The Swedish former monopoly carrier Telia is rethinking a 1994 plan to converge its fixed and mobile networks. On the contrary, the company will differentiate the two, as it sees a surge in demand for broadband services on the fixed network, and will use the wireless network for plain old voice and data services. Convergence is going to wait for completion of the national integrated broadband network sometime after the year 2000. The company plans to offer voice and data services to fixed terminals for business users, and a backhauling service for mobile telecom operators. The company says it will avoid this problem by always having several satellites in view of the user.
Trials are currently underway in Norway.
The equipment works by blocking calls to a database of known callback numbers in the USA, the UK and Belgium. ADSL FOR DATA Microsoft has teamed up with GTE for a trial of ADSL technology, initially at the former company's facilities in Redmond, Washington state. For employees only to start with, the trial will later extend to users at the University of Washington and to some 60 local businesses. However in this case the Americans are not moving as fast as their northern neighbours. Anyway, since Singapore's scheme is based on nothing more sophisticated than a black-list of undesirable sites, and undesirable sites multiply quicker than you can say 'Down with Lee Kuan Yew', the attempt seems doomed to failure.