The European Aviation Safety Agency is planning to publish guidance that’ll allow airlines to permit the use of personal electronic devices in ‘Flight Mode’ during taxiing, take-off and landing as well as throughout commercial flights.

This will cover tablets, smartphones, eBook readers and mp3 players as well as laptops, although heavier devices will need to be stowed safely during take-off and landing.

Ericsson has published the latest edition of its Mobility Report, which shows that the total number of mobile subscriptions worldwide is forecast to reach 9.3 billion by 2019.

More than 60% of these connections - 5.6 billion of them - are expected to be smartphones.

Rural homes and offices in part of Cumbria will be able to use EE’s 4G mobile network as an alternative to fixed-line broadband from next month.

EE is expanding its rural broadband trial in the northern part of the Lake District to cover more than 100 square miles, where it’ll offer ‘superfast’ broadband speeds to over 2,000 residents and businesses for the first time.

Mark Bridge writes:

We started last week with a change of plan from BlackBerry. No, it’s not selling itself to Fairfax Financial. Instead it’s aiming to raise $1 billion from investors. Cynics might suggest there wasn’t enough interest for a takeover.

EE has announced a series of exceptionally large mobile data bundles for businesses including broadcasters and other media organisations.

It’s created a series of 4G data tariffs that can be shared and have no fixed-term contract or expiry date, with bundle sizes from 50 terabytes to 1 petabyte (1 million GB).