The Dumers Lane call centre will at first employ 250 people when it opens next month. The rest of the vacancies will be filled by Autumn.

Most jobs are full-time contracts for customer care operators.

BTCellnet is working with Bolton and Bury Chamber of Commerce and recruitment agents to find people to fill the jobs.

Bury is a great choice for the location of the new call centre. Weve had tremendous support from Bury Metro Council and Bury Chamber in pulling the deal together said BTCellnet director of sales and service Hugh Logan.

George Steaur previously in charge of Olivettis Dutch Benelux and Northern European operations has been appointed general manager of the operation in Holland.

Eircell head of retail sales Stephen Mackarel is now The Carphone Warehouses general manager in Ireland and John Grummitt leaves Smith Kline Beecham to become European commercial director in charge of financial and strategic development of the European business.

These top quality people will bring invaluable business and operational experience to our European network said Carphone Warehouse chief operating officer David Ross.

The Carphone Warehouse runs 140 shops in France Sweden Spain Holland Germany Ireland and Belgium.

Most of these outlets run under The Phone House brand.

Meanwhile a reorganisation of The Phone House Germany is also underway and the previous general manager Howard Gleave is being replaced.

The technology is being supplied by the Sema Groups SemaVision software.

Vodafone chose the system because it says it is easy to use and that information can be quickly updated with data from partner organisations such as the Automobile Association.

Its integration with our other systems means that in a few months we will be in a position to offer a range of commercially-viable services said Tony Riley sales and marketing director of Vodafone Added and Data Services.

The freebies contain a tiny deckchair stand for the phone sunglasses disposable camera sun block and a transparent phone case.

The promotion is being support by a national press and ad campaign.

Connection to the customers bank is over Vodafones GSM network. An authorisation time of beweteen 13 and 15 seconds is being claimed.

The idea of the devices is to enable businesses to process electronic transactions wherever the customer is such as an exhibition sporting event or in the home (eg delivery services).

This waiver comes at a critical time for Iridium said John Richardson CEO of Iridium LLC.

With our lower and simplified prices taking effect in July we now have the time to implement our refocused marketing strategy.

Iridiums new strategy announced June 21 (Mobile News June 28) includes airtime price reductions of up to 65 per cent a flat per-minute rate for international calls and a greater emphasis on creating a value proposition for industrial customers .

The companys two product manufacturers Motorola and Kyocera are significantly slashing the wholesale prices of their satellite phones and other subscriber equipment.

Iridium is negotiating with bank creditors to restructure the capitalisation of the company and intends to use the next six weeks to work with representatives of all of its creditors to reach an agreement in principle on financial restructuring.

The concept for the Iridium system was originally proposed by in 1987 by Motorola engineers Ray Leopold Ken Peterson and Barry Bertiger who envisioned a constellation of low orbiting satellites.

The problem was that they and the other American executives at Motorola never envisioned that there would be a pan-World terrestrial digital system called GSM that would enable people to use their mobile phones in practically all the worlds populated areas.

Iridium also faces competition from Globalstar which starts its own satellite phone service later this year.

Globalstar is a consortium of the worlds top telecoms service providers and equipment manufacturers such as Qualcom Alcatel France Telecom Hyundai and VodafoneAirTouch.

It has just released details of an Ericsson-made phone that is half the weight and size of the current range of Motorola and Kyocera Iridium handsets and which can also be used on GSM terrestrial networks as well as satellite.

An automatic phone message alerts users when their paid-for airtime is about to run out.

When their credit runs low they get an automatic top-up from a pre-set amount taken from their bank accounts by direct debit.

PreTalk combines the budgetary benefits of prep-aid telephony with the ease of postpaid services said Advanced managing director Gary Sheppard.

Advanced will handle all the laborious re-crediting. All customers have to do is tell us how much they want to top-up. Or they can wait until their credit runs out and top-up themselves.

Advanced supplies the PreTalk package for 79.99 based around the Siemens S8 handset.

Advanced will sell PreTalk through High-Street stores across the country.

The calls demonstrated the working of WCDMA prototype equipment during trials to investigate the characteristics of the WCDMA system.

Ericsson built a WCDMA test bed at its Guildford centre this year and has been carrying out live demonstrations of multimedia calls including mobile video test calls.

The Ericsson test facility has already been used by One 2 One to demonstrate real-time video conferencing involving two-way video calls between an office and a moving vehicle. The data speed achieved was around 50 times faster than current GSM mobile data rates.

Handover of the video call between different radio cells were made without any degradation of picture quality says One 2 One.

The service is expected to be available commercially in two years.

The network has linked up with Olympic WorldLink which develops business inf9ormation systems based on palmtop computers. The system will use high-speed GPRS technology to flash instant financial information such as real-time prices on 10000 contracts from 28 stock exchanges around the world to the palmtop computers.

The system uses the Microsoft CE operating system.

First year turnover of 250000 has risen to 3.5 million today according to figures released by the organisation.

The Mobile Phone Repair Company says it now handles around 23000 phones a month and says it is now the UKs largest mobile phone repair organisation.

We promise to repair phones to the highest standard and deliver it back in full working order within agreed time scales. For personal callers we offer a 30-minute service said the companys managing director Steve Cuthbert.