Yesterday, I had posted a story on LG Electronics' strong performance in 3G wireless handsets.  At the end of the piece, I mentioned an article that I came across Telecoms Korea talking about a potential deal involving LGE selling its communications unit to either Nortel or Cisco (I discovered the original article on Tuesday this week, but could not find any official news item on Google News or any other source).

Well, today, someone e-mailed me a Dow Jones Newswires story claiming that that rumor is now official: LGE will spin-off its telecommunications unit and establish a JV with Nortel:

Interesting news item - but it is still early to jump to any conclusions until more details are announced.  For instance, I wonder if the JV will or will not include the 3G handset part of the LGE communications organization (the original report mentioned specifically that the 3G operation would not be a part of the JV exercise).  If so, then the deal makes sense for Nortel, since the company is actively competing in the 3G space, and this can create some synergies (e.g. Hutchison 3, a leading W-CDMA operator). 

However, speculatively speaking, there will be some duplication in the enterprise division (in terms of the LGE KTS and PBX, as well as the interest in KTS vendor Vodavi).  I would imagine LGE would keep its enterprise product lines and sell them in Korea and APAC (except possibly for Australia and other areas where Nortel is strong).  Nortel would still use its enterprise product lines in the remaining regions around the world.  Again, the information is still very fluid, so it is early to make too many conclusions.

Note: The story originally appeared on Edaily, a respected Korean publication.  Since I don't speak Korean, I tried searching for LG in the text and found the article.  Then, finding an online Korean to English translation tool was difficult (Google's language tools currently do not include support for Korean-to-English translation).  Altavista does have such an engine, albeit the translation is not the best (I guess the engine is still a work in progress).  But here it is, in any event.  The URL is:

http://www.edaily.co.kr/news/exclusive/read.asp?newsid=02102486573423072&strPage=1&curtype=read

(scroll down to "Traduci una pagina web" and copy and paste the above URL).  Then, choose "da Coreano a Inglese" on the combo box and click on the button that says "Traduci".

The CRTC VoIP hearings continued today, the final day of the three-day public consultation period that will determine the regulator's stance of VoIP.  Yesterday, Jeff Pulver posted his own submission to the CRTC in his blog.  Not surprisingly, Jeff pitched an FCC-like stance, much like the same position that I have been advocating here at TF.  But I liked the way he so candidly said:

Time will tell whether or not the CRTC will take a page out of the FCC book and adopt a minimum-regulation position.  Actually, it is not just the FCC that took that route; in fact, there are other countries such as the UK, Austria and Singapore that have also reached the same conclusion.  As Richard Stastny points out in his blog, it seems that regulators that have already dealt for some time with issues such as ENUM are apparently more forward-thinking towards VoIP (Ed. note: Richard has been one of the key players in Austria's ENUM initiative and has spread the ENUM gospel in a few VON conferences).

Once the hearings are completed, the commission will have to ponder upon a lot of issues, before making its final decision, which is expected to happen in the first half of next year.

Update: Transcripts should be available sometime soon (now that the hearings are over) - check the main CRTC VoIP hearings page.