The European Commission announced yesterday that they had signed a user-level interoperability agreement with the US-run Global Positioning System (GPS). This seems to make sense for Galileo, helping them to overcome the initial market entry hurdles. One can of course speculate that this came at a price. We assume it has to do with the system's military usage. Galileo went back into a state-run operation after a private consortium repeatedly failed to meet its launch schedules and budget forecasts.

Yesterday Europe (if you want to count Russia as European) got their WiMAX Sprint equivalent. At least that's what pretty unknown Russian company Summa Telecom announced. They plan to invest $1 bln into a nationwide WiMAX network covering some 330 cities by 2010. In addition they also want to invest $600 million into a GSM network. The money is coming from Summa Telecom's main shareholder and they got it, not surprisingly, from the oil and metal business: "Funds for the construction of the networks will be provided by our main shareholder, Ziyavudin Magomedov," Ryabov said. "

Summa Telecom owns the only nationwide WiMAX spectrum, following an auction in November 2006. Speculation was that they would just resell those licenses, but as it turns out they have their own plans.

The GPS navigation market has been hot for quite some time now. You can see this for yourself when you try to buy a BT GPS receiver and are told that they have all been sold out for now two weeks already... something that happened to me last Friday in Media Markt. But of course online you can order still.

Now Europe's number one navigation solution vendor TomTom announced that they will buy the shares of Tele Atlas for a 32% premium. It is not a hostile takeover, as the joint press release on Tele Atlas' website also suggests. I think we can expect many more deals soon as the market continues to heat up, with mobile phone vendors starting to move in, too.

After rumours were spread that T-Mobile would sell the iPhone in Germany, while others said that Vodafone would not, German Walmart-equivalent Media Markt is now showing the iPhone on their website with no launch date but the heading "Touching is believing". The Apple phonemania continues and we are getting a bit tired of it so will stop any more blogging on it to concentrate on more important topics...

With Google's annoucement to put down $ 4.6 bln for an upcoming 700 MHz spectrums auction in the US they made it pretty clear what ambitions they have. Other investments also point in that direction (FON, Ubiquisys, Meraki Networks, Current Technologies) as well as its ownership of lots of dark fiber that can serve as backhaul. What could stand in their way, though, are its plans to open the network up to just any service provider, something that goes too far for the FCC, which may be looking for more openness but not to that extent. If you want to take it a step further and really scare the incumbents you could think of the following scenario. Google builds an open access country-wide network and Apple provides its iPhone for it exclusively. Knowing the closeness of the two companies that is not entirely impossible. Quite a nightmare for the wireless industry...