The FTTH component of the National Broadband Network will start rolling out later this year to a series of selected test sites chosen to be representative of the different types of dwellings and urban and natural environments likely to be encountered in the full scale rollout.

Tasmanians living in the communities that will be the first to receive NBN services will shortly be invited to briefings on the network and its services.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has conceded he suggested to the NBN Company that it look at possibly hiring Queensland Premier Anna Bligh's former chief of staff Mike Kaiser – the man now at the centre of a $450,000-a-year 'Labor Mates' row.

SingTel has reported a 4.8 percent rise in operating revenue to $2.30b and 3.6 percent rise in EBITDA to $529 for its Australian subsidiary, Optus, in the three months to 31 December, compared to a year earlier, driven primarily by growth in Optus' mobile business.

Figures released by its parent, SingTel, show that Optus had 8,244 million mobile subscribers at 31 December; a figure that shows it is maintaining its lead over the merged Vodafone-Hutchison.

The NBN Co will soon name locations around Australia for the initial roll-out of National Broadband Network infrastructure as 'first-release' live trial sites, executive chairman Mike Quigley has told a Senate committee.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy wants the industry to open a dialog to develop a code of practice for better protecting intellectual property online in the wake of the iiNet court case before Government considers stepping in with new legislation.

In the wake of the movie industry's failed attempt to make ISPs responsible for stopping Internet piracy, communications minister Stephen Conroy is pushing the idea of a copyright code of conduct between the industry and ISPs. He might have to push very hard: the two sides have tried before without success.

Southern Cross Cable Networks has extended until 2020 its sponsorship of the Southern Cross Trans-Pacific Optical Research Test bed (SXTransPORT) - capacity on its cable network that provides 10Gbps links to the US for the Australian research community.

An estimated 72,000 children who accessed the internet last year had some kind of personal safety or security problem, according to a Australian Bureau of Statistics report published today.

Investment research firm, MicroEQUITIES has issued a strong buy recommendation on wireless broadband network operator, BigAir (ASX: BGL), saying its shares should be worth twice the price of about eleven cents they are currently trading at.

The Northern Territory Government has awarded Amcom a five year $20 million contract to extend its optic fibre networks in Darwin and Alice Springs to serve government agencies and schools.

Telstra has warned that rule changes proposed by the ACCC to 'declared' data transmission services could effectively extend regulation to "NBN Co's proposed new bitstream ethernet services...wholesale DSL, broadband cable Internet, IP-VPN, and VPLS services in the access network." Most of Telstra's competitors disagree.

3G Americas, a wireless industry trade association representing the GSM family of technologies including LTE, has published what is says is a "highly anticipated resource report" on the evolution of mobile technologies to LTE and beyond and designed to be read by "interested members of the general public."

The Australian Democrats says the current legislative framework for the Internet and related industries is "ill-fitting and ill-serving making it difficult and prohibitive for the Australian Industry to operate with certainty." The party is proposing a radical overhaul.

The global GSM Association has teamed up with Internet measurement company, comScore to come up with a system for tracking the performance of mobile advertisements that, if adopted worldwide, could give the mobile advertising market a significant boost.

Optus will double the spectrum available to it for mobile services in capital cities if its bid to buy spectrum held by an Australian subsidiary of Qualcomm is approved.

The source code for Symbian, still the world's most widely-used smartphone platform, has been made available free to anyone under open source licensing.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has responded to the release of a somewhat critical audit report into the first, terminated National Broadband Network request for proposals process, saying the process was valuable.

Canadian citizens will be able to shop in the high street for domain names ending in .tel - designed to provide a single point of online contact for individuals and organisations - under an agreement between Canadian domain name registrar, Webnames.ca, and .tel's backer, Telinc.