Finnish-German giant Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) said Tuesday its purchase of Motorola's wireless network infrastructure assets would be delayed until 2011 pending approval from Chinese regulators.

The companies had announced on July 19 that NSN would buy most of Motorola's wireless network infrastructure assets for 1.2 billion dollars (926 million euros), bolstering its ranking as world number two in the industry.

NSN said at the time both firms expected to complete the deal, which needed regulatory approvals, by the end of 2010.

On Tuesday, the Finnish-German company said in a statement it now expected "to complete its acquisition of the majority of Motorola's public carrier wireless network infrastructure assets in the first quarter of 2011."

"The transaction has not yet received regulatory approval from the Anti-Monopoly Bureau of the Ministry of Commerce of China, which is continuing its review process," the company said, adding "all other necessary regulatory clearances have been obtained."

On December 15, the European Commission gave the green light to the transaction, saying it would "not significantly impede effective competition in the European Economic Area (EEA) or any substantial part of it."

The deal has also received the approval of regulators in the United States, Brazil, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Taiwan and Turkey, NSN said.

earlier related report

Millions affected as Skype goes down
Washington (AFP) Dec 22, 2010 –

Skype suffered an outage lasting several hours on Wednesday affecting millions of users of the Internet communications service.

"Our engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal — thanks for your continued patience," Luxembourg-based Skype said in a message on its Twitter feed @Skype.

In a blog post, Skype explained that computers known as "supernodes" had been taken offline by an unspecified problem affecting some versions of Skype.

"Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of supernodes available," Skype said. "Our engineers are creating new 'mega-supernodes' as fast as they can, which should gradually return things to normal.

"This may take a few hours, and we sincerely apologise for the disruption to your conversations," Skype said. "Some features, like group video calling, may take longer to return to normal."

Skype, which was founded in 2003, bypasses the standard telephone network by channeling voice, video and text conversations over the Internet.

The company announced plans in August to raise up to 100 million dollars in shares by listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

The service has millions of users around the world and many took to Twitter to complain about the outage in a variety of languages.

"Holy crap. end of the world… #skype is down," wrote Rafael Otero on his Twitter feed @rotero.

"Ugh. #skype went down when I was in the middle of a call," said Carly-Anne Fairlie on @carlyannedotcom.

Technology blogger Om Malik, writing on his blog GigaOm.com, said the outage was a serious issue for a company that is "starting to ask larger corporations for their business."

"If I am a big business, I would be extremely cautious about adopting Skype for business, especially in the light of this current outage," Malik said, adding that Skype "needs to ensure that it doesn't go down. Even for a few minutes."

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