The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
Telecom New Zealand has reported EBITDA of $NZ783m for the half year to 31 December 2008, a 16 percent decline on the equivalent half in the prior year.
The figure include a one-off $NZ101 million of impairment charges made up of the previously announced impairment of $NZ33 million of GSM mobile equipment, relating to the decision to upgrade to 850 MHz mobile technology, and a $NZ68 million write off of goodwill relating to PowerTel. Telecom said its carrying value was no longer supported by forecast earnings. Without these hits EBITDA would have been $NZ884m, a 5.5 percent decline. Guidance of group net profit after tax of $NZ460m to $NZ500m for the full year is unchanged.
The company said: "The impact on Telecom of the economic slowdown does not appear to have accelerated this quarter, and revenues have remained relatively resilient with strong management focus...The [850MHz 3G] mobile build is on track, and we remain on schedule to launch New Zealand's largest and fastest 3G mobile network in June 2009.
"The fibre-to-the-node programme is ahead of schedule, delivering average attainable speeds of 13Mbps to customers on the new cabinets, and the fixed line transformation is expected to see the first customers on the new voice over IP technology by the end of the year."
Need all the latest news on telecommunications?
If telecoms is your business: you'll find in-depth, industry-specific news, analysis and commentary in ExchangeDaily
Check out a
recent edition (no forms to fill in) or take a free trial
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
Latest Headlines from IT INDUSTRY
