| |
 |
|
9
Sept 2010 |
Call tariff reductions by Kenyan telecom players came too soon and may not make business sense, a senior government official said.
Zain, Kenya's second-biggest mobile operator which as acquired by India's Bharti Airtel in June, slashed tariffs by 50 percent last month, sparking a price war with market leader Safaricom and the sector's two other players.
Communications Ministry Permanent Secretary Bitange Ndemo told Reuters calling rates should have fallen proportionally with the uptake of broadband.
... |
| |
|
|
7
Sept 2010 |
The Net neutrality debate often descends into the kind of partisan dementia found on Fox News and MSNBC. It doesn't have to.
In the debate today, carriers claim they need to regulate what users do on their networks (including the Internet, whose traffic moves through carrier networks for part of the journey) because data usage is growing 10 times as fast as the revenue from data, causing bandwidth shortages and threatening their economic viability.
Users freak out at the regulated-usage idea, saying t... |
| |
|
|
7
Sept 2010 |
More people would opt to cut back on food rather than give up their broadband connection if money became tight, according to a Sky News survey.
As Sky News spends the day looking at Britain's economic Hard Times, members of the Sky News Panel revealed they are more concerned about their finances than they were a year ago.
More than half of people in work are already financially worse off than this time last year, and that is even before this year's budget cuts have been implemented.
Nearly two-thir... |
| |
|
|
7
Sept 2010 |
The FBI and other police agencies don't need a search warrant to track the locations of Americans' cell phones, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday in a precedent-setting decision.
In the first decision of its kind, a Philadelphia appeals court agreed with the Obama administration that no search warrant--signed by a judge based on a belief that there was probable cause to suspect criminal activity--was necessary for police to obtain logs showing where a cell phone user had traveled.
A three-judge... |
| |
|
|
6
Sept 2010 |
Spin, iiNet, TPG and Primus are among the ISPs that have recently announced plans offering at least one terabyte of data per month. Others, such as Optus, have for some time offered 'unlimited' plans that are subject to speed limiting after the quota is reached.
But something all these have in common is that they differentiate between peak and off-peak use, with a portion - perhaps the majority - of the quota being restricted to the small hours. Optus has a relatively generous definition of off-peak (mi... |
| |
|
|
6
Sept 2010 |
Vodafone has announced its 4G roll-out for Germany, though it seems it'll be Americans making the first 4G phone call.
Vodafone Germany will have LTE coverage in 1,000 municipalities by Christmas, and Vodafone promises a national network by the end of 2011. That will be a data network using dongles for connecting laptops, in common with other LTE roll-outs, so it seems America's metroPCS will be the first to launch a 4G phone network over which customers will make phone calls.
Long Term Evolution is t... |
| |
|
|
6
Sept 2010 |
Customers of Orange and T-Mobile will soon be able to hop between the two mobile networks.
The deal is one of the first practical benefits from the recent merger of the two firms, which have 30 million customers combined.
The network sharing deal is limited to 2G signals, meaning that customers will see little benefit when using the mobile web.
Analysts said that T-Mobile had the most to gain from the merger.
"Outside of the South-East [of England] there has been a constant perception that T-Mob... |
| |
|
|
6
Sept 2010 |
Broadband pricing in Europe and the US fell EUR5 a month, on average, as broadband speeds went up by an average of 20 per cent during the last year, says researcher Analysys Mason. This is after a relatively flat period during the past recession, when prices held up.
Now the average price paid for a fixed broadband service bundle, which includes any single service or double and triple play bundles, has come down to EUR40.7 a month. Analysys Mason says that it tracks over 1000 fixed broadband-based bundle... |
| |
|
|
3
Sept 2010 |
The global disparity in fixed broadband access and cost has been revealed by UN figures.
The Central African Republic is the most expensive place to get a fixed broadband connection, costing nearly 40 times the average monthly income there.
Macao in China is the cheapest, costing 0.3% of the average monthly income.
Niger becomes the most expensive place to access communication technologies, when landlines and mobiles are also taken into account.
"Access to broadband in an affordable manner is ou... |
| |
|
|
2
Sept 2010 |
Mobile phone operator Safaricom Limited has ruled out any tariff reductions on its voice and short message service (SMS) services, even as shareholders pile pressure on the company to do so to match the competition.
"We need a balanced response to the ongoing price war in the mobile phone market to safeguard our revenues, margins and subscriber numbers," Michael Joseph, Safaricom CEO, told the firm's shareholders at the company's Annual General Meeting (AGM), held yesterday at the Bomas of Kenya.
Safa... |
| |
|
|
1
Sept 2010 |
Mobile firm Orange has become the first UK network to use a technology that offers higher quality voice calls.
High Definition (HD) voice claims to reduce background noise and the "hisses and crackles" often heard on a normal mobile call.
The technology, known as, Adaptive Multi Rate Wideband (AMR-WB) has been adopted as an international standard for 3G mobile networks.
Other networks are expected to follow Orange soon, experts said.
"It is relatively easy for an operator to introduce - it's jus... |
| |
|
|
1
Sept 2010 |
T-Mobile USA said Tuesday afternoon that it will increase the maximum possible data speeds offered on its upgraded 3G network to 42 Mbit/s in 2011.
The fourth-ranked mobile operator in the US has been upgrading its GSM-based 3G network with a high-speed packet access plus (HSPA+) software update for months now. Upgraded markets offer a theoretical peak download speed of 21 Mbit/s. The operator has previously said that this translates into average download speeds in the 5-to-8-Mbit/s range using its HSPA+... |
| |
|
|
22
Aug 2010 |
The Federal Communications Commission reported this week that broadband users see about half the advertised "up to" speeds promised by Internet providers, and similar findings were made earlier this year in the UK. (Keep in mind that some speed problems are outside the control of the ISP, including poor indoor wiring, bad WiFi setups, outdated computer hardware, and Internet congestion.)
Given the massive disconnect between the actual and advertised speeds, how is a broadband buyer to know in advance how... |
| |
|
|
19
Aug 2010 |
Just hours after iiNet claimed to make history with Australia's first terabyte broadband plans, rival Primus has launched a new 1.1 terabyte offering - upping iiNet's new deal by 111GB per month.
Last week, iiNet chief executive Michael Malone said his company didn't see Primus as "particularly relevant, from a competitive point of view", compared with larger rivals such as Telstra, Optus and TPG.
But yesterday Primus chief Ravi Bhatia (pictured, above) claimed leadership in the battle to offer Austra... |
| |
|
|
17
Aug 2010 |
Nearly 60 homes and three businesses in Ashby de la Launde - a small village in Lincolnshire UK - will be connected to a fiber network by the end of September. On Friday NextGenUs UK CIC and AFL Telecommunications announced the installation of a "community interest owned FTTH network" there.
The privately funded network will provide its users with "super fast" 100 Mbps connections, according to the press release.
NextGenUs UK CIC is a founder member and supporter of a campaign Final Third First, which... |
|
