Initially only available to Vodafone customers for outgoing calls inbound mobile calls routed via the SkyPhone satellite to the fixed handset on board will be available next year.

Customers will not use their own handsets on board. Rather they will register for the service through their normal SP and be issued with a Vodafone Skyphone mobile connect card to swipe through the phone handset of the In Flight Entertainment System. The call appears on the customers normal itemised phone bill as a roamed call.

Barely a week after Vodafone announced their plans over in Slough BTCellnet announced that it will be offering BTs new Skyphone Mobile Connect card to all BTCellnets international roamers.

The network claims that the service safely extends GSM onto aircraft. In addition to BTCellnet BT has offered the Skyphone service which it helped to develop to other mobile operators round the world of which 20 have already signed up. The service is currently being trialled by over 2500 BT and BTCellnet executives.

Peter Richardson director of BT Cellnet Corporate Solutions said The number of international executives is increasing and businesses take on a more global outlook as is the number of long haul international flights. We are delivering a safe means for those people to be in touch with the rest of the world 24 hours a day regardless of whether they are on the ground or in the air.

Meanwhile an agreement between the GSM Association and SkyPhone means that GSM customers will soon be able to make charge originated satellite calls via special equipment on board aircraft which are then simply billed to their existing GSM account by their home network.

The new service called Mobile Connect has been made possible by an agreement with the GSM Association to use its world standard GSM billing protocol TAP (Transferred Account Procedures) to communicate costs incurred to customers via the GSM network in their own country (see related story).

Previously Iridium and Motorola teamed up to provide satellite phones and service to Central American governments and relief agencies in the wake of Hurricane Mitch as well as to humanitarian agencies assisting refugees in the recent Balkans conflict.

The parent company now believes that it is probably the largest independent repairer of mobile telecommunications equipment in the UK.

Says EPS Chief Executive Peter Ashton We have the capability to manage all aspects of our customers after-sales and warranty management issues. We have developed services such as technical enquiry and fault diagnostics help desk electronic testing and repair cosmetic refurbishment product exchange and distribution management. This gives us an extensive end to end service capability enabling EPS to be a true third party manager of the complete logistics chain.

When children aged 10 years to 15 years were asked what they would most like as a Christmas present nearly 50 per cent of them chose a mobile phone followed by 32 preferring a colour TV and 19 per cent who wanted a games console.

The research indicated that over 60 per cent of the parents who would give their child a mobile for Christmas said they thought phones were important for safety reasons.

Woolworths research was carried out from a sample of 200 children nationwide and 1000 parents nationwide.

In recent weeks we have reduced the prices of all our phones and as a result sales are booming said Woolworths mobile phone buyer Jim Ramsay.

Our Bootle store is now selling 50 to 60 phones a week which is phenomenal growth when you consider Woolworths only entered the market recently.

We are also seeing a large increase in the sale of airtime vouchers and we are expecting these to become very popular as gifts for Christmas and birthdays Ramsay added.

Woolworths is currently selling: One 2 Ones Up 2 You ( 59.99) and More 2 Say ( 79.99) Vodafones Pay as You Talk ( 49.99 with Motorola handset 69.99 with Panasonic handset 89.99 with Nokia handset) and BTCellnets Pay and Go ( 69.99 with Siemens C21).

Users can put their calls on hold and listen to up to 20 minutes of audio recorded onto a 16Mb memory chip.

The handset can record on either standby or talk time and features playback mode.

The SPH-M2100 model phone which is targeted at buyers in their 20s and 30s went on sale on the Korean market last week.

A separate remote control unit can be used to operate music and call functions a file decryption programme has been built in to prevent illegal copying of music downloaded into the phone.

Meanwhile NEC says it has developed the worlds first coder/decoder which enables the transmission and reception of audio and video over the internet for next generation phones.

The technology is said to make mobile video-phones a reality.

NEC is working on making the device smaller and boosting its performance before incorporating it into a final product.

A new class of amateur radio licence is to be launched next month as part of the re-structuring of the way amateur radio bands are allocated says the Radiocommunications Agency.

The company has also announced plans to expand its nation-wide personnel complement of 500 by around 10 per cent to keep pace with growth.

These are Talk 400 (400 minutes for 58.75 a month) Talk 1300 (1300 minutes for 176.25 a month) Talk 3700 (3700 minutes for 470.00 a month) and Talk 7500 (7500 minutes for 940.00 per month).

Up to 100 handsets can be connected to one talk plan. Larger corporate customers will also be able to design their own tariffs.

Orange is also now offering corporate customers the L7089 tri-band Motorola which can operate on GSM1900 networks in North America as well as GSM1800 and GSM900 networks in Europe.

In September Orange will launch a high-speed mobile internet access providing data rates from 28.8kb/s up to 64 kb/s – up to six times the current speed of the Orange wirefree network and with speeds comparable to many current commercial modems.

Orange is also increasing its support for business customers with the expansion of a dedicated business sales team to manage corporate accounts and a specialist business bureau within Orange customer services to handle business-only enquiries. For personal customers Orange will now offer Talk 30 (30 minutes of talk time for 17.50 a month) and Talk 120 (120 minutes for 25.00 a month).

Access to the range of Orange internet services will be charged at normal Orange data rates. There will be no monthly subscription and internet access can also be used as part of a customers inclusive minutes. Data transmission up to six times faster than current data speeds from 28.8kbs up to 64 kbs will be available via a high-speed circuit switched data (HSCSD) service.

This is an enhancement to Oranges existing circuit-switched network technology. It follows an investment of over 10 million. Orange says the rollout of the new service will make it the first UK mobile operator to offer high speed data rates this side of the millennium.

Current speeds for dial up connection from a mobile to the internet or corporate intranet is a relatively slow 9.6 kbs. HSCSD is the first stage in the evolution of second generation GSM to third generation UMTS technology.