struck in March 2009 and will last for five years.

The US$20 billion is able to be tapped both as a ZTE credit line and, significantly, as a financing facility for the vendor’s overseas projects.

In a statement, ZTE said that the overseas financing would allow it to “meet the funding requirements of overseas customers in the purchase of the company’s equipment and related technical services.”

The credit will come as mid-to-long term loans, short-term loans, debenture financing, factored financing, supply chain financing, as well as trade financing such as guarantees, bills and letters of credit.

Ericsson is seeking a US import ban of Samsung products, following on from the legal action it filed against the South Korean technology giant last week over alleged patent infringement.

Reuters reports that the Swedish infrastructure company filed a request with the US International Trade Commission to ban the import of Samsung products that it claims infringe on its patents.

Ericsson spokesman Fredrik Hallstan told Reuters that the request for the import ban is “a part of the process,” with the goal being to prompt Samsung to “sign license agreements on reasonable terms,” rather than secure the sales ban.

When filing the patent infringement suit last week, Ericsson said Samsung had refused to sign FRAND licensing terms after two years of negotiations.

Samsung licensed Ericsson patents in 2001 and renewed the agreement in 2007. These licences have now expired, according to the Swedish company.

The dispute centres on “several telecommunications and networking standards” that Samsung uses in its devices along with “Ericsson’s patented inventions that are frequently implemented in wireless and consumer electronics products”. Ericsson did not put a value on its damages claim.

Ericsson holds more than 30,000 patents around the world and said it spent around US$5 billion on research and development in 2011.