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17
June 2009 |
U.S. wireless carriers Verizon Communications and AT&T took issue with assertions that they colluded in setting prices for text messages, saying on Tuesday that prices for most customers had fallen and the market was competitive.
Sen. Herb Kohl, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee's antitrust subcommittee, said he was concerned that the four largest cell phone companies doubled their text message rates from 10 cents in 2006 to 20 cents in 2008.
"These sharp price increases raise concerns. Are the... |
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17
June 2009 |
The results surprised researchers, showing a 15% increase from a year earlier.
Net services seem to have escaped the with Americans more willing to cut back on mobile phone usage or cable TV than broadband.
Of those who still were not connected, 17% said it was because the technology was not available in their area.
Nearly a quarter of those surveyed said they had cancelled or cut back on cable TV services or mobile phone services but only 9% said they had cancelled or cut back on broadband service... |
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15
June 2009 |
THE long-awaited East African Marine System (TEAMS) fibre optic undersea cable, expected to cut telecommunications costs across the continent has officially been launched in Kenya.
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki who launched the 5,000-kilometer cable which started from Fujairah in the UAE to Kenya under the Indian Ocean on Friday in Mombasa, said that the landing of the cable was of “historic proportions” since the “economies of today are largely driven by internet and other ICT connections.”
The 130 mi... |
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15
June 2009 |
In a credit crunch-busting move, UK network 3 is launching a ‘£0 a month’ data plan.
The network says that customers on its ‘Sim Zero’ tariff will be able to make completely free calls for the life of the contract – as long as they stick to Skype-to-Skype calls.
Instant messaging using either Skype or Windows Live Messenger is also free on the tariff, while free voicemail access is another perk.
Skype has been free on the 3 network since 2006, but only for customers on a contract with a minimum ter... |
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15
June 2009 |
The telecoms services market is beginning to stall, according to the latest telecoms update from research firm TeleGeography.
The top 20 global service providers generated $251bn (£153bn) in revenues during the first three months of 2009, representing an increase on the same period last year of just three per cent. The growth was not just organic, but was bolstered by mergers and acquisitions.
An impressive 48 per cent of this growth came from India and China, while markets in Europe were singled out ... |
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15
June 2009 |
There really is only one way to stop people from downloading music illegally, and that is to offer an alternative that can compete with file-sharing networks. Today, Virgin announced a deal where the ISP will offer its customers unlimited access to Universal’s music library for approximately 10-15 pounds a month. Whether this is a good enough deal to get people off their old file-sharing habit still has to be seen.
Anticipating on the possibility that not all customers will be interested in the monthly s... |
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12
June 2009 |
Tax cuts and incentives have been announced in Kenya intended to boost broadband and mobile take-up as a new fibre optic cable is launched.
Kenya's Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta cut the 16% VAT on new phone handsets.
He also allowed internet providers to offset the cost of purchasing new fibre optic bandwidth for 20 years.
The first of three submarine cables connecting Mombasa port to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates is being inaugurated by the president on Friday.
Kenyans rely on slow and... |
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12
June 2009 |
Global IP traffic is expected to increase fivefold over the next four years, according to new figures from Cisco.
The networking giant's Visual Networking Index predicts that IP networks worldwide will be handling 56 exabytes (EB) of data per month in 2013, up from 9EB per month last year. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes.
Cisco said that the Asia Pacific region will dominate the IP traffic space with around 21EB per month by 2013, followed by the US with 13EB per month and Europe with 12.5EB per m... |
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11
June 2009 |
BT is tired of the BBC and other video sites getting a “free ride” on its networks.
Last week, the news broke that BT was “throttling” the BBC’s iPlayer video streaming system at peak times, which the broadcaster said was hurting viewers’ ability to watch television online.
John Petter, managing director of BT Retail's consumer business, has now accused the BBC of getting a “free ride”.
"We can't give the content providers a completely free ride and continue to give customers the [service] they wan... |
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11
June 2009 |
In a press release, France Telecom has announced that ACE (Africa Coast to Europe) submarine cable system, which was intially planned to stretch from France to Gabon, will now be extended to South Africa connecting all countries along the West coast of Africa, from Morocco to South Africa. This new cable will provide broadband interconnection to the global telecommunications network to more than twenty-five countries in Africa and Western Europe.
The ACE consortium currently comprises seventeen telecommu... |
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10
June 2009 |
Virgin Mobile USA today announced a prepaid mobile Internet system called Broadband2Go, which offers very inexpensive plans for relatively light users.
Broadband2Go runs on Sprint's national EVDO Rev A network and gives Windows XP or Vista PCs download speeds around a megabit. Unlike other national systems that sell monthly bucket plans and charge for overage, Virgin Mobile will sell chunks of megabytes on prepaid cards, like a prepaid phone top-up system.
Virgin will offer one modem, the Novatel MC76... |
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9
June 2009 |
T-Mobile USA is looking into claims that a hacker has broken into its data bases and stolen customer and company information.
Someone anonymously posted the claims on the security mailing list Full Disclosure during the weekend. In that post, the hacker claims to have gotten access to "everything, their databases, confidential documents, scripts and programs from their servers, financial documents up to 2009."
The poster said he had offered the information to T-Mobile competitors, but they supposedly di... |
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9
June 2009 |
The US Federal Trade Commission's move against an Internet service provider thought to be a safe haven for spammers has reduced spam volumes, but only by a little.
According to e-mail security vendor Marshal8e6, total spam volume dropped by about 15 percent last week, as the FTC got a court order to pull the plug on a notorious ISP named Pricewert. "We noticed quite a drop-off mid to late last week," said Phil Hay, a threat analyst with Marshal8e6. "Things got pretty quiet compared to what we'd been seei... |
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8
June 2009 |
The East Africa Marine System (Teams) fibre optic cable project has been hit by a new wave of controversy, before its landing date in Mombasa.
The National Museums of Kenya wants construction work at the landing point, in the historic cultural site of Fort Jesus, halted, claiming that Teams are yet to carry out a mandatory land Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)
"The study was carried out only on marine resources, but they overlooked the land which is critical because it is a historic site," Dr Far... |
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8
June 2009 |
High-speed broadband connections could be extended to more than 93% of the population with inexpensive modifications to the existing BT network, the company has told ministers.
As it continues talks with communication minister Lord Carter ahead of his Digital Britain report next week, BT is also understood to have warned that relying upon the UK's five mobile phone networks to extend broadband risks harming competition and would only be a stop-gap measure.
Lord Carter made getting broadband - of at le... |
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