The Times
The Times reports that ‘Motorola’s failure to produce a successor to its bestselling Razr phone has contributed to an 84% drop in its fourth-quarter profits’. The manufacturer said that it expected to continue to lose market share this quarter, having only shipped 40.9 million handsets this year, compared to 65.7 million a year earlier. Motorola’s latest handsets have struggled to capture the public’s imagination, and its global market share has fallen to 13%, down from 23% at the end of 2006.
Vodafone is conducting trials of mini, plug-in base-stations that can be installed in a house or office to improve call quality technology.
The stations, known as ‘femtocells’, are palm-sized boxes that connect to the mobile network via a user's broadband connection. They work with a range of mobile standards and ABI Research, the technology analyst, forecasts that by 2011 there will be 102m users of femtocells worldwide.
It is thought that operators will subsidise the cost of the equipment, giving away the boxes as part of the increasingly common 'bundled' packages of broadband and mobile. Ealier in the week The Telegraph reported that Vodafone is aiming to increase its 3.3% stake in China Mobile, worth £6bn, as the country looks to further open up its telecoms sector.
Financial Times
The Financial Services Authority has begun its first prosecution for insider dealing, the Financial Times reports. The regulator is bringing persecution against two men accused of trading ahead of a £103 million offer by Motorola for TTP Communications in June 2006. The TTP shares closed 13p before the Motorola announcement, which valued the shares at 45p.
Welsh based start-up, H2O is looking to use sewers to connect people in Dundee, Bournemouth and Northampton to ultra fast broadband. The company is proposing to use innovative cable technology that is laid in sewage pipes. The technology is cost effective and could help avoid a potential broadband bottleneck in the UK, with data heavy streaming and downloading becoming more common.