Nippon Telegraph and Telephone said on Friday it would deliver high-grade content through a new company that will use its fiber-optic Net access network.
The new firm, NTT Broadband Initiative, will offer streaming content such as video and music, and provide a gateway for information that needs to be delivered over high-speed lines.
Fiber-optic networks allow homes and businesses to go on the Internet and transmit data at speeds of 10 Mbps (megabits per second), or more than 150 times faster than regular dial-up modems. NTT (NTT) recently began retail services in limited areas.
"We made this company because it was inevitable that this was needed, given the direction (of telecommunications technology)," said Junichiro Miyazu, NTT's president.
NTT said it would create a network that would make multi-media services such as movies, software, online chatting, medical services, shopping and video games available to users through personal computers, televisions and other household appliances.
Miyazu said delivering the content over existing high-speed channels such as ADSL or NTT DoCoMo’s third-generation wireless network was also being considered.
The company, with 60 employees, was set up on Friday and capitalized at 3.5 billion yen ($28 million). Further funding from the parent company was also being planned, according to Hiromi Wasai, president of NTT's Broadband Initiative.
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Pulling back: Toshiba has trimmed capital investment plans for its semiconductor operations, with other big Japanese chipmakers likely to follow as the industry struggles with a steep downturn.
Toshiba (TOSBF) cut its target for chip-related plant and equipment spending in the business year to next March to $800 million, down nearly 30 percent from a figure issued just two months ago.
Analysts have widely expected Japan's five big chipmakers to pare their profit and spending projections for the current business year, with the semiconductor market mired in one of its worst slumps ever, brought on by a sudden chill late last autumn in demand for PCs, cellphones and other chip-using products.
Capital investment cuts were also considered necessary to bring capacity levels in the global chip industry back in line with recently subdued demand.
"If all chipmakers cut their capex budgets like Toshiba has done, that would be positive because it will retighten the supply-demand balance into next year," said Richard Kaye, an analyst at Merrill Lynch.
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Ax falls at Agere: Agere Systems (AGRA), the semiconductor business recently spun off from Lucent Technologies, announced that it would slash an additional 4,000 jobs to cope with a downturn in the communications market.
The move comes on top of the 2,000 jobs the company said in April it would eliminate. After the job cuts are complete, the company's total workforce will be about 12,500 employees.
The company expects to take a charge of up to $900 million to cover costs of the restructuring, with $725 million of it taken in this quarter.
Agere also announced that its revenues in the quarter would be about $920 million, which is below the $950 million that the company had expected.
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Asia.biz: With the Internet's dot-com suffix getting increasingly overcrowded, Asian domain name registries are taking the lead in securing customers for the new dot-biz tag that will start operating in October.
NeuLevel, a Melbourne, Australia company, last year won the right to be the master registry of domain names for the dot-biz suffix that promises to expand the number of available Internet addresses and offer other features.
NeuLevel has recruited 95 of the 100 or so third-party providers of domain name registration to offer dot-biz.
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Making Europe happy: Honeywell International (HON) offered to reduce the purchase price it sought from General Electric (GE) in a bid to compensate its suitor for the demands of European antitrust regulators and help close the deal.
Honeywell said it would reduce the stock exchange ratio on the deal to 1.01 shares of GE for each Honeywell share - down from the previously ratio of 1.055 shares of GE.
The reduction would compensate GE for the divestiture of a 19.9 percent stake in its aircraft leasing arm, GE Capital Aviation Services or GECAS, Honeywell said.
Honeywell, in a letter sent to GE, said it saw no choice but to offer the European Commission the divestitures offered two weeks ago, which generate $2.2 billion in revenues.
Reuters and AP contributed to this report.
