Hanover, Germany  - Skype, the popular phone-like service that lets people talk free over the web, plans a set of new services which it will charge for, chief operating officer Scott Durchslag said Wednesday at the CeBIT trade show in Germany.

In an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, he said these would include paying 20 cents to dictate a text message into Skype's servers and have it delivered by short-message service (SMS) to mobile phones.

Paris - French telecommunications giant France Telecom said on Wednesday that its profits for the year 2008 fell by 35.4 per cent over 2007, to 4.07 billion euros (5.1 billion dollars).

The reasons for the downturn was a decline of 527 million euros in operating income, an increase of 337 million euros in expenses due to one-time items and a jump of 1.5 billion euros in corporate taxes, the company said in a press statement.

Company bags Rs67crore BSNL contract

The state-owned telecom company, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) will now also start WiMax service in rural area of Gujarat. The Chennai-based IT firm, Gemini Communication has won an order from BSNL to provide the service in rural area of the state.

Gemini Communication, which is listed on Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), announced on Tuesday that it has bagged an order worth Rs67 crore from BSNL for its rural mobile WiMax project.

To provide better quality of services (QoS) standards in India, telecom regulator TRAI has asked for measures to make sure that there is a limit put to set total number of subscribers under a single bandwidth unit.

In a declaration, the regulator said, “There have been complaints from the subscribers regarding inadequate broadband speed being provided by the Internet Service Providers. Most of the complaints allege that the available broadband speed is lower than the subscribed speed.”

Three global telecom firms Huawei, Telsima and Alvarion emerged as front runner for bid order of BSNL's WiMax equipment. The winners are expected to be announced next week, enabling launch of much awaited Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMax) services by state owned telecom giant.

Other telecom companies such as ZTE and Alactel-Lucent are also in the race. However, they have to face stiff competition from foreign telecom players on the lowest price (L1) issue.

Nripendra Misra, chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) does not hide his disappointment while talking of third generation (3G) telecom services. That the auction of 3G spectrum has been indefinitely deferred is a case study for policymakers, he says. And while he refuses to comment on whether it is fair to allow the two PSUs — BSNL and MTNL — to offer 3G before private operators, Mishra does concede the lack of a level playing field.