Sydney - The Australian government on Tuesday scrapped a tender process and announced it would form a new company to build a national high-speed fibre-optic broadband network.

The company would be a public-private partnership with Canberra selling its majority stake when the 43-billion-Australian-dollar (30-billion-US-dollar) project is completed.

"It's the most ambitious, far-reaching and long-term nation-building infrastructure project ever undertaken by an Australian government," Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said.

Powered by Airtel's Carrier Ethernet Network, the fastest wireline broadband - based on optic fibre-based DSL technology, and offering a speed of 16 Mega bits per second (Mbps) - has been launched in Delhi by Bharti Airtel! A similar launch for Chennai and Bangalore is also on the cards in the near future.

London, April 3: In a live 24-hour webcast today, anyone on the Internet will get a unique opportunity to explore some of the most advanced astronomical observatories both on and off the planet, as part of the International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009) initiative ‘Around the World in 80 Telescopes’.

Hamburg  - Users of YouTube, the online video service, lost access Wednesday to a vast array of contemporary music in Europe's biggest nation after a dispute with a German fees agency escalated.

"This video is not available in your country," said a message when computers connected to the internet in Germany tried for example to open YouTube's Viva la Vida clip by British rock bank Coldplay.

Bejing, Mar 31: China has shut down 162 websites that it found providing pornographic and lewd content in their audio or video segments.

According to a statement issued by the special operation office for crackdown on online porn and lewd content here on Monday said that the blocked websites had not acquired permits to broadcast audio and video programs issued by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT).

The websites include www. baigujing. com, www. bt990. com and other sites based mainly in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong Provinces.

Come Tuesday and the free Skype for iPhone will actually be available for download from the iTunes App Store! While it was at the CES that Skype had announced its native VoIP client for the iPhone, it will be at CTIA annual mobile showcase in Las Vegas that Skype would launch its new service on Tuesday.

Skype has been endeavoring since long to make its service available on the most popular advanced phones, thereby expending its over 400 million users who lapped up the idea of economical, and sometimes free, calls via Skype's computer application.