Ofcom has announced plans for a consultation on how to protect consumers from price rises that happen within fixed-term contracts for landline, broadband and mobile phone services.

Current rules insist that communications providers give their customers at least one month’s notice of any significantly detrimental change to their contractual terms.

The GSMA, the trade organisation that represents more than a thousand companies in the mobile industry, has published new research that shows the industry still has plenty of growth potential.

Total mobile connections worldwide are expected to reach 6.8 billion by the fourth quarter of this year. When machine-to machine communications and inactive SIM cards are excluded, the figure is 5.9 billion connections.

Google published its quarterly results yesterday, revealing a drop in quarterly profits. There was also embarrassment when a draft version of the results was published early.

Third quarter revenue was up year-on-year to $14.1 billion although net income fell by around 20% to $2.18 billion from the previous year’s figure. UK revenue was $1.2 billion.

Nokia Corporation has published its quarterly results for the third quarter of 2012. Net sales were down 19% on the same quarter last year to €7.24 billion and the company made a much bigger loss than it did in Q3 2011: €576 million compared with €71 million last year.

However, the loss was less than the two previous quarters.

The High Court in London has rejected Apple’s appeal against a ruling that Samsung hadn’t infringed its iPad design. Samsung won the original case in July with a judge deciding the Samsung Galaxy Tab range was “not as cool” as the Apple iPad’s appearance.

Part of the ruling involved Apple running advertisements saying that Samsung hadn’t copied its designs.