China to deploy 4G in 2012

China may start the commercial use of its home-grown fourth-generation telecommunication technology in 2012, and large-scale commercial trials will begin next year, according to officials at China Mobile, the world's largest wireless operator, states People's Daily.

Bill Huang, general manager of the China Mobile Research Institute, said TD-LTE, the next-generation telecommunication standard that China Mobile is promoting, will see large-scale development in 2011.

"The full-scale commercial tests of TD-LTE will first be conducted in cities mainly in the Pearl and Yangtze river deltas," Huang said on the sidelines of the 2010 International Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing.

Vodafone Australia suffered a serious network failure across Western Australia on Saturday afternoon which knocked out both its GSM and 3G networks, reports Cellular News.

A statement by the company on its network status Web site confirmed the outage.

The network failure led to a flood of complaints from customers who were unable to make or receive calls. It has been suggested by local media that Vodafone may have been carrying out network upgrades when the failure occurred, but the company has not commented on the issue.

Networking equipment maker Cisco Systems says it has closed its acquisition of LineSider Technologies, a privately held provider of network management software, reveals Bloomberg.

Financial terms were not disclosed. LineSider's products help companies build the computer network services needed to create cloud computing infrastructure. Cloud computing refers to using software and storing data online rather than on their own computers.

Shares of Cisco, which revealed the acquisition earlier this month, rose 17 cents to $19.87 in late morning trading on Monday.