Vivendi Games Mobile made Delta Force available on mobile phones worldwide. The game, the latest title based on the Delta Force Black Hawk Down: Team Sabre franchise from NovaLogic, was inspired by Ridley Scott film Black Hawk Down. In the main game, players choose among three characters to eliminate a terrorist group trying to hijack communication satellites. Mini games challenge players to seek informers, break enemy codes and track terrorists in an armored car while avoiding sniper fire, dodging land mines and protecting civilians. Team Sabre -- the first installment in the series -- drew strong feedback and reviews, Vivendi Games Mobile said.
The North Carolina Utilities Commission rejected a petition by the town of Valdese for a local exchange boundary adjustment replacing AT&T with Embarq as incumbent provider to a new 680-acre subdivision. The development, on land the town annexed last year, is in AT&T’s franchised service area. The town, served by Embarq, wanted the telcos’ territories shifted to fit the town line post-annexation and have Embarq be the incumbent for the new parts of town and the old (Case P-55, Sub 1715). Toan officials said this would let all residents maintain a “Valdese identity” and have identical local calling areas. AT&T objected, saying state courts have held that the commission can’t force a phone company to quit territory where it’s ready, willing and able to provide good quality service and replace that company with another. AT&T also said Valdese residents not wanting AT&T service had access to alternate carriers. The commission agreed with AT&T, saying it lacks legal authority to force the boundary change Valdese wanted, particularly since affected residents have competitive alternatives to AT&T.
American Shipper reports that the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports has produced a report which says that the proposed Southern California trucking program offers sizable savings to the public in the form of lowered health care costs and increased wages for the 16,800 port truck drivers. (American Shipper, dated 08/31/07, www.americanshipper.com and the coalition's report, "The Road to Shared Prosperity," dated August 2007, available at http://www.laane.org/docs/research/The_Road_to_Shared_Prosperity.pdf)
D-Link landed a five-year contract courtesy of the General Services Administration that makes buying D-Link stackable switches easier for government procurement managers, D-Link said Monday. D-Link products will appear on federal purchasing schedules, it said. The contract took effect Sept. 1, it said.
Alaska Airlines will offer in-flight Wi-Fi using Row 44’s satellite broadband service, the airline said. The service will be tested on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 in spring 2008 and, if all goes well, rolled out to the company’s 114-plane fleet. Besides standard Web browsing, e-mail and virtual private network access, Alaska will offer “stored in-flight entertainment content.” The Ku- band service works over land, water and across borders, unlike traditional air-to-ground service, for Alaska’s routes to Alaska, Hawaii, Canada and Mexico, Alaska said. Row 44 and Alaska collaborated for two years on the project. No terms were disclosed.
According to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection general notice, the final group, or cluster, of ports to be deployed for the Automated Commercial Environment/National Customs Automation Program test of the transmission of automated truck manifest data for truck carrier accounts1 will be the land border ports of Alcan, Dalton Cache, and Skagway in the state of Alaska.
Alaska Airlines will offer in-flight Wi-Fi using Row 44’s satellite broadband service, the airline said. The service will be tested on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 in spring 2008 and, if all goes well, rolled out to the company’s 114-plane fleet. Besides standard Web browsing, e-mail and virtual private network access, Alaska will offer “stored in-flight entertainment content.” The Ku- band service works over land, water and across borders, unlike traditional air-to-ground service, for Alaska’s routes to Alaska, Hawaii, Canada and Mexico, Alaska said. Row 44 and Alaska collaborated for two years on the project. No terms were disclosed.
Iridium Satellite gained the most subscribers it ever has in a single month in August, signing up 8,150, it said. In an unsubtle swipe at Globalstar, beset by service quality issues from an S-band radiation anomaly (CD Sept 12 p15), Iridium CEO Matt Desch said Iridium has a “near-perfect connection rate and unmatched network quality.” In a separate announcement, Iridium said Asia Pacific region traffic has grown 50 percent compared to last year. Maritime traffic grew 22 percent, land-based traffic 26 percent, said Greg Ewert, Iridium executive vice president. Iridium signed distribution deals with Singapore’s Kemilinks International and Mongolia’s Monsat, it said. Monsat will be Iridium’s first distributor in Mongolia, Iridium said. Finally, Telstra will use Iridium phones as the satellite backup component in a communications system it’s building for the Australian Rail Track Corp., Iridium said.
An interference testing plan for AM stations and wireless towers picked up further support, as a body representing two-way radio user groups said it likes the proposal (CD Sept 17 p2). The Land Mobile Communications Council is poised to back a broadcaster plan asking the FCC to require use of computer models to test for interference by wireless towers and other antennas near AM transmitters. A reworked plan that the AM Directional Antenna Performance Verification Coalition sent Sept. 7 to the FCC addressed concerns that two-way radio operators had expressed, said LMCC President Ralph Haller.
Toshiba plans to sell its original office building in Tokyo’s Ginza district for $1.3 billion to invest in core growth areas. Besides digital AV products, those include chip making. The company reportedly is negotiating to buy Sony’s chip operations for $870 million. (See report in this issue.) Other growth areas for Toshiba are flash memory and nuclear power plants, Nikkei reported. The Ginza is Tokyo’s historic commercial district. Toshiba’s site there has 40,000 square meters of floor space on 3,700 square meters of land.