Taiwan's Ministry of Transportation and Communications eased its rule on the funding of submarine telecommunications cables between China and Taiwan, saying carriers will soon be able to joint fund such initiatives.

It still rules, however, against Chinese carriers investing in its fixed telecommunications network businesses, according to the Taipei Times. 

Until now all cables between the countries had to link through a third-party or network from another country. Cross-Taiwan Strait call volumes have increased following the lifting of a ban on communication between the two regions in 1989, and now more people are calling China than any other international destination.

The state of Queensland in Australia has awarded a number of contracts for its data center and network consolidation, at a total cost of AU$12 million.

The government is looking to consolidate its central business district data centers, networks and infrastructure services to CITEN, its primary government IT service provider, according to reports.

EMC Global will provide storage and data protection, HP Australia will work on data center automation, Communications Design Management will consolidate the government's networks and services and Dimension Data Australia will carry out the patch and vulnerability management and security information and event management.

SingTel said it expects its revenue from cloud computing services to grow by 50% over the next three years following the launch of its "complete" package of services-on-demand, which it says will cover infrastructure to software requirements.

The Singaporean-based telecommunications company, which also has operations in Australia, says customers using their cloud services will now be able to scale up or down as required, and that is services will be particularly useful for small- and medium-sized businesses.

SingTel  executive vice-president for business Bill Chang told Channelnewsasia that businesses are now starting to demand the cloud in Singapore to save money, and that regarding cloud adoption, the region is still immature, meaning there is a large amount of clients the company could still win over.