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21
Oct 2009 |
British telecoms company Orange has refreshed its broadband offerings and will now dish out up to 20Mbps broadband to all its customers.
The 20Mbps download speed will now be standard for all its packages.
The company has now introduced an offering called Home Ultra, which includes Orange's Livebox wireless router, enabling connectivity for up to 6 PC's. At a modest GBP10.50 (R128) per month for Orange's mobile pay monthly customers it also includes anytime inclusive calls to UK landlines.
Orange's... |
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20
Oct 2009 |
UAE telecoms provider Etisalat is to launch the region's fastest broadband service which will run at 38 Megabits per second. The company will be installing a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network throughout the United Arab Emirates, which is part in preparation for its future plans that include IPTV and online video.
Senior vice president of marketing, Khalifa Al Shamsi, says "We want to develop the UAE as one of the best connected countries worldwide so that it can offer the best services for businesses and ... |
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19
Oct 2009 |
Voice over IP calls could be legalised in the UAE by the end of the year, says a senior official at the countrys Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) on Sunday.
Mohammed Gheyath, executive director of technology development affairs, confirmed that the telecommunications regulator is busy drawing up a policy on international internet telecommunications, know as Voice over IP (VoIP) and will be published before year-end.
"Hopefully by the end of this year a new policy will be out," Gheyath said... |
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19
Oct 2009 |
For the second year in a row, AT&T is to increase the basic price of its landlines by over 20 percent.
The telecommunications provider will next week be notifying its customers that the monthly charge for their landline will go up from USD13.50 (R99) to USD16.45 (R121) on the 2nd of January 2010. Around 3.3 million of AT&T's customers will be affected by the increase, while subscribers of bundled services won't be affected.
AT&T had its prices capped for 13 years by the California Public U... |
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19
Oct 2009 |
Phone giant Verizon is turning up the heat for cable companies, and are now offering its Northeast and Mid-Atlantic customers a package that includes wireless calling, home phone, TV, and home broadband services.
Providers have been heralding the ability to offer "quadruple-play" services for home users as it allows the providers to generate increased revenue per user.
Numerous surveys have indicated that consumers prefer this type of bundled offering as it eases billing, and of course the fact that b... |
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15
Oct 2009 |
On Tuesday ENISA - The European Network and Information Security Agency - announced that it is now the first European Union agency to start offering internet services over version 6 of the Internet Protocol (IP) protocol.
They are now offering their website over IPv6 after upgrading their internal network to provide IP connectivity, DNS lookup and HTTP/S on the new v6 protocol.
This move kicks off the European Commission's IPv6 Action Plan, which aims for the widepsread implementation of IPv6 by 2010.... |
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15
Oct 2009 |
The Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications is promising all of its 5.3 million citizens a guaranteed 1Mbps service by July 2010. This 1Mbps minimum speed will increase to 100Mbps by the end of 2015. While this sounds like an arduous task, around 95 percent of Finns already have broadband.
The new Government initiative will now have to increase the focus on rural connectivity as they are behind their urban counterparts.
Finland is currently 21st in the worldwide broadband leadership chart, ac... |
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7
Oct 2009 |
AT&T on Tuesday did a 180 and announced that its existing policy of disabling voice applications like Skype and Fring would be changed, and customers are now free to use VoIP-enabled software over the carrier's cellular network.
Until this announcement, these types of applications were only usable using wireless networks, but customers were upset about not being able to take advantage of cheaper call rates. The ban was only applicable, however, to Apple's iPhone handsets, as other types of handsets w... |
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29
Sept 2009 |
A 24th staff suicide on Tuesday prompted calls for France Telecom's chief excutive to step down, while an inquiry into staff working conditions is being demanded as stress pushes staff over the edge.
On Monday a Telecom employee who had been posted to a call centre in the Alps leapt from a highway bridge, leaving a suicide note blaming the pressures at work. Workers staged striked on Tuesday, demanding something be done about the 24 suicides the past year and a half.
France Telcom was a state monopoly... |
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28
Sept 2009 |
Kilometres of trenches are currently being dug in Tasmania as the Australian government rolls out a AUD37 billion (ZAR283 billion) broadband infrastructure investement which aims to connect up to 90 percent of all Australian homes with fibre-optic cable by 2017.
The government believe this project will not only accelerate slow broadband speeds, but help boost the economy.
High speed cabled will cover over 7.7 million square kilometres, which is around the same size as two entire European Unions. "Ther... |
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28
Sept 2009 |
According to Gartnet, by the end of 2009 around 422 million (20 percent) of households across the world will have internet access, an increase of 10.5 percent from 2008. By 2013 the number of connected household would have reached 580 million.
Broadband and data services will be a vital revenue enable for telecommunications companies, whose voice revenues are declining across the board. The voice market constitutes around 40 percent of the USD347 billion market.
Twenty one countries had at least 50 pe... |
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28
Sept 2009 |
Uganda's telecoms market is one of the most competitive in Africa, and today saw the launch of i-Telecom, which is the first Ugandan-owned operator.
i-Telecom becomes the sixth operator to join the market with Zain, MTN, Orange, Warid and utl, and will provide voice and data services via CDMA.
The CEO of i-Telecom, Augustus Mulenga, said the company pre-launched some services in December 2008, which saw 1,000 phones handed out to potential clients, and "Because of the statements from the customers in ... |
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27
Sept 2009 |
The Federal Communications Commission has received a letter from AT&T requesting in anvestigation into the blocking of the Google Voice app by Apple's App Store. AT&T asserts that Google is violating net neutrailty due to the fact that the program prohibits access to a number of cellular providers as a result of high prices to connect to their networks.
The letter stated, amongst others, that "According to Google, non-discrimination ensures that a provider "cannot block fair access" to another provid... |
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24
Sept 2009 |
The Digital Britain report has prompted the British government to announce that it will institute a broadband tax before the next election.
The tax will amount to no more than 50p per broadband connection, and the tax will be part of the Finance Bill for next year's budget.
"We want to make high speed networks nationally available. The next-generation fund will help that and we will legislate for it this side of a general election," said Stephen Timms, the Minister for Digital Britain.
In June of t... |
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22
Sept 2009 |
Research published today claims that UK broadband customers are being taken for a ride with hidden ISP charges, and calls for regulator Ofcom to investigate and take the appropriate actions.
Sixteen percent of people in the report have experienced extra charges, which averages out at an additional GBP44 per year, and this increased to GBP61 per year for subscribers in their twenties.
With the 8 million Brits who are affected by this, these excess charges end up at an extra GBP370 million for internet ... |
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