Tesco offices to go mobile

Tesco staff in its stores and distribution centres will start using mobiles for all their calls as part of a £100 million 5-year deal with Cable & Wireless that starts next month. The scheme will use a new private GSM network that'll connect all 1,800 Tesco stores and distribution locations, making inter-company calls free. Calls inside buildings will be routed over Tesco's IP network, with external calls sent via GSM. [Source: TimesOnline.co.uk]

Poor quarter for GSM worldwide as 3G sales increase

The first quarter of 2008 was the worst period for GSM connections in almost 15 years, according to a report on Cellular-News.com. There were just 380,000 net new connections worldwide, compared with an average 10 million growth over the previous 12 months. Meanwhile 3G W-CDMA technology saw a quarterly gain of 9.1 million users, following similarly high additions of 9.24m and 10.99m in Q3 and Q4 2007 respectively. GSM’s market share has fallen from 92.0% to 87.6% in the past year. In the UK, 3G connections have now passed 10 million, although the total number of mobile customers has dropped slightly from the previous quarter.

UK gets another mobile phone network

Mapesbury Communications has announced the launch of a 6th mobile network in the UK. The company will be installing GSM base stations in hundreds of payphone kiosks across the country. Its service, called UK01, is available as a SIM-only offer or by manually selecting the UK01 network from your existing network connection. [Sources: www.uk01.mobi; Mapesbury Communications]

Ofcom updates Sitefinder cell site database

Ofcom has reached an agreement with 3, O2, Orange, Vodafone, Airwave and Network Rail (but not T-Mobile) to publish the location of GSM, TETRA and UMTS mobile phone base stations on its Sitefinder web site. The regulator says it anticipates a High Court hearing about its legal obligation to reveal full details of the database, which led to the networks withdrawing their support last year.

GSM security could be breached this year

It may soon be relatively easy to crack the encryption technology that protects GSM calls, according to researchers at a security conference in the USA. Although weaknesses in the GSM encryption technology have been known about for almost ten years, the cost of hardware - estimated to be over $1 million - and the lack of software has prevented any practical attacks. However, researchers David Hulton and Steve Miller say it'll soon be possible to spend less than $1500 on equipment and still have a 95% chance of cracking a phone call within an hour. Calls needn't be intercepted 'live' but can be recorded and decrypted later. [Sources: WashingtonPost.com; ComputerWorld.com]