The week in review

MTN head of corporate affairs Yvonne Muthien tells Reuters MTN is determined to gain a foothold in the Middle East and will keep its office in Iran, even if it loses out on the lucrative bid for its second cellular licence.

At Home

MTN head of corporate affairs Yvonne Muthien tells Reuters MTN is determined to gain a foothold in the Middle East and will keep its office in Iran, even if it loses out on the lucrative bid for its second cellular licence.

THE GOVERNMENT plans to force Telkom to charge affordable prices for lines running into homes and offices to make it easier for other operators to compete with the former fixed-line monopoly, says Business Report.

SPEAKING after the meeting of the Presidential International Advisory Council on Information Society and Development, President Thabo Mbeki says the second national operator needs to be operational soon to address the high cost of telecommunications in the country.

TECHNOLOGY company Mustek posts a healthy 66% rise in net profit for the year to June, up from R50 million to R83 million. This was achieved on a revenue that rose just 9.6% from R2.6 billion to R2.9 billion, due largely to careful foreign exchange management.

THE Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) has licensed over 200 value-added network service (Vans) operators, an Icasa official says. The Vans market, including Telkom operations, is estimated at more than R7 billion a year, according to Business Report.

CELL C`S Jonathan Newman informs Business Day that it does not intend to introduce any immediate price cuts in response to cuts by Vodacom as its tariffs were already among the lowest in the market.

NEWMAN also informs Moneyweb that Cell C has not ruled out the possibility of seeking a listing on the JSE at some stage, but says this is not in its short-term plans.

INVESTMENT company Venfin, which owns a 15% stake in Vodacom, says headline earnings increased 13.2% to R838 million in its latest financial year.

ATIO Corporation partners with global ICT solutions provider Nortel, giving it access to a large end-to-end communications portfolio that includes integrated voice solutions.

COST CONTAINMENT, and the expansion and improvement of its local business, has driven Digicore, a listed fleet management and tracking company, to record a 31% rise in revenue to R253 million and a 99% improvement in operating profit before interest to R57.2 million.

THE FOSCHINI GROUP appoints Nebula to manage its entire fixed voice environment. peviously, Nebula im-plemented and managed a WAN solution for the group.

Into Africa

NAMIBIA: Simultaneous cable failures in two provinces disrupted telecommunications services to Namibia, Telkom said last week Tuesday. Sapa reported that it was not possible to predict when the service would be restored.

NIGERIA: Nigeria will launch its first indigenously built satellite by 2025, the official News Agency of Nigeria reports.

ETHIOPIA: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs says Ethiopia has been elected to host the Third World Information Technology Forum scheduled for August 22 to 28, 2007, reports The Ethiopian Herald.

ZIMBABWE: Telkom pulls the plug on Zimbabwe`s telecoms utility Tel*One for failing to honour an $18 million debt, throwing the country`s telecoms into chaos, says Business Day.

LESOTHO: Standard Bank Lesotho signs a five-year Xerox rental agreement worth R1.1 million with Maseru Business Machines (MBM), a Bytes Document Solutions Africa Operations reseller.

ETHIOPIA: The Ministry of Infrastructure announces that it will undertake infrastructure expansion works at a cost of 26 billion birr during the current budget year, reports The Ethiopian Herald.

ZIMBABWE: Econet Wireless, Zimbabwe`s largest mobile phone operator, post misleadingly large profits in the local currency, with net profit increasing more than fourfold from Z$76.5bn in the first half of 2004 to Z$317.6bn this year. It however had a lacklustre performance in US dollar terms with profit declining from US$14.1m to US$8.7m, reports Business in Africa.

Abroad

DUTCH BANK ABN AMRO agrees to pay five firms 1.81 billion euros to manage and develop its IT systems in a major coup for IBM, Accenture and India`s Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys Technologies and Patni Computer Systems.

SAMSUNG Electronics unveils what it claims is the industry`s first 256MB uni-transistor random access memory, using 90-nanometre process technology. The memory, designed for next-generation mobile phones, operates at 133MHz, making it the fastest pseudo-SRam currently available, claims vnunet.com.

THE ACQUISITION of Nokia`s Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) activities by EADS is finalised. With immediate effect, all PMR activities within EADS have been grouped together to form EADS Secure Networks.

TOSHIBA America Electronic Components announces that it has teamed up with digital media processing firm Sigma Designs to develop a Linux-based platform for digital consumer multimedia appliances such as smart DVD players, says vnunet.com.

NIKON wins the race to become the first company to build a digital camera equipped with a WiFi transmitter. The firm promises that the devices, the Coolpix P1 and P2, will begin shipping commercially by month end.

IN AN EFFORT to help displaced Hurricane Katrina victims and their families, ad hoc communities of Internet users are using mapping technologies from Google to track storm damage, reports Forbes.com.

WITH THE LAUNCH of ".eu" Internet domain names just weeks away, European companies are in a rush to register their names, claims AFP. According to the European Commission, firms will be able to register their names of choice by early December.