Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has been ordered to pay Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU) $70 million in a patent dispute. At one time, the patent dispute may have costed Microsoft $1.5 billion.

According to consulting firm Gerson Lehrman Group and GizmoFusion, Sprint has finalized an LTE deal with contracts being signed with Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, and Samsung. The LTE service will be rolled out over the next 2-3 years as part of the decommissioning of iDEN on the 800MHz spectrum. It is likely that Sprint is looking to partner with Clearwire or T-Mobile. [GizmoFusion via Engadget]

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU) is going to be making a payment of over $137 million to settle bribery cases brought forth by U.S. authorities. The case concerns Alcatel-Lucent and its subsidiaries between the 1990s through 2006.

AT&T has just sent out a memo about how they have detected a joint software defect with Alcatel-Lucent that is causing upload speeds to slow down. In some markets, iPhone 4 users have complained about slow upload speeds in HSPA-equipped AT&T markets. Speeds that have had over 1Mbps during the holiday weekend have noticed speeds dropping below 100kbps. However these conditions affected “less than two percent” of AT&T customers. Below is the full statement from AT&T:

Alcatel-Lucent has acquired ProgrammableWeb, a website that has a library of Web APIs used by developers for the web and mobile devices.