The Home Office has announced a £39m deal to help emergency services comms cope during the London 2012 Olympic Games.

The National Police Improvement Agency has signed the £39m contract with Airwave, the company that provides the mobile radio network used by every UK police force and currently being rolled out to every ambulance trust and Fire and Rescue service in the country, to fund an increase in the system's capacity in time for the 2012 Games.

Compiled at the IoD, Pall Mall, London, and dispatched to silicon.com via a free wi-fi connection.

For more than a year now I have been in a state of mild bewilderment while watching and listening to the economic commentators. The truth is: I find it difficult to afford them much credibility as I have been here many times before.

BlackBerry-maker RIM has unveiled its second touchscreen device, the Storm2.

The Storm2, announced in May this year, will be released exclusively on Vodafone's network on a £35 per month contract and will be available from 26 October, with the operator already taking pre-orders.

ICT workers looking for a new job should keep their eye on the telecoms sector.

The number of job vacancies in the industry rose sharply last month, according to new research.

Smartphones have come a long way in the last few years. Not so long ago, a smartphone all too often meant a cumbersome PDA-style brick running an equally cumbersome operating system, or else a Qwerty-sporting BlackBerry tucked discretely inside a businessperson's briefcase.

How times have changed.

The Home Office has announced it's extending IT contracts with suppliers Atos Origin and Fujitsu, under new deals worth £430m.

The Home Office claims the contract extensions, which will run until 2016, will reduce IT costs by £100m over their lifetime.

Bonhams previewed some vintage tech last month as the London auctioneer prepared to put a selection of classic hardware under the hammer.

The sale includes Sinclair computers such as the ZX81 machine and a ZX Spectrum 48K extension shown here.

The iPhone is coming to Orange in the UK - ending two years of exclusivity with O2.

O2 will continue to sell the iPhone 3G and its faster brother the 3G S but both devices will also be available to customers on Orange's network, starting sometime later on this year.

By year-end, one in five households worldwide will be wired up to the internet, according to new estimates from Gartner.

The number of households with fixed broadband connections is expected to reach 422 million across the globe this year, a jump of 10.5 per cent over 382 million in 2008, the analyst house said on Friday. This number will further swell to an estimated 580 million by 2013.

BT has announced it will extend its planned coverage of 24Mbps broadband to 75 per cent of the UK by 2011 - up from its previous target of 55 per cent.

The telco currently provides speeds of up to 24Mbps to around 40 per cent of UK homes and businesses. The vast majority of those outside this coverage area can get up to 8Mbps.

BT has opened a new high street shop to promote fibre broadband in London's Muswell Hill - the location for one of its two fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) pilots, along with Whitchurch in South Wales.

Residents of London's N10 district are being invited to try the FTTC service for free until January 2010, with the telco targeting its existing broadband customers with letters offering a free taste of fibre.

Joltid, a peer-to-peer software company established by Skype's founders, filed a copyright suit against Skype on Wednesday alleging Joltid's technology is being infringed on by Skype users "in the United States at least 100,000 times each day".

Just the latest in an ongoing licence dispute between the popular VoIP service and its developers, the lawsuit, filed in Northern California US District Court, seeks an injunction and damages, which Joltid "reasonably believes are amassing at a rate of $75m daily", according to the suit.

On Friday Skype pulled the plug on its Extras programme, which was designed to help third-party developers create add-ons for Skype's VoIP service - like emoticon enhancements, backup services, and music player plug-ins.

Unlike Firefox's similar third-party extensions, not enough people were installing Skype Extras, Skype said in an email and in a blog post to developers.

Google Gmail suffered nearly a two-hour outage on Tuesday, which was the result of a miscalculation regarding the capacity of its system, the company said late on Tuesday.

Gmail was down from about 12:30(PDT) Tuesday to about 14:30(PDT), affecting millions of Gmail customers. The problem was caused by a classic cascade in which servers became overwhelmed with traffic in rapid succession.

Ecommerce giant eBay announced on Tuesday that it's selling its Skype unit to an investor group that includes entrepreneur Marc Andreessen's new venture.

Under the deal, eBay will receive approximately $1.9bn in cash and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125m, for a total of $2.025bn. The participants expect the deal to close in the fourth quarter.

eBay is expected to announce today that it has reached a deal to sell its internet telephone service, Skype, to a group of private investors, the New York Times reported on Monday.

The investment group will reportedly include Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital group launched in July by Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and co-founder of Opsware, and Ben Horowitz, also co-founder of Opsware. A price was not revealed but previous reports put eBay's asking price for Skype at about $2bn.

What are the chances the government wants to monitor you?

Worries over ordinary citizens being tracked by the government may seem like Big Brother paranoia, but the likelihood you're on the Whitehall's watch list is far higher than you might suppose.

Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers says the economic recession that's gripped the world for the past year may have reached a tipping point in the last three months, as he sees the company's corporate customers return to spending more on technology.

Even though Cisco's sales and profits were down drastically from a year ago for the fourth fiscal quarter of 2009, Chambers said on Wednesday during the conference call with investors and analysts that orders for new products grew for the first time in several quarters.

How much human interaction powers SpinVox's voicemail-to-text conversion system? Natasha Lomas was invited to the company's HQ to see a demo of the system. Did it impress?

A trip to the HQ of SpinVox - the voicemail-to-text conversion company I wrote about last week - has given me a newfound respect for human hardware. By which I mean the ear, the brain and above all the brain's ability to grub and process a grain of meaning from the polluted and chaotic environments humans create.

Government proposals to monitor all web communications are technologically unworkable, according to the organisation that switches the majority of web traffic for the UK.

The London Internet Exchange (Linx), which counts ISPs among its 330-plus internet partners, on Tuesday severely criticised the government's plans, known as the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP).

First UK Bus - the UK's largest bus operator - is to install new technology to monitor how well its 9,000 buses are being driven.

The system, from telematics company GreenRoad, will assess drivers' performance by analysing how well they perform manoeuvres such as cornering and braking.

FMC (fixed mobile convergence) might not have become the enterprise must-have that telcos predicted, but it seems the technology is slowly finding its way into businesses across the globe.

FMC works by routing calls over mobile networks when a user is out of the office and over a broadband connection via VoIP when they're in range of a hotspot. Its chief selling point is the potential for savings on call costs but the tech has also been sold as a way for enterprises to gain additional telecoms functionality such as unified contacts information.

Skype is trying to develop new peer-to-peer technology to replace the code it currently uses, due to an ongoing legal battle with the founders of the popular internet telephony service.

Skype's owner, eBay, revealed the software-development initiative in a filing on Tuesday last week with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but warned that it may not be successful.

Using a bit of mystique to protect company secrets is all very well but too many foggy messages risk driving a wedge between you and your customers, warns Natasha Lomas.

An interesting little tale unfolded last week courtesy of a report by BBC's tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, or 'Rory Katherine Jones' as voicemail-to-text conversion service SpinVox inevitably rebrands him.

Ericsson cast the $1.13bn winning bid in an auction for the wireless assets of bankrupt Nortel Networks, the companies said on Saturday.

The Swedish telecommunications giant picked up Nortel's CDMA and next-generation LTE wireless technologies. As part of the agreement, at least 2,500 Nortel workers supporting CDMA and LTE will be offered jobs at Ericsson.

The company overseeing the tech for the London 2012 Olympic Games has revealed how it's warming up in preparation for the starter's gun.

A technology roadmap for the Games, released today, details how Atos Origin, the London Olympics IT supplier, and its partners will prepare for 2012, building a network capable of streaming 6GB of sporting results every second to the watching world - the equivalent of the entire contents of Wikipedia every five seconds.

BT is to resell Microsoft's cloud-based business messaging and collaboration suite, the company announced on Monday.

The Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) will be available to BT's business customers as a fully hosted managed service, including features such as performance management, maintenance and software upgrades.

CIOs spend countless hours listening to suppliers pitch their technology, so silicon.com decided to make the process a lot more entertaining by putting the vendors on the spot. Welcome to the 60-Second Pitch.

Suppliers have just one minute to pitch their product or service to a panel of current and former heads of IT, who then have the opportunity to quiz the vendor before giving the technology a green or red light - just for fun, of course.

BT on Thursday announced a five-year, £99m contract with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to manage voice and data networks across 197 military bases.

The deal broadens the Defence Fixed Telecommunications Service (DFTS) agreement, under which BT is building and managing a co-ordinated communicated infrastructure for the Army, Royal Navy and RAF.

BT is cutting its call centre workforce in India by 4,000 and bringing some of the work back to the UK, the telco confirmed today.

The cuts all fall within BT Retail and only involve third-party call centre staff rather than direct BT employees, according to a BT spokesman.

O2 is to launch a fixed-mobile convergence service for small businesses, the company has said.

The service, called Fixed Number Anywhere, will give users a landline-style number that channels calls straight through to their mobile phone, a spokesperson for the operator told silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK on Wednesday.

A £1bn contract to provide telecoms equipment across the public sector has been put out to tender.

Central and local government departments, NHS organisations and other public bodies will be provided with telecoms goods, services and client side support under the framework agreement put out by Buying Solutions, the trading arm of the government's procurement body, the Office of Government Commerce said this week.

If elected, the Conservative Party would take away Ofcom's policy-making functions, David Cameron said on Monday.

The Tory leader was making a speech attacking quangos - of which the telecoms regulator is one of the most prominent. He acknowledged it was "clear that [Ofcom] has an important technical function", specifically in spectrum licensing and keeping an eye on BT, and in ruling on breaches of the broadcasting code, but said other responsibilities should be taken away from Ofcom.

The weekly Inbox column collects the best and most thought-provoking of the reader comments silicon.com receives each week. The government's U-turn on ID cards this week caused readers to reach for their keyboards in force. Readers also weighed in on telcos being rather too well-represented in the list of worst companies for customer service and the question of whether Whitehall IT may be off to pastures new.

Don't forget to post your own response below to any of these stories or comments.

BT reckons a government plan to put a 50p tax on copper lines in order to fund fibre broadband to the country's hard to get to places can only go so far - and will probably never reach the last fifth of the UK.

The plan, unveiled last month in the government's Digital Britain report, is aimed at ensuring superfast broadband is rolled out to areas likely to be ignored by the market.

IT staff at British Airways (BA) have saved the company more than £2m by working for free or taking unpaid leave amid forecasts of a slump in airline IT spend this year.

Techies were credited by BA CEO Willie Walsh for being among the 7,000 of BA's 40,000 staff who cut back on hours or pay to help the company through the credit crunch.

Telecoms companies may tell us it's good to talk but they seem to be struck dumb when it comes to communicating with their own customers, according to a new poll.

In a survey asking 5,000 Brits to vote for UK businesses with the worst customer service half of the top 10 are telecoms companies.

Skype shed the beta tag on Monday to reveal version 3.0 of its VoIP application for Windows Mobile phones. Skype 3.0 for Windows Mobile is nearly identical to the beta build that preceded it but mobile Skype users graduating to it from version 2.5 will notice some major feature additions - notably the capability to transfer files and to send SMS messages.

File transferring and SMS are carryover features from desktop Skype and are initiated via relatively small buttons on the mobile interface that you can access from the contact list. Click the dark, round icon to send an SMS using Skype Credit, and select the grey drop-down arrow to select "send file".

The head of UK telecoms regulator Ofcom has urged European parliamentarians and telecommunications ministers to resolve an argument that has erupted over a raft of new legislation.

At the European Competitive Telecommunications Association (Ecta) conference in Brussels on Thursday, Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards said if the Telecoms Package failed to become law by the end of this year, it would be a "significant blow" to regulatory certainty in Europe.

How is the UK's IT workforce faring in today's economic climate? silicon.com's annual Skills Survey, now in its 11th year, aims to find out.

The survey is intended to track the year's skills trends, and discover how things have changed in the last 12 months.