THE WRAP: AlcaLu in damage control, and a police raid

Robert Clark | February 26, 2010

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This week heads rolled over the continued failures of Telecom NZ’s 3G network, while Google’s European troubles look set to continue.

Alcatel-Lucent went into damage control over the spate of failures of the HSPA equipment it supplied to Telecom NZ.

It replaced Steve Lowe, the head of its NZ business, while Telecom’s CTO Frank Mount resigned. AlcaLu boss Ben Verwaayen told NZ media it was the company’s no.1 problem.

Police raided Richard Li’s home in Hong Kong as they probed his unsuccessful $2 billion attempt to privatize PCCW a year ago.

European authorities began an anti-trust probe into Google’s role in the search market after rivals complained it was manipulating results.

An Italian court convicted three Google executives on privacy violations over the posting of a YouTube video. It was the first time the company had been responsible for the content posted on its system.

Hollywood film studios lodged an appeal against an Australian court ruling that an ISP was not responsible for illegal movie downloads by its customers.

In a fresh approach to fighting cyber-crime, Microsoft won permission from a US court to take down a global botnet, The software firm also signed a cross-license agreement with Amazon, giving the two companies access to each other’s patent portfolios and stirring speculation about future collaboration on e-readers.

Intel revealed it has was hit by a sophisticated cyber-attack at the same time as Google, and announced a $3.5 billion tech investment fund for the US.

American Tower bought Essar’s mobile tower business for $430 million – its third Indian deal in the past 12 months.

Pacnet said it would build data centers at its Asian landing stations.

A forex windfall and subs growth in Indonesia helped TM’s international arm Axiata triple its earnings. KT announced heavy subsidies for LG’s first Android phone.

More controversy broke around the Australian next-gen broadband project, this time over the proposal to allow the new state-owned NBN Co. to offer retail services.

The semiconductor industry, a bellwether of the telecom and IT sectors, will grow 20% this year, driven by PC and memory sales, Gartner predicted.

A survey of Chinese scientists found that 84% thought losing access to Google would “somewhat or significantly” harm their work.

Nortel confirmed the sale of its carrier VoIP unit to US IP firm Genband for $282 million.

The US Strategic Command lifted its ban on the use of thumb drives on military networks, apparently because of the difficulty in policing it.

And after a meeting with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, the Dalai Lama opened a Twitter account, signing up 70,000 followers in the first few days.

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telecomasia.net

Robert Clark

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