BUSINESS
In the papers 04 October
04-10-2000
by
Eircom slashes call costs | Europe says yes to local loop unbundling
Eircom's price cuts announced Tuesday are a prime focus of the day's papers. The former state telco has cut its minimum call cost from IEP.115 to IEP.05, a change the company says should cut 16 percent from the average telephone bill. Rates are unchanged at IEP.04 per minute for daytime local calls and IEP.01 per minute for evening and weekend local calls.
The Irish Examiner reports on Tuesday's pre-Budget submission by the Irish Software Association, supporting the lower 20 percent tax rate on share options gains. Association director Katherine Lucy said that Irish stock options are "fundamentally uncompetitive" and that this threatens the future of the industry in Ireland, the paper said.
The papers also report on a new IEP4 million investment by Irish security firm Entropy in the provision of managed security services to Irish and European companies.
In European news, the European Commission's decision to support full local loop unbundling at the end of the year gets full coverage. EU telecoms ministers have not issued a directive but have passed a regulation that should get final approval at the end of December, calling for full liberalisation of local telephony. The regulation means that from next January competitors will get access to the previously closed connections into customers' homes as long as they pay a fair fee to the incumbent operators.
Abroad the morning papers focus on the USD166 million acquisition by Internet advertising firm DoubleClick of NetCreations. NetCreations provides marketing services for e-mail and its acquisition will pass a database of some 15 million e-mail addresses to DoubleClick.
The New York Times, finally, reports on IBM's decision early this week to rebrand its complete server line, from mainframe to PC scale, as eServers. The company also introduced the first eServer, the zSeries 900, which is a replacement to the S/390 mainframe and said it would also roll out replacements for the current RS/6000 Unix range and its popular AS/400 range. The company plans to give more flexibility to customers, including the option to use the Linux operating, and will spend some USD325 million marketing the eServer concept, the paper said. The move is seen as an effort to combat Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard in the server market.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 