The beginning of the end (of the year)

Actual telecoms news has been thin on the ground this week, so it’s rather fitting that the Informer filed his last edition of A Week in Wireless for 2007.

The biggest news, such as it is, is that Sprint Nextel reckons its still going ahead with a commercial launch of WiMAX next year – a statement which didn’t seem to get much coverage from the analyst community. Still, Daryl Schoolar, senior analyst at In-Stat has some comment on Sprint potentially spinning the business off.

Another company that might be doing some spinning off is Motorola, which, given its poor performance of late, is facing increasing calls to be broken up. Brian Modoff, Deutsche Bank analyst, has some comments on Moto’s potential trip to the breaker’s yard in the Economist.

We’re getting well into roundup story season now, so Michael Gartenberg, of Jupiter Research, has a list of features he’d like to find in the iPhone. While Dean Bubley, over at Disruptive Analysis, looks at ‘device of the year’ for 2007, which is of course, where the iPhone gets another mention.

Meanwhile, pre-empting a lot of interest next year, China has lifted geographic restrictions on foreign investment and increased the ceiling on assets ownership by overseas companies. Charice Wang at Ovum, has some comment here.