Nortel has confirmed today it has entered into a sale agreement with Swedish-based Ericsson Corp. to buy Nortel’s CDMA Business and LTE Access Assets for $1.13 billion following Nortel’s liquidation.

Nortel President and CEO Mike Zafirovski said in a statement today, “[The sale] represents a very positive prospect for our customers who will be able to continue their relationships with a long term partner; for employees who will have new opportunities at Ericsson and for many of our other stakeholders. I want to especially thank our customers for their tremendous support during the process, which contributed to such a positive outcome.”

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Swedish-based telecom network maker Ericsson has announced it will be investing $1.5 billion over the next five-years in South Korea to build a research center to create fourth-generation network equipment.

Under the plan, Ericsson will employee a total of 1,000 people at its South Korean-based unit, up from just under 100 current employees.

Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg announced the plan today during a meeting in Sweden with South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak.

The new 4G wireless technologies will be sold around the world to telecoms.

Chinese company Huawei Tech has won a contract to the tune of USD $583 million to install 3G phone networks across Costa Rica. About 935,000 customers in the country would use the new networks. Huawei beat out Ericcson and ZTE Inc. (Chinese based) in its bid. Costa Rican officials said the network should be in use by the end of 2009.

China has announced it will begin to issue licenses to companies for its 3G mobile network for over $40 billion in government contracts. The Chinese infrastructure will include C and WCDMA, and TD-SCDMA. It is more likely China will opt for extensive use of the TD-SCDMA standard as it was developed by China and therefore China would avoid paying royalties. The Chinese government has awarded 3G contracts mainly to domestic Read the full story

The Google Open Handset Alliance today has just announced 14 new members are on board for further developing and adopting Google’s Android Mobile OS. The new companies include Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, Garmin, ASUSTek, AKM Semiconductor Inc., Telco Vodafone, among others. Ericsson has also previously announced it plans to release a Google powered device by mid 2009. “Sony Ericsson is excited to announce its membership of the Open Handset Alliance and confirm its intention to develop a handset based on the Android platform,” said Rikko Sakaguchi, CVP and head of Creation and Development at Sony Ericsson. The most notable news here is that Vodafone is on board, who has more than 280 million subscribers. The GPhone is expected to sell about 500,000 units by the end of 2008 (manufactured by HTC), and will only sell more given the new partnerships in 2009. The GPhone is free for partners to use while other mobile operating systems are significantly more costly. I can tell you from experience that each Windows Mobile license costs about $7 per unit, while Symbian costs about $3 per unit. Clearly, there is a lot of money for companies to save when they sell millions of units.

The mobile phone space has become very interesting recently. Companies are realizing consumers expect more, want to stay connected, and want to have access to a variety of reasonably priced applications. More recently, BlackBerry maker RIM started a $150 million fund towards the development of third party applications for the BlackBerry. However, third party applications for the BB are scarce and pricey. Nokia also realizes that users want to stay connected with friends all the time and will introduce a new home-screen platform for their upcoming Nokia N97 where users can easily update their location and stay connected with friends via Facebook and other social networking services. As the GPhone becomes widely adopted, we will begin to see an array of programs, that will hopefully benefit consumers as other market players increase innovation to push bigger and better products of their own.