Nokia appoints head of Asia
Nokia named Paul Tyler as head of Asia Pacific and Japan as part of its planned merger with Alcatel-Lucent.

Tyler will oversee the combined company’s customer operations across the region. He was head of sales for the region from 2009 to 2011 and prior to that was head of Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Islands.

The appointment is subject to the successful closing of the deal announced in April.

CSL offers data carry-over for $6/month
Hong Kong’s largest operator HKT introduced data carry-over for its CSL Mobile customers for HKD48 ($6.20) a month.

The new rollover scheme, named “Piggy Bank Data Carry Forward Service”, allows customers to carry forward their unused mobile data entitlement within their contract period. Any unused data will be automatically rolled over to the following month.

CSL Mobile chief marketing officer Bruce Lam said this is not a simple one-month rollover plan. “It is an accumulator plan that allows our customers to have peace of mind as they can save unused data, accumulate it throughout their contract period and use it to match their needs.”

SmarTone to launch 4G in Macau this month
SmarTone announced it will launch 4G service in Macau this month and named Nokia Networks as the supplier upgrading its 3G network to LTE.

The operator awarded the vendor a five-year contract that covers the planning, deployment and optimisation of the LTE network. It is required to cover 50 per cent of the territory when it launches and have citywide coverage by the end of 2016.

SmarTone, along with rivals CTM, China Telecom (Macau) and Hutchison (3Macau), received their 4G licences in March. Market leader CTM launched 4G service last month.

Telstra, Ericsson demo 5-carrier aggregation
Australia’s Telstra and Ericsson achieved a downlink speed of 950Mb/s on an LTE-Advanced network by aggregating 100MHz of spectrum over five separate 4G channels.

The companies, which demoed five-carrier aggregation across the 700MHz, 1.8GHz, 2.1GHz and 2.6GHz (2 x 20MHz) bands, said they also reached download speeds of more than 843Mb/s end-to-end over the internet via the Speedtest.net site.

Mike Wright, Telstra’s group managing director for networks, said the demonstration shows the advanced state of these standards and its ability to rapidly bring them into commercial service to deliver increased capacity to meet growing demand.

Asus on target to ship 20.5M smartphones
Asus is on target to ship 20.5 million smartphones this year, after shipments hit 13.5 million in the first nine months of the year.

Jerry Shen, the company’s CEO, said it will ship seven million units in Q4 and expects smartphone shipments next year to increase 46 per cent to 30 million units, DigiTimes reported.

Asus will also reduce the number of new models introduced next year to a single-digit range.

Rival Acer also announced plans earlier this month to narrow its range of smartphones next year and focus on improving profit margins instead of pushing to expand shipments.