Cisco, Huawei, and Ericsson have all been asked to take a hit after a Filipino telco blew its budget by a whopping $880 million and blamed it on bad procurement processes.

This story starts in late 2022 when Filipino telco PLDT issued a press release describing the success of a multi-year program to transform its core networks, lay plenty of fresh fiber optic links, build submarine cables, and create a 5G network.

All of which sounded great, except the telco also detected a "cost overrun" of ₱48 billion ($880 million), or about 20 percent of annual revenue, in commitments made

Professor, engineer and namesake of Metcalfe's law Robert Metcalfe is the latest winner of the Turing Award for an invention he made back in the 1970s: the Ethernet.

Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was just a few years old when Metcalfe arrived and set up the lab with that internet precursor, ARPANET.

But that didn't connect the hundred new Alto personal computers and laser printers, so Metcalfe drew on his experiences with the University of Hawaii's AlohaNet, and together with the late David Boggs built a hundred node network - now known as the first Ethernet - in two

The Starlink satellite network has invited customers to try out a service that will allow them to take advantage of an internet connection "almost anywhere on land in the world" for $200 per month.

Operated by Elon Musk's SpaceX corporation, Starlink unveiled its Global Roaming service in an email to customers, offering them the chance to stay connected virtually anywhere. The price for this plan is stated as $200 per month, on top of the $599 cost of the hardware kit, comprising antenna, stand and router.

However, it is not clear how Starlink intends to follow through on this promise,

Swedish networking kit maker Ericsson is laying off 1,400 employees in its home nation amid wider efforts to reduce expenses, and ahead of a deeper round of redundancies in other countries expected in the coming days.

The job losses are part of previously announced efforts to speed up "cost improvements" with an SEK 9 billion ($870 million) reduction earmarked for the end of 2023, of which 70 percent is to come from cost of goods sold and the remainder from sales, general and admin expenses.

"The negotiations with the Swedish unions are now closed and have reached agreement regarding ways

Scenarios in which China invades Taiwan, and inducing strategic, diplomatic, economic, and tech supply chain crises, often imagine that Taiwan’s main island would be the main site of any kinetic action.

But Taiwan also hold territory just offshore from China – the island of Kinmen is just 10kms from the mainland city Xiamen. And further north, some of the Matsu island archipelago is less than 50kms away from mainland China.

In early February, life got a little harder in Matsu when two submarine cables providing internet service were damaged.

Last week, the deputy chairman and spokesman of Taiwan's National Communications