Woods, AT&T National Return to Congressional Country Club (Washn)
(c) 2012, The Washington Post.
WASHINGTON — The last time Tiger Woods set foot on the grounds at Congressional Country Club, he stood on the 18th green of the Blue Course and raised both hands in the air, then awarded himself the trophy that indicated he was both the host of the ATT National and the tournament’s champion. Those happy, heady times were nearly three years ago.
“That was a tough one,” Woods said. “It was a hard-earned win.”
Monday, Woods returned to the Bethesda club — initially donning a golf shirt and shoes for a chipping contest against a few select fans, then a suit and dress shirt for a news conference — to reintroduce Washington not as much to his golf game, but to his tournament and his foundation. The ATT National, which spent 2010 and ’11 in suburban Philadelphia while Congressional underwent renovations and then hosted the U.S. Open, comes back to its original site next month.
Woods used his event Monday to promote the tournament’s beneficiary, the Tiger Woods Foundation. Since Woods helped save PGA Tour golf in Washington in 2007, foundation officials say they have spent $14 million in grants and other endeavors in the District and surrounding area.
“The event is bigger than what I do on the golf course,” Woods said.
To that end, Woods spent the hours before his appearance at Congressional at a fundraising luncheon in Georgetown. He invited a recipient of a college scholarship named for Woods’s late father Earl to speak at Monday’s event. And he generally tried to draw distinctions between his play on the course, spotty for the past two years, and what he considers important work off it.
“For me as a player, that’s a separate designation,” he said. “Me as a player, I want to win the event. But I think me as a person — as a whole, as part of the foundation — it’s bigger than hitting a golf shot.”
Fairly or not, the golf shots are scrutinized more intensely. Woods followed his 2009 victory here with three more on the PGA Tour that season, then another in Australia. Winning still seemed second nature, and was assumed.
But beginning with a sex scandal in late 2009 that eventually led to his divorce, then a three-month absence in 2011 to deal with left leg injuries — injuries that cost him an appearance at last year’s Open — it has become clear that the Woods who held off Hunter Mahan at the 2009 ATT National is in the process of being replaced by a different version. His win at the Arnold Palmer Invitational in March was his first official PGA Tour victory in more than 21/2 years. But because he tied for 40th at the Masters, then missed the cut in Charlotte and tied for 40th again at the Players Championship — saying all along that swing changes begun two years ago aren’t yet ingrained — he likely will arrive at Congressional as a much-watched work in progress.
“I think that I’m headed in the right direction,” Woods said. “You have to understand: Even when I’ve had some really good years — whether it was in the early 2000s or mid-2000s — even if I was winning golf tournaments, I still thought I could improve. I could still get better each and every day. I never looked at it as like: ‘Oh wow, that’s my peak. I can’t do any better.’ If that’s the case, I’d rather walk.”
The field Woods will compete against at Congressional, which will hold the ATT National through 2014 and has an option to re-up for three more years, is still taking shape. Officials announced Monday that defending champ Nick Watney, who won last year when the tournament was held at Aronimink Golf Club outside Philadelphia, will play, joining former ATT National champs K.J. Choi, Justin Rose and Woods. (Anthony Kim, the 2008 winner, is sitting out much of the PGA Tour season because of injuries.)
Tournament director Greg McLaughlin said the event also has commitments from Mahan, ranked sixth in the world, one spot ahead of Woods; 2010 British Open champ Louis Oosthuizen, who lost this year’s Masters in a playoff; and Dustin Johnson, the young American star who hasn’t played since March because of injuries, among others.
But Monday, Woods didn’t care much about his own play, or the field against whom he would compete.
“They don’t really need me winning golf tournaments,” Woods said. “They don’t need me participating on a golf course, period. This is about education. This is about kids making something of themselves, and then obviously giving back and becoming mentors themselves.”
bc-golf-tiger
Article source: http://www.mlive.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/woods-att-national-return-to-congressional-country-club-washn/cba81e99fec6968599d865df312a14a8
Categories: All Business Tags: att, verizon
Less than 2% ‘Like’ mobile carriers despite millions spent on Facebook campaigns
Less than 2% of mobile carriers’ subscribers “Like” them on Facebook despite the millions of dollars they collectively spend in an effort to promote their services on the world’s most popular social network. Facebook made its initial public offering on Friday and while the company’s stock price dipped below the IPO price of $38 on Monday and continued to slide on Tuesday, Facebook’s offering was the biggest Internet IPO of all time by nearly 10 times. There is no denying that Facebook and the 900 million people who use the social network are of tremendous value to businesses looking to promote their services, but mobile carriers have seemingly not found success thus far as they attempt to bolster Facebook fan counts.
According to a recent report from market research firm Strand Consult, mobile carriers are wasting millions trying to promote their services on Facebook. Following discussions with a number of carriers around the world as well as an extensive study, the firm found that an average of less than 2% of carriers’ customers are fans of them on Facebook despite substantial resource investments.
Internationally, Strand found that no network operator covered in its study was liked by more than 4% of its subscriber base. In the United States, the firm looked at Verizon Wireless, ATT and Sprint, and found that none of the nation’s top-3 carriers even broke the 3% mark.
“We were especially surprised when we looked at the American operators, Verizon, ATT and Sprint, operators that spend millions of dollars in marketing and have internal and external teams working on Facebook,” Strand analysts wrote in a research note discussing the study. “For all their work, they can’t budge much above 2%. Such small results hardly seem worth the effort.”
Strand Consult clarified that it does not believe wireless service providers should forgo a Facebook presence, but it says the benefits of companies’ efforts on Facebook are not yet clear. Companies focus on likes because results are easily measured, but true return may lie elsewhere.
“Indeed, we have seen solid evidence from around the world that social media—operators’ own support websites, Facebook, Twitter, and other user-driven tools, can help reduce support costs,” Strand wrote. “For those tasks, we recommend social media. But we have yet to see Facebook as a solid driver for leads and sales.”
Zach Epstein
Article source: http://www.bgr.com/2012/05/22/facebook-campaigns-mobile-carriers-att-verizon-sprint/
Categories: All Business Tags: att, verizon
Tiger looks ahead to Congressional, ATT National
He said it was good to see an old friend.
“I love this golf course,” Woods told USA Today Sports during a promotional tour in the Washington, D.C., area for the June 28-July 1 ATT National, which benefits the Tiger Woods Foundation. “I think it’s a fantastic tee-to-green golf course. You have to drive the ball well to get into some of these flags, but once you get on the greens, there’s a lot of pitch to these greens, a lot of movement, usually from back to front.
“And placing the ball in the correct spots is vital to give yourself a chance, because a couple of the holes, if you put it above the hole, you’re not going to make the putt and more likely you’re probably going to end up three-putting unless you make a 6- or 10-footer.”
His 7,500-yard buddy, however, took a beating last year during the U.S. Open. With rains saturating the grounds before and during the second major of the season, the course never could play fast and firm. As a result, Rory McIlroy set records en route to an eight-shot romp, finishing what is annually the toughest test in golf at 16-under-par 268. Nineteen other players broke par.
Woods, the only active player with three U.S. Opens on his résumé, said he hopes the weather cooperates this year for the ATT National.
As in warm weather.
“I would like to see it difficult. I always want to have this golf course difficult or any venue that we host the tournament at,” said Woods, who will return to the PGA Tour at the Memorial Tournament next week in Dublin, Ohio. “Unfortunately, because I’m playing the event, I can’t influence (the setup) that much — that much. Trust me, I always voice my opinion of how I like the golf course to be, but ultimately it’s up to the rules staff and how they want to set it up.”
As for his golf game, Woods, ranked No. 7 in the world, said he took a few days off after his most recent tournament and has just started cranking up his workouts on the range and in the gym. Since winning the Arnold Palmer Invitational in March, Woods finished in a tie for 40th at the Masters, missed the cut in the Wells Fargo Championship (just the eighth missed cut of his career) and wound up in another tie for 40th in The Players Championship this month.
“I’m headed in the right direction,” Woods said of his season to date. “You have to understand, even when I’ve had some really good years, whether it was in the early 2000s or mid-2000s, whatever it was, even if I was winning golf tournaments, I still felt like I could improve and I could still get better each and every day. I never looked at it and said, ‘Wow, that’s my peak. I can’t get better.’ If that was the case, I would have walked.
“Like anybody who plays this game, I think we can get a little bit better. I’m just going to continue to try and improve, incremental steps and every facet of my game, and make every facet of my game more efficient.”
He’ll do so in front of the critical eye of the news media and fans. When he won the Arnold Palmer Invitational, the consensus was that Woods was back to his pre-scandal form. After three lackluster starts in succession, the talk now centers on when Woods will be back. Like his golf game of recent vintage, the talk has been up and down.
“I’ve been through this before,” Woods said. “I remember I had a pretty good year in 2000. And I didn’t win for a couple months. And the word ‘slump’ came about. And that’s basically the same thing that just happened here. I just played three events, and “When are you back?” Well, I just won a tournament (four) tournaments ago.
“I think that’s the nature of the new media business. You’ve got to be able to stand out somehow to get eyes going to your site or to your medium, and I think that’s one of the reasons why there’s the criticism that there is.”
While his swing is a work in progress, Woods said his mental game — once the best in the business by miles — is still strong.
“I think that one of the things that I am proud of is the fact that I do grind it out,” he said. “If I would have packed it in over the course of my career, I would have missed a lot more cuts over my career, especially of late when I have not been playing well. But I fight. I grind it out.
“It’s just that, unfortunately, I haven’t been able to equate that into W’s, because it’s one shot here and there. Sean (Foley) was telling me the other day, if I had improved my final rounds by two shots, I would have had four wins this year. That’s something if I look at it, at things like that, I’m close and just got to keep going.”
Article source: http://www.usatoday.com/sports/golf/pga/story/2012-05-21/att-national-congressional-tiger-woods/55118636/1
Categories: All Business Tags: att, verizon
Anonymous-Hater Claims Responsibility for Pirate Bay DDoS Attack
A hacker who claims to hate both Anonymous and notorious BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay (TPB) has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack that TPB has been suffering under for the last 24 hours.
The user, who goes by the Twitter handle @AnonNyre, has been riling up members of the hacktivist group and supporters of TPB with a series of angry posts on Twitter, to the extent that Anonymous supporters are now demanding to get in contact with him over the social network.
AnonNyre also later posted on Pastebin, claiming that he works for the FBI and wants to take TPB website down because it is “a press-release website for Anonymous“.
Although PirateBay.se was still accessible from the UK during the DDoS attack, TPB claimed that it was under attack on its official Facebook page and TorrentFreak confirmed that users around the world were having difficulty accessing the website.
Today The Pirate Bay informed its fans through Facebook that it was back online.
In a message posted at about 9:45 GMT, The Pirate Bay wrote: “We’re back in full effect! Show your support by adding this badge to your profile picture!”
This is not the first DDoS attack to be linked with The Pirate Bay. UK ISP Virgin Media suffered a DDoS attack on 9 May, a week after complying with a high court order to block users’ access to the file-sharing website.
The Pirate Bay condemned the action att he time, stating: “We do NOT encourage these actions. We believe in the open and free internets, where anyone can express their views. Even if we strongly disagree with them and even if they hate us.
“So don’t fight them using ugly methods. DDoS and blocks are both forms of censorship.”
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Article source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/255844/anonymoushater_claims_responsibility_for_pirate_bay_ddos_attack.html
Categories: All Business Tags: att, verizon
Smartphone hijacking vulnerability affects AT&T, 47 other carriers
Computer scientists have identified a vulnerability in the network of ATT and at least 47 other cellular carriers that allows attackers to surreptitiously hijack the Internet connections of smartphone users and inject malicious content into the traffic passing between them and trusted websites.
The attack, which doesn’t require an adversary to have any man-in-the-middle capability over the network, can be used to lace unencrypted Facebook and Twitter pages with code that causes victims to take unintended actions, such as post messages or follow new users. It can also be used to direct people to fraudulent banking websites and to inject fraudulent messages into chat sessions in some Windows Live Messenger apps. Ironically, the vulnerability is introduced by a class of firewalls cellular carriers use. While intended to make the networks safer, these firewall middleboxes allow hackers to infer TCP sequence numbers of data packets appended to each data packet, a disclosure that can be used to tamper with Internet connections.
“The TCP sequence number inference attack opens up a whole new set of attack venues,” the researchers from the University of Michigan’s Computer Science and Engineering Department wrote in a research paper scheduled to be presented at this week’s IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. “It breaks the common assumption that communication is relatively safe on encrypted/protected WiFi or cellular networks that encrypt the wireless traffic. In fact, since our attack does not rely on sniffing traffic, it works regardless of the access technology as long as no application-layer protection is enabled.”
The researchers tested their attack on Android-powered smartphones manufactured by HTC, Samsung, and Motorola. When the devices were connected to a “nation-wide carrier” that used sequence number-checking, the researchers were able to able to hijack connections to online services including Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Messenger, and the AdMob advertising network. They could also spoof traffic from four unidentified banks and an unnamed Android app that gives real-time stock quotes. Zhiyun Qian, a recent PhD recipient and one of the coauthors of the paper, told Ars the attack will also work against computers connected to networks using cellular cards or smartphone tethers. He said there’s no reason to believe iOS devices from Apple can’t be hijacked as well.
This week’s paper reports that of 150 worldwide carriers tested, 48 were found to use firewalls that allowed the researchers to deduce the TCP sequence numbers needed to hijack end-user connections. Using an Android app the researchers released, Ars was able to identify ATT as the US carrier referred to in the paper. Company representatives issued a statement that read, “The report does not provide enough detail for us to confirm a conclusion but we plan to take a look at the issues it raises.”
Playing outside of the sandbox
Qian and fellow co-author Professor Z. Morley Mao have devised a buffet of possible attacks depending on which required elements are satisfied in a given exploit scenario. They labeled the most potent of the attacks on-site TCP hijacking. It relies on a lightweight piece of malware that must first be installed on a victim’s phone that has Internet access as its sole privilege. With help from the malicious app, the attacker queries firewalls ATT and other carriers use to drop all data packets that contain sequence numbers out of a range considered to be valid for a current connection. By testing which packets are permitted to go through and which ones are blocked, attackers can quickly deduce an acceptable number and append it to the malicious data to camouflage its fraudulent source.
“What that means is that we’re able to completely hijack the connection, so that the original server, say the Facebook server, will be completely cut off from the communication, and we can inject whatever malicious content we want,” Qian told Ars. While Android apps are contained in a security sandbox that prevents them from accessing code and data used by other apps, he said the circuitous route taken by the lightweight malware effectively breaks out of this barrier, allowing the attackers to tamper with the phone’s Web browser and other protected apps.
Another variant of the attack relies on intermediate routers that help funnel data through a carrier network. The monotonically incrementing 16-bit headers known as IPIDs act as side channels for inferring how many packets a target system has sent. By examining the values in the headers before and after sending spoofed probing packets, attackers can deduce sequence numbers by inferring if they successfully passed through the firewall.
Still another variation of the attack doesn’t rely on any malware at all. An off-site TCP injection/hijacking exploit, for instance, relies on a technique known as URL phishing, which lures a user to a malicious intermediate webpage before sending him to what appears to be a legitimate target website. When certain conditions are met, the attack can replace the content of the site with arbitrary traffic, or if the user is logged in to the targeted site, can inject JavaScript into the pages that steals authentication cookies or performs actions on behalf of the victim.
The required ingredient
The required ingredient in all the attacks is a firewall on the carrier network that keeps track of sequence numbers for connections the end user has made with other address on the Internet. Firewalls that drop sequence numbers are manufactured by a variety of companies, including Cisco Systems, Juniper, and Check Point.
“They all build on top of the sequence number inference,” Qian said of the attacks. “Without the sequence number, all of these attacks would not be possible, so you can think of sequence number inference as a building block for all of these attacks.”
TCP sequence numbers were designed to help computers to reassemble packets that arrive out-of-sequence into their proper order. As researchers devised attacks in the late 1990s that used sequence numbers to hijack connections, the scheme was revised to give the numbers pseudo-random characteristics so they’d be hard for attackers to predict. Qian and Mao said they are the first known researchers to devise a TCP sequence number inference attack using the state kept on middleboxes.
Qian said online services can go a long way towards repelling the attacks by encrypting sessions using the secure sockets layer (SSL) or transport layer security (TLS) protocols, since almost all of the exploits he and Mao devised work against pages and apps that transmit content in plaintext. But even when Web traffic is encrypted, sequence number inference can be used to mount denial-of-service attacks. Of course, the attacks could be more effectively prevented if carriers removed sequence number-checking functions from the firewalls they use. Qian said he’s not sure that move is feasible because the carriers rely on the features to conserve resources by summarily dropping arbitrarily packets that enter their networks.
‘In my opinion, they should be turned off,” Qian said of the sequence number checks. “However, the carriers may have their own reasons not to.”
Updated to add ATT comment.
Article source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/05/smartphone-hijacking-on-att-47-other-carriers/
Categories: All Business Tags: att, verizon
Samsung Galaxy S III Coming Soon from T-Mobile & AT&T?
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Samsung has already confirmed that they will be promoting and selling the Samsung Galaxy S III in the United States. We are starting to get proof which carriers will offer the next big superphone.
Devices that appear to be Samsung Galaxy S III models are being approved by various agencies. The Bluetooth SIG approved the SGH–I747 and SGH–T999V, both which appear to be the Samsung Galaxy S III. The t model is T-Mobile and the other should be ATT according to previous naming schemes.
The FCC has approved model SGH–T999 that supports 1700MHz, 850MHz and 1900MHz, all T-Mobile bandwidth. FCC approval is usually a good sign with release dates following within a few months after approval in many cases. However in previous years, Samsung Galaxy releases were months after European releases.
The release date for the Samsung Galaxy S III is expected in the summer, provided there are no delays, like the last year. The manual for the Samsung Galaxy S III in the UK is now available.
Many believe that the Samsung Galaxy S III will also come from Verizon Wireless and Sprint. You will be able to buy many accessories for it including a Galaxy Note-like S-Pen.
Initial reviews for the Samsung Galaxy S III have been positive, some reviewers don’t like the plastic case while others raved about the software.
The latest commercial has been released and there are rumors that none other than George Clooney will star in the American commercial.
Article source: http://wirelessandmobilenews.com/2012/05/samsung-galaxy-s-iii-t-mo-att-release.html
Categories: All Business Tags: att, verizon
Verizon Wireless and AT&T racing to introduce shared-date plans
When Verizon Wireless and ATT roll out their shared-data pricing plans, it is expected to change how the industry charges for wireless.
Verizon Wireless and ATT are both preparing to roll out shared-data pricing plans this year. Whoever makes the first move will transform the way the industry charges for wireless service.
The new shared plans, which may be announced as early as next month, would let customers split one bucketful of Internet data between their phones, iPads and other wireless devices, providing an economical option for families, small businesses or people with a lot of web-connected gadgets.
With billions of dollars at stake, Verizon and ATT are hesitant to test the waters first, said Chetan Sharma, an independent wireless analyst.
Getting the approach right could reduce customer turnover and get more users to embrace data plans, which brought in $62.7 billion industrywide last year, according to trade group CTIA. A wrong move would lower the amount of money that subscribers pay, while increasing network traffic and the cost of maintaining networks.
“They are watching each other,” said Sharma, who covers telecommunications from Issaquah, Wash.
Once one U.S. carrier introduces a shared data plan, the rest of the industry, including Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA, won’t be far behind, he said.
Consumers have a growing appetite for data plans, which let people surf the web and use other internet functions on their devices. Apple’s iPhone has fueled demand by making it easy to use data-intensive features, such as online applications and the Siri voice-activated personal assistant.
While U.S. carriers already offer family plans to consumers, they’re more focused on calls. Each user and device is typically assigned an individual data plan, often at $10 to $50 apiece.
For carriers, the rewards of offering shared data can be huge, said Reade Barber, a vice president at Rogers Communications, Canada’s largest wireless carrier. His company would know: It adopted the strategy in 2009.
“The number of people using data at Rogers just exploded,” he said. More than 25 percent of Rogers’ family-plan subscribers use shared data plans, he said. “We attracted a lot of new users of data.”
The approach can entice consumers who only pay for voice or texting plans to pony up for data, bringing extra money to carriers. Or a family might shell out more for their data plan to let the kids have Internet access on their phones. Families may boost monthly bills by $15, said Susan Welsh de Grimaldo, an analyst at Strategy Analytics in Newton, Mass.
The risk for carriers is that customers who are currently happy to pay for separate data plans — say, for their kids or an iPad — will consolidate them and lower their bills.
The approach also may increase network traffic and costs. Today, a consumer may pay for 2 gigabytes of data a month but only use 500 megabytes, said Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in New York. With more devices tied to the same data plan, the unused portion would shrink. That could force carriers to ramp up capital spending, he said.
“The business may be getting more capital intensive,” Moffett said.
Still, it would benefit carriers if consumers become more dependent on their data plans. Today, most wireless customers only use their carriers for their phones. If the price is right, they may add an iPad, laptop or some other hardware.
The shared-pricing approach is part of a push to get users to pay for wireless service for everything from health monitors to internet TVs. There will be more than 250 million active devices on shared plans globally by 2015, up from a few million in 2011, according to Infonetics Research Inc.
“When billing and service plans are a little more user-friendly, customers will be more interested in adopting more devices,” said Shira Levine, an analyst at Campbell, Calif.-based Infonetics.
Sales of the iPhone and other smart phones could get a boost as well. About 15 percent of all smart phones sold by 2015 will be part of shared-data plans, according to Infonetics. At Rogers in Canada, a typical smart phone user pays twice as much as a voice-only user.
While U.S. carriers already offer some Internet-sharing plans, they generally work with Wi-Fi access — not cellular connections. Sprint’s MiFi 3G/4G Mobile Hotspot by Novatel Wireless product provides Internet connectivity to as many as five Wi-Fi devices located nearby. Plans start at $35 a month. A tethering plan at T-Mobile lets a smart phone function as a Wi-Fi modem, supporting as many as five gadgets for $15 a month.
Verizon may have the most urgency to take the shared-data approach because it wants to spur users to add more devices, such as tablets, Sharma said. ATT has made more progress in that area, in part because of the iPad. Apple picked ATT as the first U.S. carrier to offer iPad service when the tablet debuted in 2010, though Verizon now supports the product as well.
In the first quarter, ATT added 230,000 connected devices. Verizon doesn’t break out those figures.
Verizon, based in Basking Ridge, has said it plans to offer shared-data pricing in the next few months.
“We are probably going to launch data share plans this summer,” Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said in an interview. “We think we will be the leader in this category. It will be a new innovative pricing plan for data. You can expect tiered pricing.”
Shammo updated the strategy Wednesday in a presentation to investors at a JPMorgan Chase conference. He said the company will start shared-data plans on new LTE devices, which means people upgrading from the 3G standard would have to give up their unlimited plans. Upgraders would be “moving away from, if you will, the unlimited world” and shifting into a tiered shared-data plan, Shammo said.
ATT, which ranks second to Verizon in U.S. wireless customers, is less specific.
“We’ll have something later this year,” said Ralph de la Vega, president of the Dallas-based company’s mobility division.
Article source: http://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/2012/05/verizon_wireless_and_att_racin.html
Categories: All Business Tags: att, verizon
ATT Systems & directors to pay S$1.79m for tax evasion
ATT Systems directors to pay S$1.79m for tax evasion
By Claire Huang |
Posted: 18 May 2012 1315 hrs
SINGAPORE: Technology solutions company, ATT Systems (Singapore), has been slapped with a hefty penalty of more than S$745,000 and a S$40,000 fine for evading taxes.
The firm, which develops electronic systems, was convicted on Friday of tax evasion for Years of Assessment 2006 and 2007.
ATT Systems had prepared and maintained false invoices amounting to more than S$735,000 for 2006, and S$206,000 for 2007.
This meant it should have paid another S$186,000 in taxes.
The firm was ordered to pay a fine of S$40,000 and penalty of S$745,391 – four times the amount of tax evaded.
Six other charges were taken into consideration.
The Comptroller of Income Tax compounded the tax offences of two directors of ATT Systems, Mr Tan Ann Jee and Mr Teo Chin Tiong, for offences committed between 1999 and 2002 and from 2004 to 2007.
They have to pay penalties.
Mr Tan has to pay S$713,898 while Mr Teo has to pay S$311,501.
The penalty and composition to be paid by ATT Systems and the two directors amounted to S$1.79 million.
- CNA/cc
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Article source: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/1202046/1/.html
Categories: All Business Tags: att, verizon
AT&T, T-Mobile Among New Spectrum Swaps
Five wireless operators and one cable
provider filed yesterday to swap various swaths of spectrum, reflecting larger
moves within the industry to secure additional licenses for overburdened legacy
networks and new LTE service.
ATT, U.S. Cellular, Cox
Communications, Peoples Telephone Cooperative, T-Mobile USA and Cricket
Communications all filed various applications with the FCC on Tuesday to sell
or exchange spectrum licenses.
ATT is buying eight 700 MHz lower B
block licenses off Cox in areas of Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma and
Virginia.
ATT is also buying four lower 700
MHz C block licenses in Arkansas and Texas from Peoples Telephone Cooperative,
which launched LTE in Texas in February through a partnership with the
NetAmerica Alliance.
If the FCC approves the sale, the two
deals would give ATT up to 55 MHz of spectrum below 1 GHz in several
markets covered by the transaction.
The documents posted by the FCC did not
specify what the licenses would be used for, but ATT will presumably put
them to use in its LTE network, which uses lower B block and lower C block
spectrum in the 700 MHz band.
U.S. Cellular is buying four lower 700
MHz B block licenses from Cox spanning, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and
Oklahoma. The licenses could improve the regional operator’s constrained
spectrum position for its LTE network, giving it an estimated total of 61 MHz
of spectrum below 1 GHz in 29 counties, and 49 MHz below 1 GHz in an additional
25 counties.
Cox, which has long abandoned plans for
its own wireless service, sold its AWS spectrum to Verizon Wireless last year.
The transaction is still being reviewed by the FCC.
T-Mobile is swapping PCS and AWS
spectrum with Cricket and Savary Island. Post-transaction, T-Mobile would hold
80 MHz of spectrum across 55 of the markets covered by the sale and Cricket
would hold up to 35 MHz in 18 markets covered by the sale.
The licenses could augment T-Mobile’s
LTE network, which is being deployed in the AWS band.
The FCC is giving opponents to the four
transactions until May 29 to file petitions to deny. Responses to those petitions
must be filed by June 8, with the final round of comments due June 15.
Article source: http://wirelessweek.com/News/2012/05/carriers-ATT-TMo-Among-New-Spectrum-Swaps
Categories: All Business Tags: att, verizon
ATT Systems gets S$785,000 penalty for tax evasion
ATT Systems directors to pay S$1.79m for tax evasion
By Claire Huang |
Posted: 18 May 2012 1315 hrs
SINGAPORE: Technology solutions company, ATT Systems (Singapore), has been slapped with a hefty penalty of more than S$745,000 and a S$40,000 fine for evading taxes.
The firm, which develops electronic systems, was convicted on Friday of tax evasion for Years of Assessment 2006 and 2007.
ATT Systems had prepared and maintained false invoices amounting to more than S$735,000 for 2006, and S$206,000 for 2007.
This meant it should have paid another S$186,000 in taxes.
The firm was ordered to pay a fine of S$40,000 and penalty of S$745,391 – four times the amount of tax evaded.
Six other charges were taken into consideration.
The Comptroller of Income Tax compounded the tax offences of two directors of ATT Systems, Mr Tan Ann Jee and Mr Teo Chin Tiong, for offences committed between 1999 and 2002 and from 2004 to 2007.
They have to pay penalties.
Mr Tan has to pay S$713,898 while Mr Teo has to pay S$311,501.
The penalty and composition to be paid by ATT Systems and the two directors amounted to S$1.79 million.
- CNA/cc
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innity_country = “SG”;
–>
Article source: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/1202046/1/.html
Categories: All Business Tags: att, verizon
