Aimed at low-income earners.
The ACT Greens have proposed spending up to $100,000 on a free wi-fi trial aboard public transport and key spaces in Canberra as part of the party's election pledge for the upcoming territory elections.

Under the Greens' proposal (pdf), wi-fi would be rolled out to at least ten buses to test system feasibility, before expanding to the city's civic area — comprising Garema Place, City Walk, Petrie Plaza, Glebe Park and Civic Square and Canberra's bus interchanges — under a 12-month trial...

World-first platform built for Shell Australia's Prelude project.
Alcatel-Lucent will provide communications and entertainment systems for a $12 billion floating liquefied natural gas facility to be anchored off the coast of Western Australia...

Biggest acquisition to date.
Software maker VMware said it will acquire privately held Nicira for US$1.05 billion in cash to expand its portfolio and establish a leading position in virtualised networks.

The deal, which is VMware's biggest acquisition to date, includes US$210 million of assumed unvested equity awards and is expected to close in the second half of 2012...

Antitrust investigation rolls on.
European Union regulators investigating Google for alleged anti-competitive behaviour have called for the company to offer further concessions on where and how it changes its search rankings.

The search giant had sought to resolve an 18-month antitrust investigation into its search engine rankings by offering concessions to the way it handled search results...

All workers safe.
BlueScope Steel has been hit by a fire at its Wollongong plant in NSW, damaging a 'computer room' and electrical wiring.

A Fire and Rescue NSW spokesman told iTnews the fire started in an underground ducting system about 6am, before spreading to the computer room...

As CEO Maritz reportedly steps down.
VMware is rumoured to be considering spinning off the Cloud Foundry platform as a service into a separate company.
GigaOM reported the spin-out was "at an advanced stage", according to sources, and could be announced later this month or in August...

Contract covers 'umbilical' conduits.
Apache Energy has awarded a $60 million contract to design and install subsea systems for its Balnaves oil and gas project off north-west Western Australia.
The contract was awarded to French engineering giant Technip and will be executed from a Perth-based operating centre...

Launches remote access app.

The $130 million, 17,500 square metre facility in South Melbourne is NextDC's flagship data ...

Introduces power monitoring by iPad.
Nextgen networks is fitting out three co-location data centres nationwide to accept high-density customer environments of up to 24kW per rack.

The company has started taking orders for the high-density service in Melbourne and plans to expand it to facilities in Perth and Sydney...

Analysis: Do the prices add up?
Google has unveiled its latest rivalry to Amazon's establish product suite, launching an infrastructure-as-a-service solution based on excess compute power from its data centres for the first time.

The search giant's Compute Engine is a rough equivalent of Amazon Web Services' EC2 and virtual servers offered from IaaS providers...

Admins, Java apps unprepared.
An attempt to keep Earth's atomic clocks in tune with changes to the planet's rotational speed was behind outages to a number of websites and programming platforms over the weekend.

The International Earth Rotation and Reference System Service held clocks back by a single second on 11...

Power outage takes out Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram and more.
An Amazon Web Services data centre briefly lost power during violent electrical storms across the eastern part of the United States that killed at least two people and left millions without power...

Completes Office 365 rollout.
Home appliance hire firm Mr Rental is trialling a Windows Azure environment as a burst capacity and redundancy measure for its Telstra-based private cloud environment.

The company, which has about 90 franchisees in Australia and New Zealand, has also completed the deployment of Office 365 to all stores, consumed via Telstra's T-Suite and served out of Microsoft's Singapore data centre...

Claims zero downtime, 3G fallback.
Huawei has finished upgrading communications networks at 260 NSW Ambulance sites in a bid to improve the speed of reliability of emergency service's network.

Huawei assumed responsibility for the department's Wide Area Network connections earlier this year...

Three buildings, six stages.
Leighton Holdings subsidiary Metronode could begin building one of two data centres proposed for use by the NSW Government by September, pending approval of detailed plans for the facility.

Plans lodged recently with Wollongong City Council pinpointed the specific location of the new facility at Unanderra, some six kilometres south-west of the Wollongong...

Promises consensus on key issues.
Internet domain names body ICANN has appointed a new chief executive to take on some of the major challenges facing the non-profit body in the near future.

Fadi Chehade, currently chief executive of cloud-based education software vendor Vocado, will start his new job in October...

Readies remote mining control.
Gold mining operation OceanaGold has begun rolling out a fibre optic communication system in its Frasers underground mine in New Zealand.

The system will be used to support the operation of tele-remote controlled load haul dump heavy vehicles – known as 'boggers' – in the mine...

European patent office mark achievement.
Five CSIRO scientists credited with developing some of the technologies underpinning modern wi-fi networks have become the first Australians to receive the prestigious European Inventor Award.

The scientists – Dr John O’Sullivan, Dr Terry Percival, Mr Diet Ostry, Mr Graham Daniels and Mr John Deane – received the non-European award at the ceremony held overnight in Copenhagen, Denmark...

Slattery moves up.
Former Symantec Australia managing director Craig Scroggie has been named as NextDC’s new chief executive, just a fortnight after stepping down from the anti-virus firm.

Scroggie replaces founder Bevan Slattery, who will continue at NextDC as executive director and deputy chairman...

Attracts government, Origin Energy, Elders, Downer kit.
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