The threat comes at a sensitive time for European telecommunications-equipment suppliers, which are looking to increase their business in China.

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Chinese telecommunications carriers are scrambling to ramp up their networks to accommodate the rapid increase in data traffic in the world’s largest mobile market, as more people replace their basic cellphones with smartphones. China has already overtaken the U.S. as the world’s biggest smartphone market.

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The telecommunications giant has benefited from surging wireless revenue, as more of its customers switch over to smartphones. But AT&T has been falling further behind Verizon Wireless in wireless subscriber numbers, as the two biggest wireless players in the U.S. battle each other for new customers.

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For our readers who are not inclined to constantly hit the refresh button, here’s a quick look back at the Top 10 stories that drove AllThingsD this week:

1. Disney Shuts Down LucasArts
2. Here’s Why You Hate Your Cable Company
3. AT&T: Oh, Wait … About That Samsung Galaxy S4 Pricing
4. Samsung Says Apple’s Patent Damages Could Still Exceed $1 Billion
5. HD Voice Will Start Coming to AT&T Later This Year
6. You Still Can’t Resell Your iTunes Songs, Court Rules
7. Elissa Murphy, One of Yahoo’s High-Profile Tech Execs, Heads to Go Daddy as CTO
8. Henry Blodget Is Quietly Planning a Stunning Return to Wall Street
9. What’s Dell’s Bidding Process Really About? (Clue: It’s Not About Fixing Dell)
10. Windows Phone Gaining a Toehold in Some Markets

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Worldwide, Gartner says, companies and organizations will spend a combined $3.8 trillion on hardware, software, IT services and telecommunications. That’s $100 billion higher than the last forecast it made in October.

While the U.S. avoided the fiscal cliff that five months ago cast a pall over everything related to the global economy and thus IT spending, the automatic sequestration that has mandated sudden cuts in government spending has offset any gains. And while Europe has settled down, the latest sovereign debt issues in Cyprus have also served as something of a setback. Both are seen as short-term headwinds.

Spending on devices — smartphones, tablets and printers — has grown like crazy, which shouldn’t surprise anybody, and will continue to grow, the firm says. Last year, spending on devices was $665 billion globally, and is expected to reach $718 billion this year, or 8 percent more.

Spending on enterprise software is running a close second, and is expected to grow by more than 6 percent to $297 billion. Here, a slowdown in IT operations management software is being offset by growth in spending on database management systems.

IT services and data center systems are also expected to grow this year, but a bit more slowly than in the previous forecast. Spending is coming down in the near-term on external storage and in Europe. IT services is seeing some intense price competition and redirection of budgets away from new consulting projects.

The slowest-growing segment will be telecom services, which declined last year. Gartner says it will generate about $1.7 trillion in revenue, up about 2 percent from last year. Declines in spending on voice are being offset by mobile data.

“We will focus on getting the telecommunications industry as our partners” in infrastructure development, Mr. Schmidt said Friday to hundreds of students and technology entrepreneurs at a university here. He said repeatedly that the government must allow private-sector investment in the industry and allow faster, data-friendly third- and fourth-generation networks to modernize communication.

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An original draft of a report by a Federal Communications Commission panel, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, endorsed a list of concrete suggestions for major telecommunications and cable companies to tackle the cyber security problem. Those measures — which included steps such as controlling which employees have administrative privileges on company networks –weren’t backed in the final report, which FCC officials said was to be released Monday evening.

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Asked in an interview whether the ownership of U.S.-based Verizon Wireless — which is held 55 percent by Verizon Communications Inc. and 45 percent by Vodafone — will be the same in a year’s time, Mr. Colao said “I don’t know,” adding that Vodafone has an open mind “on everything.”

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Some directors have been frustrated with Ben Verwaayen’s slow progress in turning around the telecommunications equipment maker, one person close to the board said. Another person said the decision was mutual and that Mr. Verwaayen had managed to stabilize the company. The company is searching for a replacement, and Mr. Verwaayen plans to stay on until one is found, Alcatel-Lucent said.

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The telecom giant has accrued massive retirement liabilities because of its history stretching back to the days of Ma Bell. Those obligations tend to increase in a low-interest-rate environment because the present value of those future payments rises.

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In the filing, posted Thursday, Dish said many issues are unresolved in the acquisition review, which includes Sprint’s deal to buy the rest of majority-owned Clearwire Corp. Dish recently proposed a $3.30-a-share offer for Clearwire, above Sprint’s agreement to pay $2.97 a share, and says that uncertainty surrounding process could lead to major amendments to the Sprint/Softbank review.

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The telecommunications giant is considering buying a counterpart in Europe, a bet that it can best escape constraints on growth at home by getting into a new wireless market where it can upgrade technology and roll out more lucrative pricing strategies, people familiar with the carrier’s thinking said.

The company is currently studying targets, and a deal — if one happens — could come before the end of the year, those people said.

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Frank Dunn, Nortel’s former chief executive, Douglas Beatty, the former chief financial officer, and Michael Gollogly, the former corporate controller, were found not guilty of misstating Nortel’s financial results between 2000 and 2004. Those results entitled them to bonuses worth a total of 12.8 million Canadian dollars ($13 million).

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Clearwire shares immediately rose above the offer price Thursday, reinforcing expectations that any deal for the smaller wireless company will likely need to be higher. Although Sprint controls a majority of both Clearwire’s stock and board seats, any deal must be approved by a majority of non-Sprint directors and a majority of remaining shareholders.

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Sprint is also after its smaller partner’s spectrum rights.

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The company intends to change that, at least in one fashion, with the launch of a significant branding campaign combining broadcast, print, Web, social and augmented reality that gets under way today and should run well into next year. CEO John Chambers previewed the “Tomorrow Starts Here” Now campaign at Cisco’s annual meeting with financial analysts in New York on Friday.

The idea appears to be to make networking instead of computing the most important part in the narrative of the Internet’s next phase in growth and evolution. For years, computing has seemed the central player in the march of technology of which the Internet is the logical end result.

Cisco has cleverly attempted to hijack and then enhance the tired-out phrase “Internet of Things,” and has changed it to “Internet of Everything,” implying that everything worth knowing anything about, from traffic lights to trees, will be connected to the Internet in some fashion.

The new campaign — a broadcast spot can be seen below — was created by advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners, whose clients include Yahoo, Netflix and TD Ameritrade. It’s also known for doing some high-concept tech ads, like this spot for Sprint connecting 4G cell phones to the wheel, the first supersonic flight and other great scientific firsts in history.

I talked to Cisco’s chief marketing officer, Blair Christie. She said it’s kind of a culmination of a year-long effort to rethink the Cisco brand. You saw some of it earlier this year with bits like the “broken robot” ad, in which a manufacturing robot breaks down, but then gets fixed by another robot, thus allowing the assembly line to “fix itself.”

“From a marketing perspective, the story has shifted toward the value of connections,” Christie told me in an interview last week.

The piece that will get the most attention is the “augmented reality” part, which harnesses an iPhone app that allows people seeing print versions of the campaign to drill down and get to know Cisco more. You can, depending on how you navigate through the app, see several videos or download some white papers. The point, Christie says, is that Cisco is a complex company, and even the masters of the advertising industry can’t tell the whole thing in 60 seconds. More about it and the rest of the campaign here.

Anyway, here’s the video part that I can show you. That Cisco is taking the initiative in seeking to tell its own story better is a good sign. It has suffered of late from the appearance of being an older company that has lost a lot of its mojo. We’ll see if this can help get some of it back.

MetroPCS is expected to file a proxy on its sale to Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile USA to the Securities and Exchange Commission in coming days, with a Monday deadline.

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With potential acquirers preoccupied with other deals, any move involving Leap isn’t expected soon. But the pay-as-you-go wireless provider, which offers service under the Cricket brand, is expected to sell eventually because — in an industry that increasingly relies on size and scale — the company will find it harder to compete against larger competitors and its spectrum will become more attractive to possible buyers.

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The end result is that SoftBank will inject $8.0 billion of new capital to strengthen Sprint’s balance sheet, and will pay a further $12.1 billion to buy existing Sprint shares.

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ZTE’s profit warning, amid fierce price competition in the industry hurt by the global economic slowdown, also came after a recent U.S. Congressional report linked the Chinese company to a national security threat for the U.S.

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Huawei has long denied claims of bad behavior. But its practices have risen to the fore since it emerged from obscurity in the past decade to become a potent force in the telecom-equipment business.

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A spokesman for China’s Commerce Ministry said in a brief statement late Tuesday that the report against China’s Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp. “is merely based on subjective conjecture and untrue foundations, and made groundless accusations against China.”

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The conversations with banks involve advice on how and where the telecom-equipment maker might list its stock and the types of disclosures it would have to make to facilitate such a step, the people said. The company hasn’t made a decision to proceed with an IPO or chosen a bank to handle such a transaction, the people said.

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Finnish start-up Jolla Ltd. made waves earlier this year when it announced its intention to use Nokia’s MeeGo operating system as the basis for a new line of mobile devices. Nokia abandoned the system last year in favor of using Microsoft Corp.’s Windows system, but allowed Jolla and other companies access to the technology.

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Benioff’s addition to Cisco’s board fits perfectly with the ongoing shake-up that CEO John Chambers has been undergoing during the last year or so. Once you get Chambers talking about the new strategy at Cisco, you only hear the word “cloud” about 200 times in five minutes.

Of course I’m exaggerating a bit, but the fact is that the cloud is what Benioff is all about. A former Oracle VP and acolyte of its CEO Larry Ellison, Benioff founded Salesforce a little more than a decade ago on the then-radical proposition that you didn’t have to install any software on your local computer to run a customer-relationship management (CRM) database.

Back then they called it software-as-a-service, or SaaS, but more often than not, the concept of running applications in this manner is interchangeably described as being “in the cloud.”

And the fact is that Cisco is emerging as an important player in cloud infrastructure, specifically its Unified Computing System, or UCS, which combines networking and servers in single, easy-to-buy product. Long known primarily for its networking chops, Cisco has emerged as the world’s No. 3 vendor of blade servers, according to the reckoning of market research firm IDC.

Also joining Cisco’s board is Kristina Johnson. She runs a clean-energy company called Enduring Hydro. She was Under Secretary of Energy in the Obama Administration, confirmed in May of 2009, and stepped down at the end of 2010. Before that, Johnson was the provost at The Johns Hopkins University.

Here’s the announcement:

Cisco Appoints Marc Benioff and Kristina Johnson to Board of Directors

SAN JOSE, CA–(Marketwire -08/02/12)- Cisco (CSCO) today announced the appointment of Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of salesforce.com, and Dr. Kristina M. Johnson, CEO of Enduring Hydro, LLC and former Under Secretary of Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy, to its board of directors effective August 1, 2012.

“We are extremely pleased to welcome Marc and Kristina to Cisco’s board of directors,” said John Chambers, Cisco chairman and CEO. “Marc has changed the face of technology through his bold ideas around cloud computing and the social enterprise. Kristina brings us an unmatched expertise in science and technology, which will help guide Cisco as we continue to innovate and transform our customers’ experiences.”

Benioff, 47, co-founded salesforce.com in February of 1999 and has served as chairman of the board of directors since its inception. He has served as CEO of salesforce.com, which was selected by Forbes as the World’s Most Innovative Company in 2011, since November of 2001. Prior to launching salesforce.com, Benioff, a 30-year veteran of the software industry, spent 13 years at Oracle.

Johnson, 55, currently serves as CEO of Enduring Hydro, LLC, a clean energy development and consulting company. In her previous role as under secretary of energy, she was responsible for managing a broad $10.5 billion energy and environment portfolio. Prior to this role, Johnson served as provost and senior vice president for Academic Affairs at The Johns Hopkins University and dean of the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University. She currently serves on the board of directors of Boston Scientific Corporation and The AES Corporation. Johnson is also an inventor and entrepreneur, holding more than 45 U.S. patents. Johnson has received the John Fritz Medal, widely considered the highest award given in the engineering profession.

With the appointment of Benioff and Johnson, Cisco’s board now consists of 14 members, including Carol A. Bartz, former CEO, Yahoo! Inc.; M. Michele Burns, former chairman and CEO, Mercer LLC; Michael D. Capellas, former CEO, VCE Company, LLC; Larry R. Carter, former SVP, Office of the Chairman and CEO, Cisco Systems, Inc.; John T. Chambers, chairman and CEO, Cisco Systems, Inc.; Brian L. Halla, former chairman and CEO, National Semiconductor Corporation; John L. Hennessy, Ph.D., president, Stanford University; Richard M. Kovacevich, retired chairman and CEO, Wells Fargo & Company; Roderick C. McGeary, chairman, Tegile Systems, Inc.; Arun Sarin, KBE, senior advisor, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and former CEO of Vodafone Group Plc; Steven M. West, founder and partner, Emerging Company Partners LLC; and Jerry Yang, co-founder and former chief Yahoo!, Yahoo! Inc.