Fixed operators straegies

TelecomItalia is planning to invest €500m in the French DSL sectorduring the next three years. TI has already built a 4,000-km optical backbone(with Alcatel) and will add €350m on access and OSS, and €150m on marketingand sales support. TI bought Tiscali France lastmonth for €266m.

Colt(UKand pan-European operator) launched the first pan-European flat-rate businessVoIP service, for about $57 a month per user. The cost includes hosted IP-PBX,handsets and unlimited service.

NextWeb(US- CA) is tolaunch VOIP service over WiMAX in 175 cities in California.

Skype,the Internet telephony specialist, is launching a global number plan (viaagreements with a series of carriers) and an inbound calling service (SkypeIn) fromany normal landline or mobile phone. Skype claims 100 million downloads of itssuccessful free software, and about 1.2m users for its SkypeOut service.

Sprintlaunched Fox News Channel Live as part of its Sprint TV offering.

C&W(UK)plans to spend $ 360m over the next three years a NGN network (similar to 21CNnetwork from BT).

Qwestincreased again its offer for MCI to $9.7bn or $30 per share. The offer is 30%superior to Verizon bid, and consists of $ 16 in cash and $14 in Qwest stockwith the guarantee already in place. Qwest asked MCI to answer before Saturday.

TimeWarner and Comcast have reached definitiveagreements to buy all the U.S. assets ofAdelphia for $12.7bn in cash and 16% of the common stock of Time Warner's cablesubsidiary. The two companies will swap cable systems and unwind Comcast'sinvestments in Time Warner.

Hong Kong Broadband Network(HKBN) is providing 1-Gbit/sec FTTH connectivity to about 800,000 households(1/3 of HK households). The network uses metro Ethernet technology.