Cellular News reports that an industry standard for various UK railway operators to offer mobile phone-based barcode tickets has been agreed between mobile applications developer, Masabi, and the Rail Settlement Plan (RSP), the rail ticketing body jointly owned by UK train operating companies.

Alcatel-Lucent and Datang Mobile today announced their consortium has won the largest share in China Mobile's tender for the second phase of its TD-SCDMA mobile network trial.

The Times notes that passengers travelling on Bmi, the UK airline, can now use their mobile phones to send text messages, but not make calls, on aircraft flying between London's Heathrow and Moscow.

US WiMAX operator Clearwire looks set to switch on a mobile WiMAX network in the US city of Portland early next year, its first since its high-profile asset merger with Sprint Nextel was completed at the end of November.

Orascom has announced that its historic 3G network launch in North Korea will be known as 'Koryolink' and confirmed that the operation will be a joint-venture between Orascom Telecom Holding (75 percent) and the local state-owned body, Korea Posts and Telecomm Corp (KPTC), which will hold the remaining 25 percent.

China Telecom has awarded Motorola a large CDMA network contract covering 42 cities in nine provinces across the country.

Unstrung reports that the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) last week agreed on an initial set of specifications for Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology, to be included in the 3GPP's new Release 8 set of standards.