Alcatel Lucent is set to cut nearly 5,500 employees globally, according to a report from Reuters. As par of cost-savings, a quarter of the cuts will come from ALU’s 9,000 employees currently working in its home country of France. Alcatel currently employs almost 76,000 people worldwide.

A U.K. court handed Apple a defeat in its ongoing patent fight with Samsung when it upheld a previous ruling denying an injunction on the Galaxy Tab. The judge overseeing the case decided tablet is not “cool” enough to be confused with the iPad, according to a Bloomberg report.

One year after announcing an initiative with the FCC to prevent bill shock, CTIA says all of its carrier members who signed on to the program are offering at least two types of usage alerts to customers. The free alerts notify customers when they near their limit on voice, data, messaging and international roaming usage, helping avoid unexpected charges on wireless bills.

The GSMA has released a new report showing global mobile connections will number 6.8 billion during the fourth quarter. Excluding M2M and inactive SIM cards, the number of connections totals 5.9 billion. The worldwide mobile subscriber base ix expected to reach 3.2 billion this quarter and is expected to reach 4 billion within the next five years.

Samsung says it will update all of its Galaxy S III smartphones in the United States to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean over the coming months. The exact timing of the updates will be announced separately by each carrier selling the phone: AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, T-Mobile USA and U.S. Cellular. The move to the newer version of the operating system adds new capabilities to the camera, video playback and user interface.