Cisco is offering approximately $3 billion for Tandberg stock, an 11% premium on the latest trading price and a three times multiple of revenues. If the deal is completed, Tandberg’s current CEO will head up the group’s worldwide telepresence business – he will be responsible for two-thirds of the telepresence estate in enterprise global services.

The Government’s strategy on separation is to make Telstra an offer it cannot refuse. Separate yourself, or have separation done for you.

The dilemma facing both fixed and mobile next generation network builders is the current and foreseeable gap between network costs and the revenues that can be captured by the network business. Even in the absence of regulation, the shift to IP based networks has seen an increasing commoditisation of network services. New services are being enabled, but the benefits are largely being captured either by end customers or the retail service providers.

Mobile broadband is now driving almost all the growth in the mobile industry in Australia. With incredible connection growth of 120% year-on-year there were 2.2million ‘big-screen’ mobile broadband connections in June-2009. This means on average 1 in 10 Australia’s has a mobile broadband connection.

Several news outlets have reported multiple undersea cable breaks around Southeast Asia occurring on 12 August 2009. Due to the depths of the water and the fact that – according to various reports and quoted cable operators - multiple cables have been affected, the most likely cause is undersea seismic activity (i.e. earthquakes).

Ovum’s smartphone forecasts predict that smartphone shipments will grow by 23% between 2008 and 2009, despite the overall decline during that period in the total mobile phone market. This growth will continue at a CAGR of 19.5% through to 2014, at which point smartphones will account for 29% of the total global handset market.

A Commentary

Like a point on the spiral of a corkscrew, trends in technology have a way to not only come full circle when viewed straight down its shaft but also to move forward and evolve with every turn.

Ancient Buddhist and Hindu scriptures not only say that the universe was formed from something like the big bang postulated by science and that it expands as it's doing so now, but also that at some point the universe will contract in upon itself into something like a massive black hole, while it crushes all matter including all life in its path, then explode again into a sea or plasma and begin the cycle all over again.

In his book, The Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engles writes of the river which one crosses in the morning on one's way to work being neither the same nor different when one crosses it again in the evening on the way home.

In these modern or post-modern times, the wisdom of the ancients can be seen in how modern computing has come full circle and mutated as well – from highly centralised mainframe computers which played hos to dumb terminals, through minicomputers to standalone personal computers with their own independent processing power sitting on desks in offices and homes.

Soon after began the process of recentralisation through the growth of networking to share increasingly centralised storage and other shared resources among these PCs and for them to communicate with each other from anywhere, and now the latest buzzword is “cloud computing” where all the processing power, applications,  and resources are highly centralised in one remote location someone out there in our interconnected world and accessed either through a web browser or a client applet running on a PC or some other thin client -- which are a bit smarter than those dumb terminals of yore.

And, regulation of the telecommunications industry worldwide has gone through a similar cycle over the past 30 years.