The “stalking horse” deal announced in June between Nortel Networks Corp. and Nokia Siemens Networks led to a series of speculations in July on whether other vendors would announce competing bids for Nortel’s carrier wireless unit or if Nokia would announce intentions to buy other Nortel assets.
While companies were vying for Nortel’s assets, employees fighting for better layoff terms were submitting bomb threats. Nortel offices around the world were placed under security watch after French employees threatened to blow up the company’s Chateaufort plant.
Intentions to counter the Nokia Siemens’ bid were announced mid-month by private equity firm MatlinPatterson Global Advisors, which began assembling an advisory team for the offer. A few days later, Nortel announced it had entered a second “stalking horse” agreement with Avaya Inc. for the purchase of its enterprise units.
Research in Motion joined the Nortel saga by complaining to the federal government that it was shut out of the bidding process for Nortel’s wireless properties, followed up with an announcement that its bid had been rejected and then issued a press release warning that the sale of Nortel’s wireless unit could lead to national security concerns.
LM Ericsson of Sweden became the third company to go public with an offer to buy Nortel’s carrier wireless unit. MatlinPatterson announced the details of its offering through the affiliated MPAM Wireless Inc.
Ericsson won the auction as the highest bidder for Nortel’s carrier wireless unit and started seeking out government support for the purchase.
One year after the spectrum auction, which resulted in four new entrants (Globalive Wireless Management Corp., Data and Audio Visual Enterprises Wireless – DAVE – Inc., Videotron Ltd. and Public Mobile Inc.) to the Canadian wireless business, a rivalry began between Globalive and Telus Corp. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) made plans to conduct a hearing in September about Globalive’s foreign ownership.
The CRTC began a six-day net neutrality hearing to determine whether it should impose restrictions on providers that manage traffic on their networks.
Following on the netbook explosion across the U.S., Rogers Communications Inc. became the first Canadian wireless operator to leverage the netbook market by bundling a data plan with Hewlett-Packard Co.’s HP Mini 110.
Statistics released by Apple Inc. to celebrate the one-year anniversary of its App Store made clear its dominance in the smart phone application market. iPhone users had downloaded over 1.5 billion applications, over 65,000 apps were available and over 100,000 users were contributing to the iPhone Developer Program.
Rogers Communications made a bold claim to have become the fastest wireless operator in North America. But an even bolder move came from CIPS by proposing Canadian technology professionals should be exempt from personal income taxes and the government should eliminate sales taxes on technology products.
uSocial.net, known for controversial “artificial popularity” services, put packages of Twitter followers on sale. Twitter made the news again towards the end of the month, with Best Buy Co. Inc. becoming one of the first major companies to publicly indicate a specific number of Twitter followers as a preferred qualification in a job listing.
