The US Federal Communications Commission put a rocket under the shares of Nextel Communications Inc by decreeing that the Baby Bells may acquire and operate radio dispatch companies: Nextel shares rose 15% on the news, in the hope that a Bell may fancy the heavily indebted company, but they may well all have their hands too full building Personal Communications Services nets.
Nokia Telecommunications and Globe Telecom have signed an pact to expand Globe Telecom’s GSM mobile phone network in the Philippines.
Cable & Wireless Plc and Deutsche Telekom have expressed interest in investing in Philippine cellular phone operator Isla Communications Corp: Islacom can offer a 10% equity stake to another foreign firm as Philippine law allows only 40% foreign participation in a public utility; Thailand’s Shinawatra Computer and Communications Public Co Ltd already has a 30% stake in the company; Islacom hopes to strengthen its landline and international gateway services with the addition of another foreign partner; it currently has over 1,000 cellular telephone users; Cable & Wireless already has a 40% stake in Eastern Telecommunications Philippines Inc.
China’s fledgling computer industry is predicted to boom in 1995, with domestic sales soaring by $1,200m to $6,200m from 1994: output is expected to reach 1m personal computers, up 35% from 1994; experts said 1995 sales would consist of 1m personal computers worth $1,900m, software and information services worth $1,200m and auxiliary equipment ranging from disks and screens to printers worth $1,200m; an estimated 300,000 personal computers for family use will be sold in this year compared with 200,000 in 1994.
Electronic Data Systems Corp’s deal that takes it into South Africa sees it forming a joint venture with Dimension Data Holdings Ltd, and the two will together be majority shareholders of the entity, which was created from the merger of ABS Holdings Ltd, AECI Information Services and White House Technologies, which will hold the remaining stake; the venture starts life with 600 employees, and will serve customers in South Africa and its immediate neighbour countries.
Cray Computer Corp has completed testing of a 256,000 single-bit processor array: it is a component of the Cray-3 Super Scalable System that is being jointly developed by the company, the US National Security Agency and the Supercomputing Research Center; Cray Computer said researchers verified correctness of operation of the 256,000 single-bit processor array, which is the first half of a 512,000 single-bit processor array; the development contract should be completed by July.
Dutch computer services group Getronics NV reckons it has a better than 50:50 chance of winning a licence to set up the Netherlands’ second digital cellular network, its chairman Ton Risseeuw told Reuters: decision day is April 1; Getronics has over 15% of one group, MobiNed, which also includes Rabobank, NV Luchthaven Schiphol, Bellsouth Corp’s Bellsouth Europe.
The 360 SPECint92 or better that Hewlett-Packard Co is estimating for the forthcoming PA-8000 Precision Architecture RISC (CI No 2,616) compares with 225 SPECint92 for the PowerPC 620 at 133MHz and 180 SPECint92 for Intel Corp’s 133MHz P6.
German cellular network operator E-Plus, joint venture of Thyssen AG and Veba AG claims 45,000 subscribers: after nine months of operation, E-Plus service is now availale to 50% of the German population, a figure that is projected to grow to 75% by the year-end, when it will be available to 90% in the east.
National Broadcasting Corp and Reuters Holdings Plc entered a 10-year worldwide agreement allowing NBC to use news, text wires and financial data services in its programming.
BellSouth Corp has accelerated its plans to cut jobs from its local phone subsidiary but has not decided how many more positions will go; in late 1993 it said it would eliminate 10,200 posts at the BellSouth Telecommunications arm by end-1996.
Costa Mesa, Califor
nia-based Canon Inc has three new personal computers, called the Innova Media PCs, which include bundled software for Internet access: they range from an 80486DX4 to Pentium 100 processor and come with 14.4Kbps or 28.8Kbps full-duplex facsimile modem and five preloaded applications for access to the Internet; estimated prices are $1,700 to $2,700 each.
Hitachi Ltd will ship fibre optic Coupling Links for its HDS GX 8000 Series mainframes in the fourth quarter, so that a processor, or logical partition on it, can be operated in a Parallel Sysplex environment; no prices were given.
AT&T Corp has received a $400m contract to install telephone lines in the central Philippines: the deal with Isla Communications Co calls for AT&T to provide telecommunications equipment for 400,000 lines in five central Philippine provinces; Islacom is required to install 700,000 lines by the end of 1998 under its international calling and cellular licence; the company is a joint venture of Asiacom Philippines Inc and Shinawatra International Ltd of Thailand.
Drexler Technology Corp, Mountain View has told Time Warner Inc that a significant number of its movies – the ones that use an optical data format for digital sound on film, may infringe two of Drexler’s patents, but does not say how it intends to proceed: the data format quadruples the amount of digital data that can be stored, but Drexler wants to sell the patents anyway, since it sees them as extraneous to its memory card business.
The Wayne, Pennsylvania-based SunGard Planning Solutions division of SunGard Recovery Services Inc is to acquire the disaster recovery software products and customer contracts of the disaster recovery software business of CHI/COR Information Management Inc of Chicago; terms of the pact were not given.
The Acer America Corp unit of Acer Inc is endorsing Plug and Play and Windows95 as keys to making its personal computers easier to use.
Weekhawken, New Jersey-based Hanover Direct Inc is to invest in distributor Tiger Direct Inc and provide it with strategic services: Hanover will make an initial $8m for a convertible debenture and warrants, and on conversion of the debenture, exercise of the warrants and the receipt of dividends, Hanover will hold about 42% of Tiger Direct’s common shares outstanding; under the agreement, Hanover’s investment can go as high as $17.7m and it will also have the right to acquire 50.1% of Tiger’s shares outstanding; Miami-based Tiger is the former Bloc Development Corp.
Employee-owned Science Applications International Corp, Frederick, Maryland reports a $400m contract from the National Cancer Institute.
The roaming agreement between Deutsche Telekom AG and GTE Corp (CI No 2,619) is far from a simple one because although calls made abroad will be billed to the home phone, subscribers will need dual-standard phones to make calls throughout North America using the Advanced Mobile Phone Service system, and in Europe and wherever else the Groupe Speciale Mobile standard is in use; until such handsets are ready, separate phones will be required.
AT&T Corp’s Microelectronics division is to support manufacturers of 100VG-AnyLAN systems by adding a Token Ring frame capability to its Regatta 100 family of transceiver chip and repeater devices: the company says it will deliver the offering before the end of the year.
Before Telecom Eireann bought out all other shareholders of the Minitel Communications Ltd on-line service operator (CI No 2,613) it was owned by France Telecom, with 30%, and the Allied Irish Banks Ltd and Credit Lyonnais with 20% each.
The UK Office of Telecommunications announced on Friday that it is to investigate the interconnection rates charged by British Telecommunications Plc and Mercury Communications Ltd to carriers that do not have international licences – companies such as City of London Telecommunications Ltd and MFS Communications Co are forced to buy international facilities from one or the other if they
want to offer their customers international services, and Director General of Telecommunications Don Cruickshank said that with some of BT’s tariffs, the interconnection rate charged was higher than the retail price, and while Mercury’s tariffs were generally lower than the retail rate, they still needed invesigation.
Foreign manufacturers of integrated circuits captured a record 23.7% of the Japanese market in the fourth quarter of 1994, bringing the average foreign market share for the entire year to 22.4% the US Trade Representative’s Office announced.
Taking advantage of a concession that private companies can build fibre optic loops in Germany provided they are no more than 16 miles long, MFS Communications Co Inc has scored something of a breakthrough with government authorisations to construct and operate a Metropolitan Area Network in Frankfurt, after it won agreement with the City of Frankfurt on rights of way and on the use of municipal conduit to install the optical fibre; it hopes to complete a six-mile ring in the autumn, and will be the first non-government-owned carrier authorised to construct and operate a fibre optic network to serve third party business customers in Germany; MFS will provide a full range of services, including corporate voice and managed international leased lines.
AT&T Corp is aiming for the number two spot in every European market it enters, Pier Carlo Falotti, head of AT&T in Europe told Reuter in Hannover: AT&T may buy networks, but it will not go into local telecommunications networks on its own.
Shares in Integrated Micro Products Plc, Consett, County Durham fell $1.75 to $6.25 on Friday after it said it faces a disappointing quarter following Motorola Inc’s announcement of a build up of inventories of cellular phones: its fault-tolerant Unix computers are used in Motorola’s Land Mobile products, and Integrated Micro says it expects sales to Motorola to be significantly lower than it hoped.
Germany will liberalise its telecommunications market from January 1 1998, and not before, Postal Minister Wolfgang Btsch declared: the liberalisation plan proposed by me and approved by the government excludes the possibility of an opening of the telecommunication market – including network infrastructure – before January 1, 1998, Btsch said, adding that pilot projects before 1998 could only take place in cases where Deutsche Telekom AG cannot offer services that are needed at an appropriate scale or price, and where technical innovations are delayed.
Daimler-Benz AG and IBM Deutschland GmbH announced an extension of Daimler’s global services contract with IBM that is valued at over $550m: the contract runs for three years and involves delivery of IBM software, hardware and services to Daimler; it is the fifth such contract between the two companies.
Sega of America Inc has styled September 2 Saturnday in honour of the Sega Saturn 32-bit games system, which will be launched in the US on that day: parent Sega Enterprises Ltd reckons it sold 500,000 in the first month in Japan and looks for 1m by April, 2m by the end of the year – the target for the US is 500,000 by Christmas; the Saturn includes eight processors, three of them 32-bit RISCs (the machine uses members of Hitachi Ltd’s SH7000 RISC family), and some 20 titles are to be ready by launch, with 100 planned in time for Christmas; it will cost between $350 and $450. – o – Sharp Corp also plans to raise the export prices of its electronics products and devices to its US users to cope with the recent rise of the yen against the dollar: it will decide how much to raise prices depending on which level the dollar-yen rate settles at; Sharp’s current export prices are based on the assumption that the dollar-yen rate would stay at around 100 yen.
Online Media Ltd says it is converting Oracle New Media software to run on its ARM RISC set-top boxes.
Nokia Mobile Phones Japan KK, part of Nokia Oy, and the DoCoMo cellular unit of Nippon Telegraph & Telephone
Corp, have signed a sales agreement for the Japanese market, where Nokia claims to be the only outsider with digital phones: DoCoMo will sell Nokia’s digital portables via its local sales network.
Fast as a laser printer, agile as an inkjet, deadly as a head-crash… next season’s sponsor of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club in North London will be Hewlett-Packard Co, paying ú4m over four years.
IBM UK Ltd reckons that its move to so-called hot desking – more like musical workplaces, since there are significantly fewer desk spaces than there are people attached to each location, has cut its requirement for office space by about 20%, the Financial Times reports, representing a gross saving of about ú12m a year, before the costs of equipping everybody affected with laptop computer and communications equipment is taken into account; the space saving per employee who can be mobile (some people still have to be in the office all day everyday) is a bit higher at 22%.
Spain’s Public Works Minister, Jose Borrell, has agreed to go along with European Commission decisions that may dampen Telefonica de Espana SA’s advantage in the newly-opened digital mobile telephone market: Borrell will consider delaying Telefonica’s entrance to the GSM digital network service until October of this year when its competitor Airtel SA plans to start.
No word in the announcement materials that the new PC Server 320 and 720 from IBM Corp will take PowerPC processors as alternatives to the Pentiums, but that is likely because IBM still has not actually got around to announcing any PowerPC personal computer products yet; the operating systems supported on the new servers are Santa Cruz Operation Inc Unix, OS/2, OS/2 LAN Server, NetWare and Windows NT.
Oyster Bay, New York-based Acclaim Entertainment Inc is to acquire Lazer-Tron Corp for $8 per share in stock deal to enhance its presence in coin-operated entertainment.
Yet more backwash from the Pentium maths error – most spreadsheet programs are too clever by half – too clever to redo the sums and correct themselves if they have been calculated with less than perfect hardware, because they are designed to recalculate only cells dependent on numbers that have been changed: according to the New York Times, of the widely-used spreadsheets, only Quattro Pro virtually eliminates the problem, since the program fully recalculates a file each time you open it, so all you have to do once you’ve got your new flawless (well, relatively) Pentium is to open a file and save it, but to force Excel into going to all the trouble of recalculating everything, you have to open the file and press Ctrl-Alt-F9 – an option that, needless to say, appears nowhere in the Excel help screens.
