EU acts to slash sky-high mobile roaming charges

The European Commission unveiled plans to slash skyhigh costs for making mobile phone calls abroad defying fierce opposition from the telecoms industry.
 
The clampdown agreed by the commission at a weekly meeting aims to halve socalled "roaming rates" which companies impose on consumers using their mobile phones when outside their home country.

"For years mobile roaming charges have remained at unjustifiably high levels in spite of repeated warnings to the industry" said Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding.

"This

Cell Phones Join Emergency Broadcast Network

If you feel out of touch with the all the emergency alerts issued by the government get ready to join the loop. Your mobile phone is now going to be part of the Emergency Broadcast System.
 
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) part of the Department of Homeland Security is demonstrating today a new system for warnings to be sent as text messages to cell phones satellite radio devices cable TV stations Web sites and PDAs in addition to traditional

Intel's $600 Million Clearwire Investment Shows Its WiMax Commitment

Intel has made another huge investment in the nextgeneration wireless technology WiMax. Intel Capital the chip maker's venture capital investment arm invested $ million in financial funding to the wireless broadband company Clearwire Corp. to accelerate its development and deployment of mobile WiMax networks. The investment comes just a week after Intel announced plans for a chipset that has fixed and mobile WiMax capabilities and another one combining WiFi and WiMax.
 
Intel Capital's contribution is part of a $ million investment

South Korea, Japan At The Head Of The Internet Pack

South Korea and Japan top the rankings for use of information and communication technologies (ICT) such as the Internet but developing states such as India are making giant strides a U.N. report said on Wednesday.

Using a speciallydevised Digital Opportunity Index (DOI) which tracks variables such as price and infrastructure the International Telecommunication Union put Denmark and Iceland in third and fourth places respectively.

Chile topped the list in Latin America while Morocco was the bestplaced African country.

The report by the United Nations'

Vonage offering new phone device for businesses

Internet phone company Vonage Holdings Corp. said on Wednesday it aimed to expand its customer base to businesses with a new device that can be carried and plugged into computers for making phone calls.
 
Analysts however said the product was not enough to change their dim outlook for Vonage which saw its shares tumble around percent since its May initial public offering (IPO) on worries about increasing competition and persistent losses.

Vonage is one of the U.S. leaders in

Intel Wows With Dualmode WiMax

Intel Corp. next week is introducing a client chipset that supports both the fixed and mobile versions of the wireless broadband technology known as WiMax.

Arguably WiMax's biggest cheerleader the company is working to make the case for the technology with a chipset roadmap that targets devices ranging from video games to digital cameras the idea being that if the clients are there the carriers will come.

For those of you just joining us: WiMax comes in two basic flavors one

Intel, NDS team on WiMAX TV multicast

Intel Corp. and Europebased digital pay TV company NDS Group plc have announced a trial system to demonstrate the TV and video services for fixed WiMAX technology.

Using the WiMAX IEEE . standard and the soon to be ratified IEEE .e Intel and NDS will also collaborate on industry and market development activities. The companies will engage in demonstrations to service providers and the industry to show how WiMAX can offer more than broadband access with payTV services.

The preWiMAX implementation takes place

Nokia-Siemens Merger Creates World's No. Four Networks Maker

Nokia and Siemens have agreed to combine the bulk of their telecom equipment businesses to create one of the biggest players in the industry sending shares in both firms higher.

The units in the venture "Nokia Siemens Networks" had sales of . billion euros ($ billion) last year which would make it the second biggest mobile equipment player and third in fixed infrastructure the companies said on Monday.

Siemens shares jumped . percent to . euros by GMT while Nokia was up

Mobile E-Mail Usage To Triple By 2011 Says Report

Email access by mobile employees is set to triple between now and according to a report released Wednesday by U.K. Market research firm Informa Telecoms and Media. And much of that increased access will be on relatively simple devices such as standard cell phones and not over more expensive devices such as smartphones the study claims.

The surge will be spurred by a shift away from enterprisemanaged mobile email products such as Research In Motion's (RIM's) BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Instead email access

New Motorola Gateway To Stream Video Content In Home

Microsoft Targets VoIP Market With LG-Nortel Deal

Xybernaut Sells Patents Targeting Ads To Mobile Devices

Xybernaut Corp. will auction patents that can wirelessly transmit advertising, direct mail and information to targeted mobile phones and devices at specific locations, a company executive told TechWeb.
 
The company intends to use the proceeds to emerge from Chapter 11 and successfully reorganize. Xybernaut president and chief executive officer Perry Nolan said the patents will go up for auction in Washington, D.C. on May 17, with a minimum bid of $3.9 million for the three U.S. patents, one pending known as

TeleCIS Has Portable WiMax Chip

WiMax chipset maker TeleCIS Wireless Inc. is getting ready to ship a chip designed to bring portability to the wireless broadband standard known as fixed WiMax.

The TCW 1620, which supports the 802.16-2004 WiMax standard, runs at under 500 mW, and it is small enough to be used in PC cards or USB devices. Due for shipment to hardware makers by May, the chip could be a stopgap for providing portable WiMax as the industry waits for products based on the official mobile

Linksys enters 802.11n fray, skirts chip-set questions

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Cisco Systems Inc. subsidiary Linksys Inc. announced four 802.11n product lines today (April 24) and confirmed that the products would use chips from the three vendors currently supporting the nascent standard. But company executives would not comment on the reportedly questionable performance of early, pre-draft chip sets from Broadcom Corp. and Marvell Semiconductor Inc.

Linksys launched two consumer-class products: the $149 WRT 300N router, which uses the 2.4-GHz band, and the WAG 300N DSL modem-and-router combination, aimed at

Nokia, MIT Open Joint Research Lab

Nokia and MIT officially opened a joint research effort Friday and released sketches on projects they will jointly develop.
"Our mission is to explore and develop technologies that will be available in the marketplace in five to ten years – not just novelties, but technologies that will see mass market demand from consumers and enterprises," said Bob Iannucci, head of Nokia Research Center, in a statement.

At MIT, the Nokia unit is teaming up with the university's Computer Science and