As the telecom market soured, Winstar's stock plummeted.
The telecom business is seen as an important gateway into France's telecom market.
The Indian telecom market is the second largest in the world after China by the number of customers, with an estimated 911 million connections.
"There's a big phase of growth in the U.S. telecom market," Lowell C. McAdam, Verizon's chief executive, said in an interview.
"The Nordic telecom market is screaming for consolidation, and Sonera is bound to be a piece of it," Johan Brostroem, an analyst with Hagstroemer & Qviberg in Stockholm, said.
Telef?a has been a financial investor in the Chinese telecom market since 2005, when it bought a 2.99percentt stake in China Netcom.
Mr. Peralta then sold it in pieces to Verizon and Vodafone for almost $2 billion -- the last part just before the telecom market collapsed.
India is now the world's fastest growing telecom market, with more than one million new mobile phone subscriptions sold each month.
A real zero-roaming Europe hinges on a major telecom market reform, which is a mammoth task to achieve in just 13 months".
Scandinavian phone companies have been expanding through acquisitions as competition in the saturating telecom market hurts prices and leaves little room for growth.
The service provider KT, the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in South Korea, announced in September that it had shipped more than one million of the devices in just nine months, which it said were "transforming the Korean telecom market".
