Spain has just reported its first quarter of negative growth in two years, but Barcelona feels like a boom town this week as it plays host to the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the telecommunications industry’s biggest annual trade fair. The number of smartphones, mobile-broadband connections and app downloads
Telecommunications operator iBurst is in play and a deal could be announced within the next few weeks, according to several well-placed industry sources. TechCentral has not been able to establish which company is courting iBurst, which is owned by Wireless Business Solutions Holdings (WBS), but it’s
Cell C has slammed telecommunications regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa), over its invitation to apply for valuable radio frequency spectrum, accusing the authority of opening itself up to legal challenge and of producing a document “so vague so as to not be capable of proper interpretation”
Quantum effects are vital to modern electronics. They can also be a damnable nuisance. Make a transistor too small, for example, and electrons within it can simply vanish from one place and reappear in another because their location is quantumly indeterminate. Currents thus leak away, and signals are degraded
Telkom has no immediate plans to cut the cost of calls to mobile phones, despite a sharp fall in the rate mobile operators are permitted to charge the fixed-line operator to terminate calls originating on its network on 1 March. Mobile termination rates were cut from
Windows 8 shows a design sensibility and a clarity of purpose not often seen in a Microsoft product. I’ve spent about a week with the “consumer preview” of Windows 8, which is now available to the public free of charge. I’ve been testing it on a Samsung tablet, with a separate wireless keyboard and mouse
Broadcasting regulator Icasa is expected to furnish its reasons within the next week for barring TopTV from launching adult channels on its satellite pay-TV platform. However it tries to justify the decision, Icasa deserves to be challenged all the way to the constitutional court
Apple’s market value exceeded the half-a-trillion-dollar mark for the first time in after-hours trading in New York on Tuesday, just 40 days after it breached the $400bn level. Apple is now by far the most valuable listed US company, with a market value at Tuesday’s close a full $87bn ahead of the next largest
Africa looks set to get its own generic top-level domain, .africa, in 2013 if the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) gives the go-ahead, which looks likely. The creation of the new domain could set off a gold rush and create headaches for businesses wanting to protect their brands
IBM is announcing on Tuesday that it has made major advances towards creating a practical, full-scale quantum computer, a fabled, theoretical machine that relies on the tiniest atomic properties to compute problems faster than any supercomputer that exists today. Scientists at IBM Research said that their
