With the growing demand for mobile data, cellular service operators are increasingly turning to small cells -- picocells, microcells, metrocells and femtocells -- to deal with the capacity crunch in dense urban areas and to add coverage in areas with low or zero cellular signal levels, such as indoors and in remote rural locations.

Amid growing interest in small cells, widely seen as an inevitable tool for carriers to deal with booming mobile data demand, there are now signs that it may be hard to derive the expected benefits from them in some cases.

Using caching technology from Akamai Technologies, Ericsson's Smart Cloud Accelerator, announced Wednesday, is designed to allow operators to improve performance in both fixed and mobile networks.

Research in Motion (RIM) on Tuesday appointed a new chief operating officer (COO) and chief marketing officer (CMO) as RIM prepares to launch BlackBerry 10 smartphones later this year in hopes of reversing a decline in its global smartphone share.

Cisco, Juniper, HP and nine other technology companies have joined forces with two leading universities to form a research center focused on software-defined networking (SDN).

Apple, Microsoft and a handful of other tech companies are now free to license $US4.5 billion in patents they bought at auction last year from bankrupt Nortel, which could open up a can of worms for companies using technology covered by the patents.

Chinese communications vendor, Huawei, has been confirmed as the equipment supplier for the rollout of the Optus 4G LTE network in Newcastle, New South Wales, and surrounding areas.

Ericsson has made an offer to acquire the Broadcast Services Division of Technicolor, as it looks to make further inroads into the broadcast market, the company said on Tuesday.

Using more spectrum and advanced antennas, vendors and operators plan to increase mobile speeds. But the key to increasing speeds as researchers look at future networks, which will someday be dubbed 5G by marketers, is to shorten the distance between users and base stations, and allowing them to automatically be reconfigured.

Security researchers have shown that carefully crafted text messages sent to cell phones via short message service (SMS) can cause them to shutdown without the knowledge of the owner.

A number of different technologies are being developed or improved to offer higher speeds for fixed and mobile broadband networks, as operators are preparing to compete with each other and carry video traffic in 3D and at higher resolutions, which is expected to happen in the coming year.