One was an ill-fated bid to enter the Chinese market by buying CSL, a mobile operator based in Hong Kong.
Together, they have about 15 percent of the Continent's mobile market, according to Transatel, a virtual mobile operator based in Paris.
"We do see it as a way to boost network traffic," says Frank Zandee of KPN, a mobile operator based in the Netherlands that is testing NFC as a means of ticketing at a local football club.
Aditya Birla bought Novelis, a metals firm; Bharti Airtel acquired Zain, a mobile operator based in Africa; and Tata bought Corus, a British steel firm, and JLR, a carmaker.
Sugar Mama is proving popular: at the end of August Ultramercial, the company that manages the scheme, reported that Virgin Mobile had given away more than 10m free minutes.Vodafone, a big mobile operator based in Britain, sees mobile advertising as a potentially lucrative source of additional income.
GSMA, an association of mobile operators based in Europe, has an audio sample of what HD-quality voice will sound like on their website.
The mobile market in China has long been dominated by China Mobile, the world's largest mobile operator by subscriber base, which controlled 74% of China's mobile market as of April this year, according to a study by research company Ovum.
This is a natural progression after its 2006 purchase of O2, a mobile-phone operator based in Britain that is now the main focus of the company's European business.
Société Générale, BNP's rival, didn't fare as well, posting sharply reduced net income for 2009 of €678m as it took write-downs related to its American business.India's Bharti Airtel launched a fresh bid to expand into Africa's telecoms market by entering talks to buy most of the African business of Zain, a mobile-phone operator based in Kuwait.
Mobile network operators base their TDM network capacity dimensioning on Erlang B models.
