TelstraClear has said today it will shutdown and not commission it's $50 million wireless mobile phone project in Tauranga. It's CEO Allan Freeth has blamed Vodafone which of course Vodafone has denied.

 

It is amazing how often this happens in New Zealand around communications issues. The only variable is which parties will be involved in the dispute.

 

 

 

The following interesting statistics show world population and corresponding Internet percentage and usage. As you can see Australia and New Zealand make up only 0.5% of the world population but have the second highest percentage of Internet users as a percentage of the population.

 

Region	Pop	Pop % World	Internet Users	Users %	Usage % of World	User Growth
Africa	933.5 mil	14.2%	33.3 Mil	3.6 %	3.0 %	638.4 %
Asia	3712 mil	56.5%	398.7 Mil	10.7 %	35.8 %	248.8 %
Europe	809 mil	12.3%	314.7 Mil	38.9 %	28.3 %	199.5 %
Middle East	193.5 mil	2.9%	19.4 Mil	10.0%	1.7 %	491.4 %
North America	334.5 mil	5.1%	233.1 Mil	69.7 %	20.9 %	115.7 %
South America	556.6 mil	8.5%	96.3 Mil	17.3 %	8.7 %	433.4 %
Oceania	34.5 mil	0.5%	18.4 Mil	53.5 %	1.7 %	142.0 %
Totals	6574 Mil	100.0%	1114 Mil	16.9 %	100.0 %	208.7 %

But when you look at the current user growth we have the second lowest, again after the USA which probably means the next 46.5 % of users will be harder and slower. I would guess that current growth is in New Zealand is users moving from dial-up to broadband.

 

Intel has released details of new Core 2 Duo E4300 processors. This is the first of the E4000 series CPU chips and has a reduced frontside bus speed of 800 MHZ versus the higher 1066 MHZ available.

The clock speed of the E4300 is 1.8 GHZ. This chip is for entry level and business users.

Before April Intel will release a new CPU Core 2 Quad the Q6600. This is a quad core CPU and it is basically two Core 2 Duo E6600 chips on a single core. The clock speed is 2.66 GHZ with a frontside bus speed of 1066 MHZ.

After June Intel will stop making Celeron CPU's and replace this product line with a new Pentium E2000 brand CPU. This will be the current Core 2 Duo CPU with only 1MB of secondary level L2 cache memory and has no virtualisation technology or 64-bit capability. The E2140 has a clock speed of 1.4 GHZ and the E2160 is 1.6 GHZ.

Also at this time Intel will make 45nm processors for its Yorkfield-core Intel Core 2 Quad and Wolfedale-core Core 2 Duo processors. The Yorkfield will have 6MB cache for each pair of cores (12MB per CPU) while the Wolfdale which is a two core will have 6MB of cache.

The 45nm process enables the CPU's to run at over 3GHZ speed because of the core producing less heat.

The CPU's will be E6650 2.33 GHZ, E6750 2.66 GHZ, E6800 2.93 GHZ and the E6850 3.00 GHZ.

 

Sonar6 a local Auckland company has launched a Performance Assessment tool which is available online from their website. Stephen Tindall from The Warehouse is an investor and The Warehouse has just bought a licence so they can use this software for assessments on their own staff. Check it out at http://www.sonar6.com/.