IN THE PAPERS
In The Papers 15 October
15-10-2009
by Sylvia Leatham
Eircom faces bundling restrictions | Global PC shipments rise
The Irish Times reports that Harris Corporation is to close its facility in Cork, with the loss of 119 jobs. Read more on this story on ENN.
The paper also says that a new EUR4.7 million Financial Mathematics and Computational Cluster has been announced, as reported by ENN on Wednesday.
The paper also continues its coverage of Maths Week. Having a better understanding of maths could help prevent your being deceived by a scam artist and help show the improbabilities presented by a cheater, according to Nadia Baker, the schools outreach officer with the Millennium Mathematics Project at Cambridge University and the Winton Programme for the Public Understanding of Risk. Baker gave a talk to secondary school students at the University of Limerick on Wednesday. "If something seems too good to be true, it probably is," she said. "Maths gives you the skills to look more closely to find out what you haven't been told."
The same paper reports that Eircom and ComReg have reached an out-of-court settlement which means the telco will be restricted in its ability to bundle together different products for special offers. From now, a "net revenue test" will be applied to any Eircom bundles that include the cost of line rental. The test ensures Eircom is not selling below cost. Any existing products on the market will have to pass the test or face being modified or taken off the market. Separately, ComReg said in a report that Eircom was failing to meet its universal service obligations. An Eircom spokesperson said the company was investing EUR100 million over the next three years to improve network service.
The paper also notes that telecoms firm Imagine Communications is investing EUR100 million in the nationwide roll-out of a next-generation wireless broadband network Read more on this story on ENN.
Reporting on the same story, the Irish Independent says that while the WiMax rollout is good news for those living and working in Dublin, Sligo, Athlone, Tralee and Wexford, the rest of the country will have to wait for up to two years for the technology, and one in 10 people will never have a chance to benefit from it.
According to the Financial Times, global PC shipments rose in the third quarter from a year earlier. New figures from research house Gartner show that netbooks performed especially well, surging from about 17 percent of the worldwide total in the second quarter to somewhere between 20 and 30 percent. Gartner had been expecting a more than 5 percent drop in PC units sold but instead saw a 0.5 percent increase. Rival research firm IDC turned in similar figures, recording 2.5 percent growth in worldwide shipments during the quarter, ending three quarters of decline. The top PC vendor in the quarter was Hewlett-Packard. Acer overtook Dell for the number two spot in worldwide volume during the quarter, IDC said.
The Wall Street Journal says that two companies owned by the founders of Skype have filed a motion for a preliminary injunction that could halt a USD2 billion deal to sell the online communications company to a group of investors. Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis claim that Mike Volpi, a venture capitalist at Index Ventures, which is part of the group trying to buy Skype, used information he gained while working for them in making the acquisition. Volpi was previously chief executive at the online video company Joost, which is owned by Zennstrom and Friis. In September Skype parent eBay agreed to sell a majority stake in Skype to a group of investors, including Index Ventures.
The paper also notes that AT&T has accused Google of blocking calls to Benedictine nuns, a congressman's campaign office and dozens of small businesses in rural areas. Google has acknowledged that Google Voice, its internet call-forwarding service, blocks calls to some areas, mostly to what it says are adult chat or free conference call services. Google also blocks calls in mostly rural areas where rates are higher and calls are more expensive to connect. Some companies, called "traffic pumpers," deliberately route calls through those costlier, mostly rural areas to increase revenue. "Our sole intention is to isolate and restrict numbers only associated with traffic pumping schemes, which would impact our ability to offer Google Voice for free," a Google spokesman said in a statement.
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