In a regular series, Mobile World Live‘s Asia Editor Joseph Waring provides a regional roundup of news snippets:

Airtel challenges DoT licence fee
Bharti Airtel is challenging the Indian government’s plan to extract a $71 million charge for merging the licence of its ISP unit, obtained from Qualcomm, with its universal access service licence. The operator argues that the fee should not be applied since its universal licence includes the four service areas (or circles) that the ISP unit covers, the Economic Times reported.

Optus rolls out TDD LTE-A in 4 cities
Australia’s Optus has upgraded its network in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide to TDD LTE-Advanced technology with carrier aggregation. The network runs on the 2.3GHz band and supports a theoretical peak download speed of 220Mb/s. The company said Canberra will be added in the next few weeks. Optus aims to cover 90 per cent of the population by next April. Four compatible devices will be introduced in the next couple of months.

Moody’s upgrades True
Moody’s has upgraded True Corp to B2 from Caa1 following its THB65 billion ($2 billion) recapitalisation, which has significantly improved its weak equity base.

True Corp raised THB28.6 billion in a private placement of shares with China Mobile and an additional THB36.4 billion through a rights offering to existing shareholders. This allowed the company to repay THB55 billion in outstanding bank loans, reducing its debt level to THB45 billion.

Moody’s estimates its reported shareholders’ equity increased to over THB60 billion from THB6.2 billion as of June 2014, having been eroded after several years of net losses.

Vodafone Australia bulks up prepaid plans
Vodafone Australia has doubled the data allowance for its AUD30 ($28) and AUD40 prepaid plans to 1GB. Customers who recharge online or via the MyVodafone app also receive an additional 250MB and 500MB, respectively.

Its AUD50 plan now comes with 3GB of data (plus a 500MB bonus for online payment) as well as unlimited calls to ten countries in the region until early January.

Vodafone said 4G customers use double the data of 3G users and 4G data usage has increased 60 per cent since the start of the year.

Telmor’s network covers 96% of East Timor
Telmor, a unit of Vietnam’s Viettel group, has rolled out network service to remote villages in East Timor and now covers 96 per cent of the country’s population. Over the last year it has installed 320 2G and 3G base stations and 1,600km of fibre-optic cable. Telmor, with 400,000 customers, is the country’s leading operator. It expects to generate $17 million in revenue and $4 million in net profit this year.

Nok Air first to use Thaicom’s in-flight service
Thailand’s low-cost airline, Nok Air, became the first airline to use Thaicom’s satellite-based in-flight connectivity service on a flight from Bangkok to Phuket recently. The service uses the Ku-band to provide Wi-Fi on commercial flights. The agreement is initially for six aircraft, with a plan to expand the service to the entire fleet of 22 aircraft within three years.