Australian Technology News

Details of the company established to bring the Federal Government's $43 billion broadband vision to life remained unavailable this week, despite government assurances it had been registered.

ASIC does not appear to have a record of a company by the name the minister mentioned

Shadow Communications Minister Nick Minchin

In a speech on Tuesday to the National Press Club in Canberra, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the company had been "established", with a search to kick off shortly to find its chief executive. He named the company in associated speech notes as the "National Broadband Network Company".

A spokesperson for Conroy later said the company was incorporated with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission on 8 April "under the normal processes", although they were not able to provide further details and have not (at the time of print) disclosed the associated Australian Company Number (ACN).

Broad searches by the opposition and ZDNet.com.au of ASIC's database and the Australian Business Register for the company's registration details have not been successful in finding the company's details.

"Senator Conroy clearly stated that the National Broadband Network Company has been established on behalf of Australian taxpayers; the onus is on him to now provide some further details," Shadow Communications Minister Nick Minchin said.

Minchin questioned whether the company had a constitution and whether any directors had been named. "ASIC does not appear to have a record of a company by the name the minister mentioned, so at this stage perhaps it is just a number, a broadband company with no name," he added.

It is possible the company could have been registered using a temporary name that did not include any reference to "broadband", "NBN" or any other search terms, as it has not yet been formally named. It could have also simply been registered with a number.

"Matters such as the appointment of company board and executive, as well as the formal naming of the company will be considered in the coming weeks and months," Conroy's spokesperson said.

The news comes as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was in Tasmania this week, to discuss among other things the imminent roll-out of the NBN in the state with Premier David Bartlett. The state and Rudd's government are locked in negotiations regarding the implementation. However, speaking with journalists, Rudd did not provide any concrete details about the government's NBN plans in Tasmania.

"I cannot give you the month nor the day," he said. "But it will be in the second half of the year."

Comments (7) | Email this
Share: Google | Facebook | del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Slashdot | StumbleUpon

Related Articles

• Paul Fletcher's Wired Brown Land: Review
• Intel wants WiMax for rural NBN
• NBN company established, looks for CEO
• Telecom NZ tables options for fibre plan

COMPUTER scammers are feeding off swine flu fears to enticing people to download viruses or purchase bogus products.

Fujitsu has won a deal to provide all user-facing IT services for Qantas' domestic and international operations following the airline's decision to prematurely end its seven-year, $750 million desktop services contract with Telstra.

At the end of last year, Intel offered to take back surplus inventory from its channel partners because of the effects of fluctuating currency and surplus stock on its partners' cashflow.

We took back a whole lot of inventory, trust me on that

Intel's Kamil Hassan

"We went back and said, any old inventory that you have — give it back," Intel APAC channel chief director Kamil Hassan said yesterday at Intel's annual partner conference at the Gold Coast.

Fluctuation in currency such as the Australian dollar meant that channel partners who had taken on stock often no longer knew whether they would be making a profit on future transactions, he said. It also meant that money was tied up in stock that couldn't be moved, creating the temptation to heavily discount to move stock and free up cashflows.

"We took back a whole lot of inventory, trust me on that," Hassan said.

The offer had been open to many countries including Australia, Hassan said. When Intel took the inventory back, they could shift it to other markets where different items might be selling better, he said.

Intel had also put in other measures to try and keep their channel partners' in good cash shape such as paying upfront bonuses for selling equipment.

There had been a distinct drop in demand during December according to a later presentation by Steve Dallman, VP and general manager of Intel's reseller channel organisation within the Intel sales and marketing group, although his data suggested that the fall in demand had since stabilised.

Intel said at its Q1 earnings call that much of the overhang had been burned off in the first quarter.

Suzanne Tindal travelled to the Gold Coast as a guest of Intel.

Comments (0) | Email this
Share: Google | Facebook | del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Slashdot | StumbleUpon

Related Articles

• Intel wants WiMax for rural NBN
• Intel pushes new mini motherboards
• Give me my IDE port back now
• Samsung unveils 'world's smallest' 256GB SSD drive

Vodafone today said it would hit its deadline of turning on 3G mobile services in regional areas by the first week of May.

The carrier announced that services would be completed and turned on tomorrow for major regional centres — bringing its 3G coverage to 80 per cent of the population. The company has also announced a new set of plans which will launch on Monday, with its $69 cap contract netting users a monthly data allowance of 1GB and its $99 single business cap giving 2GB.

When Vodafone announced the May completion date for this portion of the roll-out last month, the company also set the date for the second stage of the upgrade at 31 August 2009. When that goes live Vodafone 3G coverage will reach over 94 per cent of the Australian population.

The $500 million roll-out was originally scheduled to be completed by Christmas last year, but in October Vodafone came out with the news that the program would be delayed by months. The portion of the network it shared with Optus — 63 per cent of the planned coverage — had been completed, but the part that Vodafone was rolling out alone was not.

The delay was laid at Ericsson's door, with Vodafone CTO Andy Reeves saying that it was taking the vendor longer than originally anticipated to complete the project. Optus has brought its coverage to 96 per cent while Telstra has 99 per cent coverage.

Comments (0) | Email this
Share: Google | Facebook | del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Slashdot | StumbleUpon

Related Articles

• Intel wants WiMax for rural NBN
• New Zealand's mad mobile May
• Internode offers Optus 3G
• Early start for Telecom NZ's 3G network

A trial that could prove to be a test case for the security of chip-and-PIN card technology starts today in the UK.

Worried about the privacy implications of a new copyright law, several ISPs in Sweden have vowed to stop logging IP addresses for users.

Security giant Trend Micro is aiming to increase its enterprise security presence by acquiring enterprise specialist Third Brigade for an undisclosed sum.

An audit of two years of .org.au registrations by domain regulator auDA will lead to a further scrutiny for almost 4,000 domains and their owners.

Microsoft has announced that its Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 has reached the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) phase and detailed the changes contained within the update.

Headlining the changes for the enterprise is the decision to fully integrate Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualisation environment into Windows Server 2008. The standard edition of Server 2008 receives one free instance, enterprise edition gets four free instances and Server 2008 Datacenter has an unlimited number of Hyper-V instances.

For Windows Vista, new features include the ability to record to Blu-ray natively, an improved Wi-Fi configuration and resumption of Wi-Fi connections from sleep mode, and updated Windows Search.

SP2 also allows the use of the exFAT filesystem to support UTC timestamps, thus allowing correct file synchronisation across time zones, and the Windows Vista SP1 blocker tool will be removed from today, according to a Windows Blog post.

Microsoft TechNet stated that the download for an up-to-date PC would be 43MB with different architectures and language packs taking a stand-alone update package's size up to 622MB.

Server Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are expected to arrive on Windows Update sometime this quarter.

Comments (0) | Email this
Share: Google | Facebook | del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Slashdot | StumbleUpon

Related Articles

• Windows 7 RC: Screenshots
• Introducing the Microsoft Deployment Council
• Exchange 2010 beta: Screenshots
• Microsoft Australia still expanding