AT&T plans to offer 5G services to customers in a dozen cities this year and is adding Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C. and Oklahoma City as the next three identified cities for its 5G plan. These cities join previously announced cities of Dallas, Atlanta, and Waco. 

Verizon Wireless has launched two new LTE promotions beginning today. Verizon customers with MORE Everything plan can now get 15GB of data per month for $110 or 30GB of data for $130 per month.   

South Africa’s telecom service provider, Vodacom has selected Nokia Siemens Networks’ Liquid Core to enable circuit switched fall-back (CSFB) functionality in its LTE network. This functionality allows LTE users to make and receive voice calls using either the GSM or 3G network while retaining the benefit of data services via LTE.

Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent have entered into a memorandum of understanding under which Nokia will make an offer for all of the equity securities issued by Alcatel-Lucent, through a public exchange offer in France and in the United States, on the basis of 0.55 of a new Nokia share for every Alcatel-Lucent share.

Cisco and it's partners aim to create a UK government funded complete end-to-end rural 5G testbed system for trials of new wireless and networking technologies, spectrum sharing, new applications and services with a focus on testing and demonstrating approaches for ensuring that 5G connectivity is accessible and affordable in hard-to-reach rural areas. 

USA carrier T-Mobile has completed live field testing of mobile broadband data session using License Assisted Access (LAA) on its commercial network. The field testing, which began in Los Angeles yesterday, showed 741 Mbps download speeds using 80 MHz of aggregated spectrum, according to the operator.

U.S. carrier Sprint has announced new 4G LTE roaming agreements with 12 rural and regional network carriers. Along with Sprint’s previously announced amended agreement with nTelos to extend their Strategic Network Alliance through 2022, the Rural Roaming Preferred Program