The new R&D facilities represent a major investment in Panasonics global GSM activity and a serious commitment in the short and long term to the industry said MCUK MD Masahiko Yamamoto.

The company called Talking Solutions uses software developed by a firm called Solnet capable of detailed analysis of telecoms bills.

Talking Solutions makes its money by charging 25 per cent of the money it saves.

We formed the company because networks arent billing companies correctly. said Barry.

We found one example where a company was over-charged 36000. The service provider was rounding calls up to minutes rather than billing by the second.

The chance of speaking exactly for a minute is very remote. To pick up a discrepancy of 0.1p is difficult.

This sort of over-charging is rife in the industry. Most service providers do this. They are not doing this intentionally. It happens when a corporate account is set up. There may be a thousand phones and every phone has to be set up individually. Along the way a company ends up with 1500 mobiles connected and a third are connected inaccurately.

SPs systems cant keep up with all the new changes and tariffs from the networks. Weve spoken to 28 companies and 27 of these have been billed inaccurately.

When I was account manager for British Gas at Martin Dawes I was in a meeting where two British Gas ex-employees had developed a program to analyse their bills. They found Vodafone Corporate were billing 15.1p for a national call instead of 14p. We teamed up with them and have sole distribution rights to market the software. Were using our expertise as account managers to go into large corporates and sell the product. If we cant save them money we dont charge them anything.

Use of our website is free to all members and in addition to full categorised listing in our directory pages offers direct links to our members own websites (www.fcs.org.uk) said trade association spokesperson Jaqui Brookes.

Horn-Smith 57 joins software company Sage as a non-executive director with effect from March 3 and as chairman of the board with effect from August.
Horn-Smith has been at Vodafone for more than 22 years. He was involved in its launch in 1984 and has since held a number of senior posts including COO from 2001 until 2004. Since 2005 he has been Vodafone s deputy chief executive.
During his tenure he was involved in major transactions such as the purchase of Germany s Mannesman and more recently the acquisition of businesses in the Czech Republic and Romania.
Horn-Smith is also a non-executive director of Smiths Group and Lloyds TSB Group.
Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin said: Julian was one of the founding fathers of the business and his contribution to Vodafone has been immense.
Horn Smith added: Although the announcement has been long planned I look forward to Vodafone s future success and after July will be cheering from the terraces.
See Business Watch page 14

This follows an appeal by Orange against the decision of the Irish Telecommunications regulator Etain Doyle to give Meteor the GSM 1800 licence.

In an out of court settlement on July 17 Orange and the Regulators office (ODTR) agreed to follow guidelines laid down in the Posts & Telecommunications Acts 1983.

When it appeared to Orange that the ODTR were not going to consider their appeal under those terms Orange re-applied to the Dublin High Court for a judicial review.

In a hearing last week the High Court refused to rule on the matter deferring the issuance of a full licence until March next year.

This is a month before Meteor planned to launch its GSM 900 /1800 service.

It is understood that Doyle attempted to issue a provisional licence allowing Meteor Communications to commence construction of their dual-band network with a number of conditions. Meteor refused stating that a number of the conditions were unacceptable.

Meteor argued should the licence subsequently be awarded to Orange any customer base obtained by Meteor would be transferred to Orange with no financial reward.

Meteor felt aggrieved that no formal provision had been made to cover their capital outlay in constructing the network and felt no obligation to expose themselves to financial risk for decisions or matters outside their control.

The resulting delay in issuing a full licence will mean the new network (from either Orange or Meteor) would be unlikely to be able to offer a public service before the beginning of 2000.

Thus Crown which owed Linkman money had to pay the Talk 2 Us debt on behalf of Linkman.

The company in question is Euronortel (real name Linkman Communications). It turned out they were sub-sub-dealing and misleading dealers by offering higher commission rates than even they were being paid explained Colin Alexander of Talk 2 Us in West Yorkshire.

Having the feeling of being conned we decided to take Euronortel to Court and place a Judgment on them. This would not necessarily mean that we would be paid. Alternatively we could apply for a Garnishee Order. We stood to lose about 4500 so what the heck.

We would like to extend our praise and gratitude to Roger Adey director of Crown who dealt with our enquiries with patience and professionalism. We were not the only disgruntled party who contacted him regarding Euronortel but he was always available. He was not aware of the Garnishee Order until it arrived on his doorstep.

Alexander says he also managed to get 50 per cent of a debt owed to him by Orange and Sony distributor Scapegold which went bust last month.

We actually visited Scapegolds offices unannounced and insisted they pay by transfer immediately direct into our bank account. Thankfully we achieved a 50 per cent settlement. The rest of the money is unlikely to be forthcoming.

His replacement is Paul Smith who joined the company from the software industry in November as dealer sales general manager.

Another new appointment at 4U is Bill Colley who becomes mamanaging director of 4U Ltd and Phones 4U Ltd. the store-owning part of the business.

Colley was previously in charge of 4Us Dutch subsidiary.

One employee Minesh Patel (19) was caught on hidden camera stealing a phone that led to him being sentenced to do 60 hours of community service.

The prosecutor said Patel had been working at Peter Joness store in Sloane Street unaware that a hidden camera had been placed in the stock-room.

The camera recorded his movements as he walked around the room and opened a box containing a 269 Ericsson handset. He put this in his jacket. Upon leaving the store he was stopped by a shop detective who found the stolen phone.

At a police interview he said he wanted to give the phone to his sister as a present.

Patels other excuse was that he had heard other employees talking about stealing stock and decided on the spur of the moment to try it himself.

It was an act of crass stupidity by this young man said his solicitor.

Sagem has programmed the RC 715 phones with a dedicated touch key that connects to the credit line showing the amount of available credit left.

A quarter of the 100000 phones are to be delivered before Christmas.

Sagem shares rose FF2 when news of the order came out. The company says it will be making five million mobile phones next year compared with three million in 1998.