Business news for Mon, 24 Dec 2007 & with words agency+service. 2 news.

THE number of Chinese broadband users has hit 122 million, the highest in the world, Xinhua news agency reported yesterday, citing an official from the information industry authority. Sixty percent of the netizens surfed on the Internet via broadband, said Jiang Yaoping, vice minister of the ministry of information industry, at a work conference of China Telecommunications Corporation on Saturday. Last year, more than 30 percent of China Telecom's income came from non-phone services, rising from 5.5 percent in 2002, the report said. One-third of the new broadband users are farmers, where the demand for the service is high, China Telecom officials said. The increased user number boosted the non-voice income of fixed-phone carriers, accelerating the transformation of traditional phone carriers into comprehensive information service providers, the report said.

The Atlanta office of media buying and planning agency OMD is scaling down. The company is shutting down its newspaper unit in Atlanta after losing AT&T Inc. (formerly Cingular Wireless) as a client in October when the company consolidated its estimated $2.3 billion account at WPP Group's Mediaedge:cia. All employees that worked on AT&T's newspaper business will be out of a job Dec. 21, according to sources close to the situation. The OMD Atlanta office will remain open, housing about 30 employees who will service the remaining accounts, including the Georgia Lottery, Randstad, Icelandair and Bayer Advanced. Dale Travis will remain general manager of the Atlanta office. Bryan Jackson and Steve Rubinacci, formerly with OMD Atlanta, have moved over to Mediaedge:cia Atlanta to continue their work in print.