US telecoms company Alltel has reached an agreement to buy Meteor Mobile Communications parent company Western Wireless in a stock-and-cash transaction valued at approximately $6bn (€4.6bn).

The State's third mobile phone firm Meteor has said it has added 24,600 new customers in the last quarter, most of them prepaid, and bringing the total of Irish customers to 180,600.

Galway-based AM-BEO has been selected as the fifth of this year's finalists for the DHL Export Awards 2003.

Mapflow has completed a web-based ASP application that provides mapping to Amatics, as part of its telematics solution for Transco PLC.