IT Support news

Microsoft have bought Skype, so that’s not really new information. Paying over the odds for a telco that’s essentially making a loss is a bit weird though right? – All skype really do is sell ads to generate revenue at the moment so you can only think Microsoft must have big plans or they wouldn’t have paid over the odds.

To put this into context a little bit we need to roll back to 1987 when Microsoft bought a tiny little company called Forethought. Microsoft paid $14m for this little company. Why? The product they bought became Microsoft PowerPoint. Seems like a bargain now given how popular Microsoft Office is (its worth noting that Office alone rakes in over $14bn a year for Microsoft).

So if you aren’t already a skype user, sign up and try it. Then watch that space.. I can’t helping thinking Microsoft have big plans for this product.

3G outages experienced lately were blamed on a switch problem by Orange, who have apologised and denied any problems have arisen from the network share with T-Mobile. Fixes have been issued and reassurances they are working on a permanent solution came with a thank you to call centres experiencing a high volume of customers unhappy at not being able to gain access to mobile data services, largely in the London area. Orange maintain that despite the problem in recent weeks it is committed to investing and improving its services and delivering a stable network for customers.

64 bit Windows 7 systems were made unstable by an update from
AVG on Wednesday, leaving machines in a continuous reboot loop.
An advisory and apology were issued, however no explanation as to
what caused the issue have been given and it’s unclear if versions
of Windows (other than the seemingly vulnerable
Desktop version Windows 7) are effected. The problem update (3292)
has now been pulled.

BT are planning trials in the new year that will push downstream
speeds up to 1Gbit/s, with the upstream needle being pushed to
400Mbit/s. This technical trial will move BT ahead of competitors Virgin
Media – who are increasing maximum download speeds across it’s
network to 100Mbit/s by mid-2012, and are currently trialling 200Mbit/s
service but have limited availability across the country.
 
BT believe with the tax funds available it
could extend fibre up to 90 per cent of UK premises, rival
firms are already criticising the tax arrangements which would
mean it will be more expensive for them to lay new fibre than for BT.