British Sky Broadcasting Group plc has agreed to buy the O2 and BE consumer broadband and fixed-line telephone businesses from Telefónica UK. Adding these half a million customers will make Sky the second-largest provider of broadband in the UK.

Sky is paying Telefonica £180 million for the deal, with the option of an extra £20 million if the transfer runs smoothly. It currently has 4.2 million broadband customers and 4 million telephone customers.

EE, formerly Everything Everywhere, has announced tariff details for its new 4G mobile phone service in the UK. It’s launching 4G in the UK on Tuesday 30th October in Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Sheffield, Glasgow and parts of Southampton. Coverage will expand to Belfast, Derby, Hull, Nottingham and Newcastle by Christmas.

The new service will be called 4GEE and promises average speeds of 8-12Mbps.

The International Telecommunication Union - the United Nations’ agency for Information and Communication technologies - has published its latest figures showing how the uptake of ICT is growing around the world.

Its latest annual report ranks the Republic of Korea (South Korea) as the world’s most advanced ICT economy, followed by Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Finland. The UK is a new entry in the ICT top ten, moving up from last year’s 14th place to 9th place in 2012.

UK telecoms regulator Ofcom has published a new quarterly report that shows the most complained-about telephone and pay TV suppliers.

Complaints about mobile phone services are now being classified as ‘pay monthly’ and ‘pay as you go’ (pre-pay) customers. Ofcom says around 95% of mobile complaints come from users with ‘pay monthly’ contracts, with the number of ‘pay as you go’ complaints currently too low to be statistically valid.

New research commissioned by Azzurri Communications and carried out by Vanson Bourne has found that most medium and large-sized UK businesses are already using or planning to use Unified Communications.

In total, 76% of respondents said they were pursuing a UC strategy.