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24
July 2008 |
Moves to revolutionise music downloading were unveiled today, including a plan for an annual fee for the right to copy unlimited tracks from the internet.
But parents of teenagers who illegally download music face being blacklisted and having their internet service curbed.
Households that ignore warnings could be subjected to online surveillance and have their internet speeds cut to make downloading large files more difficult.
Some 6.5million UK computer users download files illegally and the pract... |
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24
July 2008 |
Five countries have broadband penetration over 60 per cent, and the UK isn’t one of them, according to a global broadband report by analyst firm Gartner.
But the UK does rank seventh worldwide, with about 58 per cent of households having broadband connections, alongside France and Sweden.
The top five countries were South Korea with 93 per cent, Hong Kong with 76 per cent, the Netherlands with 74 per cent, Switzerland with 69 per cent and Canada with 65 per cent. Taiwan falls just short of the mark, w... |
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24
July 2008 |
According to reports, there may be a back door built into Skype, which allows connections to be bugged. The company has declined to expressly deny the allegations. At a meeting with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian regulator on lawful interception of IP based services held on 25th June, high-ranking officials at the Austrian interior ministry revealed that it is not a problem for them to listen in on Skype conversations.
This has been confirmed to heise online by a number of the parties present a... |
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23
July 2008 |
Remember dial-up internet? That incredibly slow and awkward way that you used to use to access the internet back in the 90s and early naughties? Well, it's still around, although it is dying a slow and painful death.
the good news is that the Australian Bureau of Statistics has announced that for the very first time, Broadband has overtaken dial-up as the method of choice for Australian consumers to access porn the Internet.
If the concept of people still using dial-up offends your geeky sensibilities... |
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23
July 2008 |
It is important that everyone in Britain has access to high-speed broadband, one product comparison website has asserted.
Michael Phillips, product director with BroadbandChoices.co.uk, said that internet service providers (ISPs) must make their services accessible to all, in news that may be of interest to business telecoms customers.
Some ISPs charge customers more if they live in rural areas, said Mr Phillips, emphasising the importance of equal service distribution in the UK over the next 50 years... |
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23
July 2008 |
AT&T’s second quarter profit jumped 30 percent, powered by the addition of 1.3 million new wireless customers. As expected, landline losses accelerated: Legacy phone lines shrank 8.1 percent to 58.9 million total lines from 64.8 million.
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23
July 2008 |
AT&T is seeing some consumers terminate home broadband connections for economic reasons, CFO Rick Lindner told analysts today when discussing AT&T’s third-quarter earnings. Those results reflect a tale of three companies: a growing wireless business, a recovering commercial business and a consumer wireline operation in flux. News from two of the three was quite good, but the third leg of that stool is showing some cracks.
AT&T continues to bleed access lines and could not cover that lost revenue with imp... |
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22
July 2008 |
Mobile phone group Vodafone has posted first-quarter revenue in line with forecasts but said full-year revenue was expected to be around the bottom of its previously stated range due to economic weakness.
Vodafone, the world's largest mobile phone company by revenues, said it added 8.5 million subscribers in the three months to the end of June, taking the company's proportionate customer base to around 269 million.
Group revenues climbed 19.1 per cent to £9.8 billion ($US19.57 billion), with organic g... |
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22
July 2008 |
It is a little remarked fact that one of the world’s earliest implementations of a pre-paid mobile platform was in South Africa in the early 1990’s - and that its introduction there spawned a mobile telecoms growth that rivaled those currently being experienced in countries like India and China.
Even today, 90 per cent of South Africa’s mobile users are on pre-paid and with minimal fixed line and broadband roll-out to townships and conurbations where population concentration is highest, the mobile is fas... |
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22
July 2008 |
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has threatened Comcast with legal action if it doesn't fall in line with his quixotic campaign against online child pornography. And the American ISP is set to do exactly what he wants.
Over the past several weeks, Cuomo strong-armed five stateside ISPs into signing his very own anti-child-porn "code of conduct." AOL, AT&T, Time Warner, Sprint, and Verizon all agreed to choke certain porn-infested Usenet newsgroups and remove known porn sites from their web servers.... |
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21
July 2008 |
China will issue 3G mobile licenses and certificates after the restructuring of its six big telecommunications operators, according to Xi Guohua, vice minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China.
The reorganization is expected to be completed in about six months.
At present, there are three 3G standards in the country: TD-SCDMA, WCDMA and CDMA2000. According to the restructuring plan, the TD-SCDMA license is expected to be awarded to China Mobile, while the CDMA2000 licens... |
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18
July 2008 |
THE big traditional telecommunication operators globally are facing many challenges, including declining revenues from fixed-line voice communication.
Most of these operators are nationally based and generate revenues from customers in their own country, says Bill Hahn, principal research analyst at Gartner.
“Some are trying to push into other markets, but most of their revenues still come from their national markets.”
In a market that generates total revenues of $1,2-trillion, fixed-line voice se... |
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15
July 2008 |
Forward thinking UK telco British Telecom will be investing $3 billion in new fiber networks to bring 100 Mbps internet connections to the country. Instead of whining, capping bandwidth and degrading other company's services like US operators, BT seems to realize that being the provider of the pipes is not so bad after all: BT will be offering the fiber network to other providers at wholesale prices to "ensure the broadband market remains competitive".
These wholesale buyers will be able to install their... |
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15
July 2008 |
The telecoms company says the fibre-optic wires will deliver speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbps), 12 times as fast as the advertised top speed on BT's current ADSL network.
BT said faster broadband would let customers run a number of different bandwidth-heavy applications at the same time.
New boss Ian Livingstone told the BBC: "You will be able to access multiple high definition TV streams and new applications like real time video conferencing and health services."
The new network is also des... |
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15
July 2008 |
Shoppers hunting for iPhone 3Gs can still find them — if they’re willing to get up early and, in some cases, drive long distances.
As of 6:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, all three models (8GB black, 16 GB black or white) of the hot-selling device were sold out in 21 states, according to Jim Neal, a retired PR man living near Kansas City who took the time to check each of Apple’s 188 U.S. retail stores using the company’s iPhone availability widget.
“All told,” he writes, “117 Apple stores reported having sold o... |
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