Global payments company Visa has launched a new plug-and-play mobile money platform as it looks to seize a greater share of the m-payments market.

Targeted initially at unbanked customers in India and Rwanda, the new platform links a newly-created financial account to a mobile phone number.

Mobile data analysis firm RootMetrics has found that UK-based operator EE’s 4G LTE roll-out is delivering on public promises and is a “measured success” when compared to similar roll-outs in the US.

Tests conducted in Liverpool, Cardiff and Sheffield in December to compare how 4G LTE performed against 3G services offered by EE and rival networks found that EE’s 4G LTE speeds are more than twice as fast as 3G in the three cities.

Networking leader Cisco has predicted a 13-fold increase in mobile Internet traffic over the next four years in its annual Visual Networking Index (VNI) global mobile data traffic forecast due to an increased number of mobile devices and wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) connections.

The number of mobile video calling service users will increase four-fold to nearly 160 million by 2017, driven by technology and user interface improvements, according to a new survey.

Advertising and freemium models are starting to emerge in the mobile video calling market but revenue generation remains the key challenge for mobile video calling players, the study by Juniper Research found.

With the UK's 4G LTE auction for licenses in the 800MHz and 2.6GHz spectrum bands underway, mobile operator Three has surprised its rivals by promising to offer customers the next gen service for free.

The smallest operator in the UK currently, Three caught a lucky break last year when Ofcom ordered rival operator EE to sell 2x15MHz of its 1800MHz spectrum to it as a condition of regulatory approval for the Orange-T-Mobile merger that formed the company.

Ahead of Mobile World Congress, Ericsson has made a series of new announcements dealing with mobile broadband coverage and capacity; mobile services management; and applications and device testing.

The vendor is extending its Antenna Integrated Radio (AIR) portfolio with the launch of AIR 32, a new solution that allows for the introduction of LTE and HSPA without requiring additional antennas or radio units to be added to network sites.

Small cells developer Ubiquisys has announced a new partnership with Saguna Networks to provide a small cell-based caching solution to help ease traffic congestion on mobile operators’ networks.

Saguna provides Radio Access Network (RAN) application acceleration and mobile content delivery software that works over HSPA and LTE networks.

Wireless device testing firm Anite has signed a new three-year deal with Deutsche Telekom to provide interoperability test solutions for mobile devices on its network.

DT is no stranger to Anite’s SAS platform, which it has been using for over five years to analyse issues including dropped calls, non-received calls and network-related signalling.

Nokia has won a deal to integrate its cloud-based HERE navigation and mapping platform into Toyota’s Touch & Go in-car digital navigation systems.

The move is a win for the troubled Finnish handset maker, which has steadily fallen behind in the smartphones race in recent years, particularly in Europe, and is still experiencing heavy losses.

There is a battle looming between the collection and use of big data and the “little” data mined from individual users on a regular and frequently less than transparent basis.

The one will affect the other and not necessarily favourably if a new report from Ovum’s principal analyst Mark Little is anything to go by.