Today's other stories in brief

Three Ireland works throw users offline

Internet users suffered further disruption this week after Three Ireland's mobile broadband service suffered problems. Users complained that they could not access the internet, leading to a flood of calls to its customer care centre. A spokeswoman said the problem had been caused by ongoing upgrade works.

She said the company’s subscription figures had grown, particularly in recent months, but said the issues experienced by some customers were not caused by a lack of network infrastructure. The mobile operator has 160,000 mobile broadband customers.

The company beat Eircom to the contract for the National Broadband Scheme to provide internet access to under-served rural areas, and is on track to complete the roll out by the third quarter of 2010.

Strencom wins €100,000 contract from Big Fish

Cork-based Strencom, a provider of internet services to businesses, has won a €100,000 three year contract to provide telecoms and managed services to Big Fish Games.

The US firm, which distributes over 1.5 million so-called “casual games” per day online has demanding bandwidth requirements at its European headquarters in Cork.

With support from IDA Ireland Big Fish is creating 100 jobs at its Irish operation.

Strencom will provide Big Fish with services including 24x7 network monitoring and a 100MBit/sec internet connection, using the State-owned Metropolitan Area Network in the city.

Bing challenge to Google starts to falter

The pace of growth of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which is attempting to rein in market leader Google, slowed in August according to new data from Irish web analytics firm StatCounter.

Bing had 9.64 per cent of the search engine market in the US last month, an increase of just 0.23 per cent. The market share for Bing and Yahoo, which Microsoft recently announced a deal around search with, declined slightly to 20.14 per cent from 20.35 in July.

Globally Microsoft and Yahoo! combined took 8.42 per cent of the search market in August, a decline of 0.35 per cent.

Facebook and Bebo hits

Facebook and Bebo account for 43 per cent of all internet traffic from 3 Ireland customers using their handsets. The mobile operator said that Facebook is the site of choice for pay monthly customers with Bebo the preference for the younger pre-pay market.

The survey, focusing on 3 customers accessing the internet via the Planet 3 mobile portal, highlighted the dominance of search engines such as Google and Yahoo which account for more than half of traffic.