TelecomWeb News Digest articles from April 2007

TelecomWeb News Digest archives from April 2007

AT&T, America Movil Team To Control Telecom Italia.
April 2, 2007... AT&T and Mexican communications magnate Carlos Slim Helu's mobile phone unit America Movil are in negotiations with Pirelli & C. S.p.A. to pick up an indirect controlling minority stake in Telecom Italia. The deal is believed to be worth...

Rogers Goes Where No Wireless Has Gone Before.
April 2, 2007... Rogers Wireless, a subsidiary of Canada's Rogers Communications, this morning became the first carrier in North America to offer wireless video calling, stealing bragging rights from its far larger U.S. brethren south of the border. And...

European Satellite Concerns Plan Telecom/Broadband Initiatives.
April 2, 2007... OHB-System AG of Germany inked a deal with the European Space Agency (ESA) to develop a European Small Geostationary Satellite platform for telecommunication missions. According to TelecomWeb news break sister e-letter Satellite Today,...

Cisco Credits Channel Partners For Wireless Access-Point Success.
April 2, 2007... Cisco is touting another milestone in pervasive wireless adoption, shipping its 4 millionth enterprise wireless access point to a market "driven by increased enterprise demand for mobility services and unprecedented channel penetration in key...

Plano Awaits Pole-Mounting OK To Deploy Broadband Cop Network.
April 2, 2007... Local news coming out of Plano, Texas, says the city is negotiating an agreement with energy provider TXU that will allow Plano to move forward with the next phase of its plan to build a mobile broadband system for public-safety entities and...

SunRocket Tops 200K Subs.
April 2, 2007... VoIP house SunRocket - considered Number Two in the pure-play market behind Vonage - today said it has passed the 200,000-residential-subscriber mark. The subscriber total is barely 10 percent of what Vonage claims and substantially...

Parts Of The FCC's Pretexting Ruling Could Harm Consumers.
April 3, 2007... For those who continue to worry about identity theft and the illicit procurement of personal phone records (now known as "pretexting"), the Federal Communications Commission has decided to beef up its privacy rules by requiring wireline and...

U.S. FTTH Penetration Counts Nearly 8M Homes.
April 3, 2007... The number of homes hooked up directly to fiber has nearly doubled during the past year, according to a new study jointly released by the Fiber-to-the- Home (FTTH) Council and the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA). The study,...

WOW! Look Who's Calling.
April 3, 2007... WOW!, the 12th largest multiple systems operator (MSO) in the United States, has begun offering its subscribers the ability to see Caller ID information on their television screens - one of the first batch of cablecos of any size to offer...

Verizon Re-Invents Cheap DSL.
April 3, 2007... As of yesterday, Verizon once again is offering DSL at $14.99 - a rock- bottom, come-on price that undercuts the fees charged by many of the still- surviving dial-up plans. Verizon had first hit the ultra-cheap DSL price point back in...

Survey Sez: Enterprises Need To Tweak Wireless Billing Practices.
April 3, 2007... Dublin, Ireland-based Research and Markets now says the most effective way for an organization to manage its telecommunications resources is to treat wireless services the way it treats wireline services - with centralized billing for...

Through Reuters, Energy Market Gets The Message.
April 3, 2007... Worldwide multimedia and financial agency Reuters just unveiled "Reuters Messaging 6.0," the latest version of its Communication and Collaboration Services product suite that features connectivity to Yahoo! Messenger. The new incarnation...

Carphone Warehouse Gains Subs, Spends On Problem-Solving.
April 4, 2007... There's good news and bad news contained in the quarterly and year-over- year financials just released by the U.K.'s Carphone Warehouse, with some of the company's broadband services included in the bad news. For 1Q07, Carphone Warehouse...

Coming Soon: The 'World's Largest' Mobile Signature Rollout.
April 4, 2007... London-based digital-security provider Gemalto says Turkcell, sporting 30 million subscribers, will use Gemalto's SIM-based identification solution to implement a large-scale mobile signature program. The program is based on qualified...

Island Nation ISP Cuts Over Prepaid FTTH Services.
April 4, 2007... Indonesian ISP and data-center provider Biznet launched new Fiber-To-The- Home (FTTH) initiatives to meet both business and residential customer demand for high-performance, high-bandwidth business applications. The initiatives are based...

Free Push E-Mail App Works In U.S., Canada.
April 4, 2007... Consilient, a developer of push e-mail, multimedia and advertising for mobile phones, unveiled a free version of its "Consilient Push" mobile e-mail application, featuring multi-account access and giving users a single application for...

Mexico's Hot-Spot Market Heats Up.
April 4, 2007... Ft. Lauderdale-based GlobeTel Communications Corp. and VPN de Mexico S.A. de C.V. (VPN) of Mexico City just inked a deal to establish a joint venture - 51-percent owned by VPN (which is part of Grupo IUSA) and 49-percent owned by GlobeTel -...

Is Linux Finally Emerging As A Wireless Player?
April 4, 2007... New research says the Linux community is assaulting the mobile-phone environment with a two-pronged attack that focuses on commercial operating system solutions and real-time operating system (RTOS) replacements. ABI Research forecasts...

Telecom Italia Control Contentiously Contested.
April 5, 2007... France Telecom and Spain's Telefonica have emerged as potential rivals to AT&T and Mexican telecommunications mogul Carlos Slim Helu's America Movil in the bidding for control of Telecom Italia in a complicated battle that also includes an...

Canada's Instant Telecom Deregulation.
April 5, 2007... In a surprise move, Canada's self-styled "New Government" has ordered the immediate deregulation of what looks to be a majority of the Canadian phone industry as of April 19, giving the nation's major telco's the right to launch a battle to...

Aussie Bank Corners U.K. Cellphone-Tower Business.
April 5, 2007... A subsidiary of Australia's Macquarie Bank is about to take what looks like 100-percent monopoly control of the towers in the U.K. that house wireless transceivers for virtually all carriers, paying $4.93 billion to gas and electric supplier...

Nokia Pays Qualcomm Once And May Once Again.
April 5, 2007... Just to show you can't win for losing, Nokia, which just wrote a $20 million check to Qualcomm for patent licenses covering 2Q07, may end up owing more, as Qualcomm turned around and filed suit against the Finnish handset maker in the...

Survey Sez: Mobile Audio Users Spend More On Infotainment.
April 5, 2007... Results of what Arbitron and Telephia characterize as a "landmark study" say mobile audio "is a promising opportunity that has not yet been fully exploited." The metrics firms recently examined the evolving market for mobile audio...

Remember Those Public-Safety Communicators Next Week.
April 5, 2007... What started out as a 3 a.m. conversation at the Contra Costa County (Calif.) Sheriff's Office in 1981 turned into an annual week of appreciation aimed at public-safety telecommunications officials nationwide, and it's that time of year...

Judge Bars Vonage From Signing New Customers.
April 6, 2007... U.S. District Court Judge Claude Hilton this morning ordered Vonage to stop signing up new customers if it couldn't find a way to dish up VoIP service without violating Verizon patents - an order that even Vonage admitted could quickly put...

Veraz Fumbles Its IPO.
April 6, 2007... Veraz Networks, the supposedly hot startup darling of the softswitch set, IPO'd yesterday morning at a price more than 20 percent less than expected and then was promptly trashed by investors. Veraz went to market at an IPO price of $8...

UTC Tells FCC To Take Next Frontline 700 MHz Step.
April 6, 2007... 700 MHz hopeful Frontline Wireless LLC got some help from the Utilities Telecom Council (UTC) in its quest for recognition of its broadband public- safety plan at the Federal Communications Commission. In a letter to FCC Secretary Marlene...

BPL Provider Needed For Surprise Internet Service.
April 6, 2007... The Arizona town of Surprise continues to work with the Arizona Public Service Co. (APS) to find a company willing to build and operate a low-cost Internet service via broadband over power lines (BPL). A previous deal with Tempe-based...

The Battle Against Wireless Conference-Call Blocking.
April 6, 2007... Spencer, Iowa-based Great Lakes Communication Corp. (GLCC), which offers alternative, low-cost conferencing solutions, is fighting to maintain its market position despite alleged attempts by "some of the largest telecommunications carriers"...

.com & .net Get A Bit Pricier.
April 6, 2007... VeriSign yesterday said that it is boosting the annual registry fees for .com and .net domain names, in order to cope both with the massive increases in traffic on the Internet and the cost of beefing up security. The price increases are the...

Cablecos Could Make Hay From Vonage's Slow Death.
April 9, 2007... The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted Vonage a temporary stay of last week's injunction stopping it from signing new customers unless it can find a way to do so without violating Verizon patents (TelecomWeb news...

Public-Interest Groups Push For 700 MHz Broadband Considerations.
April 9, 2007... Move over, first responders. A coalition of public-interest and consumer groups has asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to use its upcoming auction of the valuable 700 MHz spectrum to create a high-speed Internet service that...

Russian Giant Snaps Up Another Million-Resident Operating Area.
April 9, 2007... Golden Telecom Inc., which bills itself as the largest provider of integrated telecommunications and Internet services in high-population areas throughout Russia and other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, closed its...

South Koreans Ponder IPTV/Broadcast Parity.
April 9, 2007... A South Korean prime-ministerial advisory group, to the delight of that country's cable-TV companies and to the consternation of its telcos, is said to be on the verge of recommending that IPTV be subject to the same set of regulations that...

California Court Okays Muni FTTH.
April 9, 2007... California's Truckee-Donner Public Utility District (PUD), which has been trying to get a municipal broadband project off the ground since the late 1990s, won a major, and possibly final, court victory that now allows it to provide its...

NextWave Purchase Enhances Mobile-TV Capabilities.
April 9, 2007... NextWave Wireless Inc. signed a definitive agreement to acquire IPWireless Inc., a privately held San Bruno, Calif., company with R&D facilities in the U.K. IPWireless is involved in initiatives with such carriers as T-Mobile, Vodafone,...

On Capitol Hill, APCO Stresses Tech, Money, Training.
April 10, 2007... In testimony continuing as TelecomWeb news break was being posted today, Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) International President Wanda McCarley told the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation...

Survey Sez: More C-Level Support Needed For Contact Centers.
April 10, 2007... Are contact centers perceived by senior enterprise management as strategic assets to their businesses and, therefore, a high priority when it comes to investment in growth and capabilities upgrades? A recent survey by TelecomWeb news...

Lenovo Taps Sasken For Feature-Phone Apps.
April 10, 2007... Chinese OEM Lenovo Mobile is teaming with Bangalore, India-based Sasken Communication Technologies Limited to develop wireless handsets based on the OMAP-Vox platform from Texas Instruments. To date, the Sasken Application Framework has...

NGT Goes Private Label.
April 10, 2007... New Global Telecom (NGT), a provider of wholesale hosted and trunk-based VoIP solutions, just unveiled its Private Label VoIP Service, which it says enables channel partners to "quickly and profitably launch a brandable VoIP solution to...

KDDI Targets Japanese With U.S. MVNO Launch.
April 10, 2007... Japan's KDDI Corp. says it plans to "cut into the U.S. mobile-phone- service market" by becoming a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) on the Sprint Nextel system. Its initial target market is Japanese nationals residing in the States. ...

Meredith Takes On 'Lifetime' On The Web.
April 10, 2007... Publishing giant Meredith Corporation today launched Better.tv (http://www.better.tv), its first-ever broadband network aimed at women. Meredith brass says Better.tv offers viewers original video content and programming based on the assets...

Vonage Gets The Chance To Argue For Its Life.
April 11, 2007... In what legal experts say is a rare event, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has decided to hear oral arguments - rather than simply making a decision based on legal briefs, as its done on every similar case in...

Rumor Du Jour: Somebody's Sniffing Around Bell Canada.
April 11, 2007... Somebody, or perhaps several somebodies, are said to be interested in acquiring Bell Canada parent BCE Inc., and they're reportedly putting together what could be a massive takeover bid - one that would have to start out at $25 billion. ...

Worker Unrest Targets Chinese, German Telcos.
April 11, 2007... News reports out of China say executive members of the state-run Chunghwa Telecom Co. Workers' Union have charged that telco's management of ongoing "inhumane" worker layoffs aimed at cutting costs. And earlier today, a German labor union...

Routers In Space: Intelsat To Send Internet Into Orbit.
April 11, 2007... Intelsat Ltd. subsidiary Intelsat General Corp. won the nod to manage a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) project to test, for the first time, Internet routing in space (IRIS). Assuming the project works, the hardware will be converted to...

How Mobile TV Will Provide S-Band, FSS Opportunities.
April 11, 2007... Northern Sky Research (NSR) says S-band services are generating positive results in Asia via TU Media and its more than 1.1 million subscribers in South Korea, and additional S-band plans in Asia and Europe (and, potentially, North America)...

Verizon Wireless Cracks Enterprise Wireless WAN Market.
April 11, 2007... Verizon Wireless now is offering the BroadbandAccess Wireless Router Service to provide high-speed, wireless, wide area network (WAN) access for business customers. Wireless broadband-enabled routers allow businesses to link various...

Vonage CEO Quits As Axe Sharpens.
April 12, 2007... VoIP provider Vonage this morning revealed CEO Michael Snyder walked out the door and relinquished his board seat yesterday. The company, which by all estimates is operating in what can only be called "survival mode" pending upcoming...

Will Telefonica Offer A Telecom Italia Counterbid?
April 12, 2007... Telefonica SA reportedly is preparing to make a counter-bid for the 66- percent stake in Telecom Italia SpA's holding company Olimpia owned by Pirelli & C SpA. The bid would top the current controversial $7.5 billion offer from AT&T and...

The Forbes Billionaires: What A Difference Two Months Makes.
April 12, 2007... In its recently released list of the top global personal-wealth rankings, Forbes showcased a fine mix of telecom and technology magnates who occupy billionaire status, but the Number Three guy really should have been Number Two. Of...

New Zealand Sets Spectrum Re-Auctions.
April 12, 2007... The New Zealand government has decided to re-auction what it calls "under-used" cellular spectrum currently held by the nation's only two cellular carriers, Vodafone and Telecom New Zealand. At the same time, the country this week began a...

NFC Needs Improved Ecosystem To Thrive.
April 12, 2007... According to a new analysis of the Near Field Communication (NFC) market, by 2012, some 292 million wireless handsets - more than 20 percent of the global market - will ship with built-in NFC capabilities. However, the continued development...

Simonyi 'Hams' It Up From The Space Station.
April 12, 2007... After being in space for fewer than 24 hours, civilian traveler Charles Simonyi (call sign KE7KDP/HA5SIK) started making contact with the Earth-bound amateur-radio community. The billionaire software pioneer and aviator arrived two days...

European Celcos Prepare For More Roaming Cuts.
April 13, 2007... June 7 could be the day European wireless carriers finally find out whether their roaming charges will be capped at a new all-time low. The European Commission estimates that wireless carriers take in as much as $12 billion a year from...

Is Pipex Auction In The Doghouse?
April 13, 2007... Reports out of the U.K. suggest the planned sale of Pipex, Britain's premiere ISP, has foundered and nearly all of the bidders have fled, feeling the price is just too high. One report has it that Carphone Warehouse was the only bidder...

Telecom New Zealand May Sell Its Copper.
April 13, 2007... In a surprise move this morning, Telecom New Zealand (TNZ), the nation's dominant carrier, proposed selling off its copper-line network rather than submit to a government-imposed scheme that would split the company three ways. The...

BMI Backs Off Ringtone Revenue Estimates, Citing Mature Market.
April 13, 2007... Performing rights organization BMI believes U.S. ringtone sales this year will fall to $550 million, down $50 million from calendar year 2006. A year ago, BMI predicted the ringtone market would surpass $600 million in retail sales, up...

Two Sodas, Please - For Me And My Cellphone.
April 13, 2007... Juicing up a cellphone or other wireless device may take on a whole new meaning in the future, now that research shows some handhelds can benefit from a sugar rush. Researchers at Saint Louis University have developed a fuel cell battery...

AT&T Wins Georgia IPTV Franchise Fight.
April 13, 2007... An AT&T-backed proposal for statewide video franchising has been approved by Georgia legislators by an overwhelming margin, setting the stage for a statewide battle between IPTV providers and conventional cablecos. Approval of the Video...

Vonage Admits There's No 'Plan B'.
April 16, 2007... In newly available court documents, beleaguered VoIP provider Vonage concedes it really doesn't have a workaround to the three Verizon patents it was found guilty in a jury trial of violating. Put another way: There is no "Plan B." If...

'Save Telecom Italia' From Foreigners, Workers Plead.
April 16, 2007... Telecom Italia's annual meeting began this morning with unions representing the carrier's 84,000 workers staging a loud protest outside the meeting hall, waving red flags and shouting slogans urging shareholders to "save Telecom Italia" from...

Survey Sez: We Want Our Broadband TV.
April 16, 2007... Fifty-three percent of Internet users say they would replace their cable and satellite TV with broadband TV if they could get the same channels. A new Zogby poll, sponsored by Redback Networks (an Ericsson company) asked 1006 Americans...

Samsung, Nokia Pledge Mobile-TV Cooperation.
April 16, 2007... To encourage greater adoption of broadcast mobile-TV services and to accelerate service deployment, Samsung and Nokia have decided to work together to help ensure interoperability among their Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld (DVB-H)-enabled...

Ofcom Proposals Could Reduce License Morass.
April 16, 2007... U.K. regulatory body Ofcom is circulating proposals to allow more extensive license-exempt use of the radio spectrum and to open up high-frequency bands for new and innovative applications. Ofcom is required under the Communications Act of...

Nokia Siemens Unit To Build Longest GSM-R Route.
April 16, 2007... Two-week old Nokia Siemens Networks, in its first big contract win, has been tapped by the Chinese Ministry of Railways (MoR) and the China Railway Signaling and Communication Corporation to build the GSM-Railway (GSM-R) communications...

AT&T Abandons Telecom Italia Bid.
April 17, 2007... Facing fierce government and union opposition to foreign ownership of Italy's incumbent telco, AT&T has dropped its bid to gain control of Telecom Italia in partnership with Mexico's America Movil. America Movil, controlled by the...

Cable Broadband Test Spec Diluted In Rush To Market.
April 17, 2007... In a move admittedly designed to rush competitive higher-speed, cable- based broadband to market in the face of fierce telco competition, the cable industry's CableLabs is, at least temporarily, waiving the toughest parts of its high-speed...

TeliaSonera Cuts Fixed Line Telephony Jobs.
April 17, 2007... TeliaSonera, citing continuing declines in its fixed-network voice business, says it's going to slash between 160 and 180 jobs in network operations, product management, and sales and marketing as well as in operations development. None...

Survey Sez: SMBs Need More Customer-Service Attention.
April 17, 2007... Small and medium-sized businesses in the U.K. are getting a raw deal from large service providers, according to a survey released today by Companeo, a free service for SMBs. The survey shows that two thirds of small businesses believe...

Rural Call-Blocking Victims Meet With Congress, FCC.
April 17, 2007... The Farmers Telephone Company, a century-old full-service telecom provider, is banding together with its peers to ask the Federal Communications Commission and legislators on Capitol Hill to investigate recent call blocking and nonpayment of...

Could FCoE Be The Next Industry Standard?
April 17, 2007... A group of some of the meatiest heavyweights in the storage and broadband networking business have banded together to propose what was once an unthinkable standard: Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). The group - Brocade, Cisco, EMC,...

Vonage Whispers The 'B' Word.
April 18, 2007... Vonage, filing a delayed 10K annual report this morning, warned it could go bankrupt as a result of its conviction for violating a trio of Verizon patents. The statement was in stark contrast to the VoIP house's string of public...

The Big BlackBerry Blackout.
April 18, 2007... Achieving what a massive patent lawsuit last year threatened to do - shut down Research In Motion's (RIM) BlackBerry e-Mail service - a "system failure" of still-unknown nature brought the service to its knees at about 7:15 p.m. Eastern...

DoJ Taps General Dynamics For First-Responder Network.
April 18, 2007... The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) chose General Dynamics C4 Systems of Scottsdale, Ariz., over Lockheed Martin for a potential multi-billion-dollar contract to supply the Integrated Wireless Network (IWN), which is aimed at supporting...

1Q Motorola Financials Show Losses, Not Profits.(Financial report)
April 18, 2007... Motorola today reported sales of $9.4 billion for the first quarter of 2007 and a net loss of $181 million (8 cents per share), compared to a profit of $686 million in the same quarter a year ago. The company's Mobile Devices segment...

AT&T Melds Wired, Wireless In Business-Market Thrust.
April 18, 2007... The "new" AT&T, flexing its muscles following its merger with BellSouth, this morning unveiled a series of converged wireline/wireless packages aimed at businesses of all sizes. "Our recent acquisition of BellSouth Corp. and the...

mFoundry Shines A 'Spotlight' On M-Banking.
April 18, 2007... Mobile application platform provider mFoundry says its new Spotlight Mobile Financial Platform delivers a "single click" financial-services solution that serves the needs of financial institutions, wireless operators and their customers. ...

U.S., EU, AT&T Berate Italian Gov't For Telecom Italia Fiasco.
April 19, 2007... Both the European Commission and the Government if the United States have chastised the Government of Italy for literally running AT&T out of the country, foiling its bid for joint control of Telecom Italia with threats of legislation that...

Metro PCS IPO Tops $1 Billion.
April 19, 2007... Earlier today, Dallas-based MetroPCS Communications Inc. kicked off its initial public offering of 50 million shares of common stock priced at $23 per share. As TelecomWeb news break was being posted, the shares were trading at $27.40 -...

Verizon, Batelco, PCCW Short Listed In Saudi Phone Bid.
April 19, 2007... Verizon Communications, Bahrain's Batelco, and Hong Kong's PCCW have emerged as the three finalists in the hotly contested battle to win a license to become Saudi Arabia's second landline phone company, breaking the monopoly held by...

Camvera Backs Out Of Ga. Wireless Internet Deal.
April 19, 2007... What started out as a promise to supply wireless Internet service to residents of Lee County, Ga., now has turned into a financial disaster that has those residents saddled with a reported $300,000 tax tab. Last summer, the Lee County...

AT&T-Microsoft IPTV Finally Picking Up Steam.
April 19, 2007... AT&T is finally installing new subscriptions to its nascent IPTV service, U-verse TV, at a rate that hints the technical problems with both its network and the Microsoft TV middleware on which U-verse runs may have been solved. According...

Chinese Telematics Market Could Top $300M This Year.(Industry overview)
April 19, 2007... For the past two years, and following a long period of slow activity, the commercial telematics market in China has been ramping up. According to ABI Research, the Chinese market for fleet management systems (FMS) could surpass the $300...