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3
July 2009 |
The first day the Apple iPhone 3GS went on sale was the biggest sales day ever for AT&T, according to an internal memo sent to company employees that has since been published in various blogs.
That's right, iPhone Day 2009 beat out the two previous iPhone launch days, as well as surpassed traditionally heavy retail sales days such as Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and December 26th, the day after Christmas.
The new iPhone may not have added a whole bunch of new bells and whistles, but it se... |
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3
July 2009 |
A 50p broadband tax will not be enough to roll out fibre internet to the whole country, according to a BT executive.
Olivia Garfield, group director of strategy and portfolio for BT, said at a briefing yesterday that the fund would only allow for 80 to 85 per cent of the country to have fibre broadband, rather than the 100 per cent the government would like to see.
A spokesperson from BT said: “Over ten years, we are looking at £1 billion raised from the levy which would only cover 80 to 85 per cent.”... |
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2
July 2009 |
Multiple sources have provided an internal AT&T memo that highlights the company's recent milestones and successes:
1. Fact of the Week: On June 25, the day Michael Jackson died, text messages sent on our network spiked at 65,000 messages per second — the largest volume ever recorded — surpassing events like American Idol voting and New Year's Eve, when millions of our customers wish their friends and family a happy new year via text."
2. "iLaunch day 2009 was one for the record books, as AT∓T c... |
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1
July 2009 |
Telecoms giant Nortel has laid off another 150 staff across the UK without redundancy pay.
Nortel Networks UK, which has its headquarters in Berkshire, went into administration in January.
The posts are being cut from the Maidenhead headquarters, Newtownabbey in County Antrim and Harlow, Essex, according to former workers.
Administrators, Ernst and Young, said "economic reasons" made it necessary to implement further redundancies.
More than 220 staff were laid off in March without any pay or war... |
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29
June 2009 |
Vodafone Portugal has tripled its mobile download speeds to a peak rate of 21.6Mbps, after launching a HSPA+ 64QAM upgrade. The maximum upload speed will increase from the present 1.4 Mbps to 5.7 Mbps.
After becoming the first Portuguese operator to make data sessions in HSPA+ in February this year, Vodafone is now also taking the lead in rolling out this technology to the general public, making it the first operator in Portugal and one of the first in the world to offer speeds of 21.6 Mbps on a mobile n... |
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29
June 2009 |
Vodafone, the world's largest mobile operator in terms of sales, is reportedly considering a bid for the UK mobile operation of Deutsche Telekom, in order to boost its position in its domestic market.
A move for T-Mobile UK would certainly be audacious and would likely be closely scrutinised by industry regulators due to the likely repercussions for the mobile market in the United Kingdom.
According to the report in the Financial Times which quoted "people familiar with the situation", T-Mobile's owne... |
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29
June 2009 |
Alcatel-Lucent said today that it’s begun providing German carrier E-Plus with equipment that inserts advertisements onto mobile devices based on demographic information provided by a subsidiary of the carrier. Customers opt in to the service and in exchange get extra minutes or texts on their cell phone plans. Gettings, the E-Plus subsidiary collecting the information and delivering the ads, offers plans that send between 10-25 ads per week. When customers sign up for the program they are asked to indicate... |
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27
June 2009 |
Heightening competition in the African broadband market, the West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC) has announced that the first section of the East African Submarine System (EASSY) cable has been loaded on a ship for transport and is on course to Mozambique.
The shipment launched barely a day after a rival cable, the Sea Cable System (SEACOM), announced it was suspending the start of operations because of Somali pirate attacks in the Indian Ocean. SEACOM was supposed to be operational June 27 but has b... |
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26
June 2009 |
The major music labels are committed to the idea of graduated response, but they aren't wedded to any particular method of implementation. In France, disconnecting repeated online copyright infringers has been pushed by legislation. In the US, the RIAA wants ISPs to sign up to a voluntary scheme. But in Ireland, the "sue-them-into-doing-what-we-want" school of thought has triumphed.
The Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) has filed lawsuits against two of the country's largest ISPs, seeking to force ... |
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26
June 2009 |
According to a research study by Strategy Analytics, 48% of Americans would drop their mobile data plan completely, faced with the need to reduce household expenditures. Only 10% would drop their home broadband subscription.
“Given the extraordinary importance consumers place on home broadband, we fully expected broadband to have a high ‘keep rate,’” said Ben Piper, Director of the Strategy Analytics Multiplay Market Dynamics Service. “What surprised us was the vulnerability of mobile services.”
Unde... |
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26
June 2009 |
EU Telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding has commended Digital Britain's broadband proposals, but warns that Europe as a whole must have a unified broadband strategy for economic recovery.
In the Digital Britain report released last week, Lord Carter confirmed that he was looking for all UK households to be connected with a speed of at least 2Mbs, as well as a broadband tax to make sure that Britain got next-generation broadband networks.
Reding said that other countries like France and Germany had sim... |
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22
June 2009 |
Telegeography is calling the top of the trillion-dollar communications market, saying that traditional markets are saturated, and new growth must come mainly from Asia and Africa.
The market analyst made the call following publication of first quarter sales figures for communications companies. These showed a slowdown over the previous quarter, but low single digit growth over Q1 08, it said.
The top 20 global service providers generated $251bn in sales during the first three months of 2009, which was... |
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22
June 2009 |
During the dot-com boom, so many undersea cable delivering the Internet traversed the bottom of the ocean between the U.S. and Europe that bandwidth prices plummeted and providers of submarine cables filed for bankruptcy. But those cables may soon no longer be enough to satisfy the global demand for bandwidth between the two continents, according to research out today from TeleGeography. The research firm estimates that bandwidth requirements will grow 33 percent between 2008 and 2015, and trans-Atlantic ca... |
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19
June 2009 |
Among other Asia-Pacific nations, Australia ranked 11th with 72 per cent, Japan ranked 16th with 64 per cent, New Zealand ranked 25th with 57 per cent and China ranked 43rd with 21 per cent.
The United States, where just 60 per cent of households had broadband as of last year, ranked 20th in the survey of 58 countries by Boston-based Strategy Analytics, released on Thursday.
Five of the top 10 countries or territories in the survey were in Asia and the firm predicted the broadband subscriber base in t... |
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17
June 2009 |
The government will charge a ‘broadband tax’ from 2010 to subsidise a next-generation broadband network, which should deliver at least 90 per cent coverage by 2017.
The final Digital Britain report, published yesterday, said that operators will charge 50p per month on fixed lines, which should raise £170 million to £175 million a year for a ‘Next Generation Fund’.
The report concluded that competitive, market-led investment in fibre from companies like BT and Virgin Media would be able to provide up t... |
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