Samsung Electronics has been chosen by Three UK to provide 3G and 4G LTE infrastructure equipment. It’s the first commercial mobile network roll-out for Samsung in Europe.

There’ll be a trial of LTE base stations across the UK from this year, with a commercial launch planned for 2013.

Three UK is relaunching its SIM-only tariffs, describing the new deals as ‘built for the internet’.

Pricing starts from £6.90 per month for a 12-month minimum term contract that includes 200 minutes of calls, 5000 text messages and 500MB of data. The deal offers a guarantee of no surprise UK ‘out of bundle’ data charges when the allowance is used.

Multinational conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa has published results for the first half of 2012.

Net profit was down 78% to 10.21 billion Hong Kong dollars, although last year’s figure had been boosted by the company selling some of its port assets. Revenue for the six months rose 6% to HK$194.99 billion.

Customers on the Three UK network have more than doubled their monthly mobile data usage within the past year. Last summer, average use by ‘pay monthly’ contract customers was 450 megabytes per month - but the figure is now up to 1.1 gigabytes.

Three offers ‘all you can eat’ data options on all of its tariffs, pointing out that most other UK smartphone users are on a tariff with an allowance of no more than 1GB.

UK regulator Ofcom has published its plans for the launch of 4G mobile phone and mobile broadband service. It’s aiming to start the 4G spectrum auction by the end of this year.

The proposed sale will offer 80% more radio spectrum than the 2000 UK 3G auction and is equivalent to three-quarters of the mobile spectrum in use today.