Christmas is approaching but that’s not stopped the mobile phone industry from delivering a week of diverse headlines.

We start today’s podcast by talking about the much-reported complaints involving Orange UK’s tariffs and Carrier IQ’s monitoring before moving on to cheerier topics, including a new MVNO, another free WiFi service and two new mobile payment deals.

Mark Bridge writes:

Season of goodwill?  Not in the mobile phone industry.

Orange UK is putting its prices up next month. It says the 4.34% rise is less than inflation, so you might think customers would be pleased. You’d be wrong. Also unhappy are many people who’ve discovered Carrier IQ software embedded on their phones. Fortunately for the UK mobile industry, most of those people seem to be in the United States. And there was unhappiness in Egypt as Twitter’s acquisition of privacy and security company Whisper Systems saw Whisper’s mobile encryption applications taken (temporarily) offline.

The new Telefónica Digital business unit has reached an agreement with security technology company Giesecke & Devrient to establish a single European-wide platform for Near Field Communication services.

It means that G&D will take care of the ‘Trusted Service Manager’ technology and will also be one of the suppliers of NFC-enabled SIM cards.

Telefónica Digital and Research In Motion have announced an NFC-based mobile wallet.

It’s called the ‘Telefonica wallet for BlackBerry’ and currently supports the BlackBerry Bold 9900, BlackBerry Curve 9360 and BlackBerry Curve 9380, all of which have NFC connectivity and run the BlackBerry 7 operating system.

Telefónica has released its quarterly results along with figures for the first three-quarters of its financial year.

Overall, the company reported a 5.4% increase in revenue to 46.7 billion Euro (£39.9 billion) for the nine-month period and a 6% rise in customer numbers to almost 300 million fixed-line and mobile connections worldwide.