Nokia sees operators boosting 3G investment

Nokia says there is a change in the air in the mobile telecoms market. Jukka Berggvist, Nokia executive VP for networks, said in an interview in Paris today that mobile telecoms operators have started to increase investment in high-speed networks. Nokia has said that by late September it had shipped 27 000 radio base stations for WCDMA mobile networks used in Japan and Europe, and which enable video conferencing on cellphones. It claims to have over 30% of the emerging market.

Investors are looking for signs that the 30 billion euro a year mobile telecoms networks industry is stabilising after having shrunk 40% in the last two years. Bergqvist emphasised that mobile operators did not yet appear to be raising their overall investments and were probably spending more on high-speed networks but finding savings elsewhere. "They are still cautious," he said.

CNET News.com reports that spam attacks and security vulnerabilities have prompted Microsoft to turn off its troublesome Windows Messenger service in the next Windows XP update.

Spammers are taking advantage of the Messenger service to send advertisements that pop up on users` desktops. Microsoft says the current plan of record is to switch off Messenger in the next update, Windows XP Service Pack 2, which is due in the first half of next year.

The SCO Group, which is involved in a lawsuit against IBM, has begun a direct challenge to the General Public Licence (GPL), which is the legal foundation for Linux.

CNET News.com says SCO feels the GPL violates the US Constitution, together with copyright, anti-trust and export control laws. SCO also feels the GPL is unenforceable.

Dell`s final offering in its recent consumer push is a new Dimension desktop PC for the gaming community. The updated Dimension XPS is available with a number of high-end features, including Intel`s fastest Pentium 4 processors, high-end PC3200 (400MHz) memory, and RAID hard drive technology normally found on servers.

A base configuration of the XPS starts at $1 799. It comes with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 processor with hyperthreading, 512MB of PC3200 DDR SDRAM, a 80GB hard drive without RAID support, a GeForce FX 5200 graphics card from Nvidia, with 128MB of video memory, a DVD-ROM drive, and a 17-inch CRT monitor.