New Zealand-based Pacific Fibre wins the prize for the longest cable deployment contract of the week, signing up US firm TE SubCom to design and construct a 12,750km subsea cable linking the country with Australia and the US.
Alcatel-Lucent made its gains in the form of a 3G upgrade contract from China Unicom. The deal covers ten key provinces of the country, and comes less than a fortnight after China Telecom hired the vendor to deploy a fiber network.
Rival vendor Cisco was a stark contrast to Alca-Lu, revealing plans to cut 6,500 staff and offload a manufacturing plant in a bid to generate cost savings of $1 billion. The layoffs include around 15% of Cisco’s executive-level staff and could cost the firm $1.3 billion in the near term.
Hacker collective The Hacker’s Choice rebuffed Vodafone’s assertion its home femtocell service is secure, claiming it accessed customer data on the operator’s core network and urging the public not to rely on Vodafone’s software updates for femto boxes.
And media mogul Rupert Murdoch was left foaming at the mouth during a UK parliamentary inquiry into phone hacking at News International newspapers, when a member of the public landed a plate of shaving foam on the firm’s founder.
While Murdoch’s wife was commended for delivering a swift blow to the perpetrator’s head, pie-ing master Aaron Kay called the man an amateur.