BT has been awarded a £20m contract extension, without competition, on a project that has already ballooned in value by 138 per cent.

The telecoms and IT services group has been providing the Northern Ireland Land and Property Services' infrastructure since 1999, and last week it won a further four-year extension to July 2026.

The £20m deal was awarded for the LandWeb service without asking for bids from other suppliers because the private-sector supplier owns the intellectual rights to the system.

"There are technical reasons relating to the bespoke and complex nature of the solution which would lead to substantial

Who, Me? Beware the perils of being too helpful as we kick the working week off with a Who, Me? starring both DNS and the need of management to put someone's – anyone's – head on a spike.

Our tale takes us back to 2016, when "Sam" was working for an IT service provider. Sam's services had been rented out to a company that had just been gobbled up by a much larger entity. "There was a rebranding exercise under way," he told us, "and one of the changes was to switch a few thousand users to the parent company's

Cisco’s merger with Acacia Communications is set to go ahead after the Silicon Valley giant raised its offer to $4.5bn, an increase of nearly $2bn or 64 per cent.

“I am delighted that Cisco and Acacia have decided to come together in this mutual deal,” Cisco's CEO Chuck Robbins said in a statement. “We look forward to welcoming Raj and the Acacia team to Cisco to offer our customers world-class coherent optical solutions to power the Internet for the future.”

Things were looking rocky for Cisco when optical networking equipment maker Acacia announced it had decided to drop out of

Motorola must pay a Chinese mobile network radio maker more than £800,000 after losing a Court of Appeal case over claims its rival threatened to "retreat to China" and evade a previous judgment.

The complex case was summarised in a Court of Appeal ruling where senior judges reversed a High Court asset-freezing order against Hytera Communications Corporation Ltd, a digital mobile radio (DMR) biz.

Motorola previously sued Hytera in the US. Back in 2008, the Chinese company allegedly lured three of Motorola's engineers into its own ranks, taking "confidential documents and source code" with them. A US jury duly awarded

America’s largest internet providers have been asked to provide details of any price hikes or broadband restrictions they have placed on captive internet users during the pandemic.

In a letter from House Commerce Committee chairman Frank Pallone (D-NJ), as well as the chair of its technology subcommittee Mike Doyle (D-PA), the lawmakers cite the case of Comcast placing new data caps on internet users to ask the other ISPs what they have done to their customers.

Clearly Pallone and Doyle suspect broader restrictions and profit-seeking against millions of Americans stuck at and working from home. They make it plain they