TelecomWeb News Digest articles from January 2008

TelecomWeb News Digest archives from January 2008

Nokia Siemens Networks Snags FMC House Apertio.
January 2, 2008... Nokia Siemens Networks is buying privately held, fixed-mobile convergence (FMC), subscriber-management specialist Apertio for $205 million. Apertio sells real-time subscriber data applications for telecom operators, and it's already a...

Vonage Goes Free In Patent Scrap With Nortel.
January 2, 2008... Vonage, no doubt breathing a corporate sigh of relief, reached an agreement to settle its patent spat with Nortel without having to fork over a single penny, in sharp contrast to the tens of millions of dollars it has cost the VoIP carrier to...

8x8: Enterprises Sniff Around SMB VoIP.
January 2, 2008... Pure-play VoIP house 8x8 says that, as of the end of last year, its small- to medium-sized business (SMB) subscriber base had surged past the 10,000-company mark, and it's even started to see business from large enterprises for its Packet8...

For Qualcomm, A Bad Start To A New Year.
January 2, 2008... More disheartening news for Qualcomm: a new injunction regarding the infringement of three Broadcom patents was issued to the San Diego-based company before the first toast could be drunk to 2008. However, the company says it will appeal....

GrandStream Trials IP PBX For Smaller Players.
January 2, 2008... GrandStream Networks Inc. is beta-testing the GXE502x IP PBX, an all-in- one communications appliance for the fewer-than-50-seat office. The new system reportedly promises affordability (MSRP starts at $549) and advanced functionality for...

Consolidated Finalizes North Pittsburgh Buyout.
January 2, 2008... Ill.-based Consolidated Communications has added another carrier to its portfolio, wrapping its purchase of North Pittsburgh Systems Inc. (NPSI) at year's end. Consolidated Communications is a family of companies providing advanced...

Struggling Wireless House Divests Non-WiMAX Products.
January 3, 2008... Canadian wireless broadband pioneer SR Telecom, which has bet its survival on WiMAX, sold off the last of its non-WiMAX portfolio. News of the divestiture caused the company's stock price, which had topped $150 more than a decade ago, to...

Enterprises Must Consider, Test, Secure New Smartphone Apps.
January 3, 2008... According to the latest Telecom Intelligence Group "InfoTrack for Enterprise Mobility" report, as smartphones become more advanced and network speeds become faster, the promise of full, portable mobility finally can be achieved. However, each...

Why FTTH Take-Up Differs Globally.
January 3, 2008... New research predicts the North American market for fiber to the home (FTTH) will accelerate in the next five years. The current annual numerical increases of approximately 3 million FTTH homes passed (homes that could technically order...

AT&T Buys One More Piece Of Cellular One.
January 3, 2008... AT&T closed on its acquisition of Easterbrooke Cellular Corporation, picking up another of the dwindling number of smaller wireless operators still doing business under the venerable "Cellular One" brand name. With the purchase, AT&T...

Chicago Wireless Broadband Carrier Targets The Big Apple.
January 3, 2008... Business Only Broadband (BOB), which lays claim to being the largest wireless broadband provider in Chicago, has expanded into the New York City market and has snagged a senior Global Crossing executive to run the new operation. BOB, a...

Law Enforcement, Homeland Security Drive Gov't Interop IT Deals.
January 3, 2008... The Los Angeles County Regional Interoperable Communications System (RICS) leads the list of major justice/public-safety and homeland-security IT contracts planned by states and localities in 2008. A new report released by Reston,...

VCs Sink $20M Into Newfangled Wi-Fi Mesh Scheme.
January 4, 2008... Venture capitalists have plowed $20 million worth of second-round financing into a wireless mesh startup called Meraki that claims to have developed a new technology - using a swarm of cheap repeaters instead of expensive access points - that...

Black Box Claims Avaya Monopolizes Definity Repair Biz.
January 4, 2008... Pittsburgh-based Black Box Corporation, which calls itself the world's largest technical-services company, has charged Avaya with eight counts of antitrust violations, claiming Avaya has set up a system to keep the most lucrative service...

Rumor Du Jour: Vodafone Versus Best Buy In Carphone Bid.
January 4, 2008... Rumor has it Carphone Warehouse - Europe's largest retailer of cellphones, the U.K.'s second-largest broadband provider with 2.5 million subscribers and a major VoIP provider - is being eyed by both Vodafone and Best Buy. Speculation says...

Toshiba Strengthens Strata CIX Product Line.
January 4, 2008... Toshiba America Information Systems Inc., Telecommunication Systems Division, has updated its IP business-communications-system family, expanding the capacity of the smallest model and adding several new productivity features to all of its...

EnActen Buys Canadian Microsoft Gold Hosting Provider.(Company overview)
January 4, 2008... EnActen Corporation, which focuses on acquiring Web-hosting assets, now owns Alentus Corporation, a Canadian dedicated- and shared-hosting company based in Edmonton, Alberta. No financial details were disclosed. Founded in 1997,...

Mark Your Calendar For FCC's Next-Gen 911 Summit.(Calendar)
January 4, 2008... On Feb. 6, the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau (PSHSB) will host a summit on issues relating to the deployment and use of next-generation 911 technology and the coordination of those...

Nokia Siemens Bags Near-$1B Saudi Telecom Deal.
January 7, 2008... Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) landed an order to build a state-of-the-art 2G/3G greenfield mobile network in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for carrier Zain, with the contract numbers adding up to almost $1 billion. The carrier, which last...

Hughes Picks Up Business IPTV Developer.
January 7, 2008... Hughes Communications is buying business IPTV specialist Helius, with which it has had at least a cursory relationship for more than a decade, from The Canopy Group for what looks to be a bargain-basement $10.5 million in cash. According...

VoIP+Visual Voicemail: JaJah, CallWave Brew Joint Offering.
January 7, 2008... Voice applications developer CallWave, best known for its "visual voicemail" that converts voice mail into e-mail text, has teamed with VoIP house JaJah to put together a bundle aimed at mobile professionals, entrepreneurs and small...

Survey Sez: Web 2.0 The New Enterprise Darling.
January 7, 2008... ChangeWave Research says corporate usage of Web 2.0 technologies is growing - with nearly a quarter of respondents answering a recent poll saying their companies already are using Web 2.0 social software, while another 8 percent say they'll...

D2 Picks CES For FMC Product Debut.
January 7, 2008... At this week's CES show in Las Vegas, the name of the game is "new stuff," and D2 Technologies, a provider of software platforms for IP communications, chose the venue to unveil what it says is the industry's first embedded...

Alcatel-Lucent Taps Innodata For Technical Documentation.
January 7, 2008... Innodata Isogen inked a deal with Alcatel-Lucent Technologies to provide ongoing services to support the French company's technical-documentation systems. Under the terms of the agreement, whose financial data was not disclosed,...

Microsoft Makes Billion-Dollar Enterprise Search Buy.
January 8, 2008... Microsoft, in a major thrust into the corporate search market and in yet another pre-emptive strike against Google, is paying $1.2 billion to buy Norway's Fast Search & Transfer ASA. Fast is the enterprise search engine for the likes of...

Sprint Releases Details Of, Partners In WiMAX Soft Launch.
January 8, 2008... Allaying any industry concern that it was pondering putting its WiMAX plans on hold, Sprint announced a spate of new Xohm mobile Internet business agreements involving Web portal services and WiMAX network access devices. The carrier...

VoIPhD: Cisco Admitted To Cambridge.
January 8, 2008... Cisco, working with BT and IT consultant PTS Consulting, has landed a high-profile IP telephony (IPT) contract from the University of Cambridge under which it will link the roughly 200 schools and 17,000 students and faculty that make up the...

8x8 Unveils Small-Biz VoIP Videoconferencing.
January 8, 2008... VoIP carrier 8x8, the second-largest "pure play" provider in the United States, has gone to market with a small-business videoconferencing service - and it's not going to charge businesses anything extra beyond their regular VoIP bills for...

Alternatives For Enterprise FTP Needs.
January 8, 2008... AT&T subsidiary Sterling Commerce today released the results of a Hilty Moore & Associates study focused on the usage and requirements of the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) that said in part that file-transfer use continues to increase with 64...

Carrier Ethernet Follows The Money Into Wireless Backhaul.
January 8, 2008... Based on the events of 2007, the noise level surrounding Ethernet - particularly Carrier Ethernet and Metro Ethernet - is sure to get ever louder in the coming year. Some think the real money, when it comes to the United States, isn't going...

AT&T, Vonage, Comcast Spook The Economy.
January 9, 2008... AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, speaking at the Citi 18th Annual Global Entertainment, Media & Telecommunications Conference, revealed his company has been cutting off some of its landline and broadband subscribers because they can't pay their...

Frontline Locks Its Doors, Drops Out Of 700 MHz Auction.
January 9, 2008... It appears money, or the lack thereof, has forced Frontline Wireless, which had planned to be a big player in the upcoming FCC auction of E-block 700 MHz frequencies from a public-safety point of view, to shut down without warning today, and...

Verizon Begins GPON Rollout.
January 9, 2008... Verizon has begun rolling out GPON on its FiOS fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network in about half of the states it services. The deployment is about a year late, the way TelecomWeb news break reckons, although Verizon claims it's right on...

Ciena Ups The Ante In Carrier Ethernet.
January 9, 2008... Ciena, moving more deeply into Carrier Ethernet, has added Layer 2 switching to its flagship CN 4200 FlexSelect transport system. Ciena first got into Carrier Ethernet early last year (TelecomWeb news break, Feb. 28, 2007). At that time,...

Enterprises Embrace Converged Apps, Revenues Continue Ramp-Up.
January 9, 2008... According to the latest Telecom Intelligence Group report, "2007 Enterprise Converged Applications Market Analysis and Forecast," which is part of the InfoTrack for Unified Communications program, enterprise belief in the business value of...

Survey Sez: Local Agencies Can Handle First-Responder Interop.
January 9, 2008... A majority of Americans recently polled regarding the continuing 9/11 interoperability problem say a solution already should have been implemented, and they also say they trust local agencies more than the federal government to solve...

Microsoft UC Maven Retires, Juniper COO Takes Over.
January 11, 2008... Longtime Microsoft executive Jeff Raikes is retiring from his post as president of the Microsoft Business Division, where he is credited with shepherding the now-iconic Microsoft Office into the world and more recently was considered the...

Carriers Hold FBI's Financial Feet To The Fire.
January 11, 2008... It's comforting to know the feds have the same problem paying their bills in these pre-recession times as does John Q. Public. And a faulty agency accounting system may be the only way those who oppose warrantless wiretaps will see their...

Ethernet Traffic Doubles Twice Over.
January 11, 2008... For the second year in a row, Ethernet traffic has just about doubled compared with the previous year, and its growth shows no sign of slowing down. According to a new study by research house Infonetics, service providers reported...

Verizon Increases IT, SMB, MDU Attention.
January 11, 2008... Speaking at the same Citigroup Eighteenth Annual Entertainment Conference investor conclave as did rival AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson earlier this week (TelecomWeb news break, Jan. 9), Verizon head Dennis Strigl reiterated his commitment to...

Taiwan Chip House Makes 3G Chipset Play.
January 11, 2008... Taiwan's largest fabless semiconductor company, MediaTek, this morning closed on its acquisition of Analog Device Inc.'s (ADI) cellular chip assets, a move by which MediaTek hopes to enter the emerging Chinese 3G market. The $350 million...

BCS Courts SMBs With New Hosted VoIP Service.
January 11, 2008... Business Communications Solutions (BCS), a Calif.-based provider of telecom and data connectivity for local and national small and medium businesses (SMBs), has added Panterra Networks' "Worksmart" hosted VoIP services to its already wide...

Gruaimins Sink Dublin Muni Wi-Fi.
January 14, 2008... A plan by the Dublin city administration to build a municipal Wi-Fi network has been stymied by gruaimins - the European Union (EU) regulators whom, it was feared, would rule out the city's plans due to EU competition rules. Indeed, such...

The Coming Undersea Broadband Price War Down Under.
January 14, 2008... Australian peering house Pipe Networks this morning unveiled a new undersea fiber-cable project linking Australia and the United States, with owners of the new $179 million cable promising prices 50 percent less than those now charged by...

Managed Broadband Provider Cybera Goes Wireless.
January 14, 2008... MPLS-based managed service provider Cybera has gone to market with what it's touting as the first private, managed wireless broadband portfolio aimed at enterprise-class customers whose business models require fast install times, lower cost...

AirMaestro SMB WLAN System Complements ShoreTel UC Gear.
January 14, 2008... Bandspeed, a developer of next-gen Wi-Fi infrastructure solutions for the small-to-medium business (SMB) segment, says it's completed the ShoreTel Technology Partner Program Certification and that its AirMaestro WLAN platform has been...

EarthLink Division Taps DSL Tech For App Prioritization.
January 14, 2008... New Edge Networks, the business-communications unit of ISP giant EarthLink, just took the wraps off what it says is a network infrastructure that will accelerate introduction of a telecom-industry first: A network service that allows...

QuickPlay Claims First To Market With Streaming BlackBerry Videos.
January 14, 2008... Mobile TV content-management and service-delivery solutions provider QuickPlay Media may have hit the jackpot today, announcing the availability of "VideoStreams," what it says is the first free (caveat: wireless data charges could apply in...

Layoffs Rock Wireless Industry Worldwide.
January 15, 2008... A series of both rumored and confirmed layoffs at Sprint Nextel, Nokia and Motorola is affecting thousands of workers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The most startling is speculation Sprint Nextel is going to slash more thousands...

The FCC Launches Its Own Triple Play.
January 15, 2008... After hours yesterday, the Federal Communications Commission began its examination of three controversial carrier practices, issuing three notices soliciting industry comment. Kicking off things, the agency's Wireless Communications...

Enterprise Broadband Price War Mooted In U.K.
January 15, 2008... U.K. next-generation-network (NGN) operator Exponential-e has debuted a 100 Mb/s, fully managed, "pure" Ethernet business service at bargain-basement prices barely a fifth those of equivalent MPLS- and SONET-based services over older...

Wi-Fi: It's Not Just For Hot Spots Anymore.
January 15, 2008... Wi-Fi technology is beginning to test the waters beyond just voice and data communications. One company has started thinking about Wi-Fi as it relates to sensors and industrial processes. "Rarely is Wi-Fi invoked within the context of...

Verizon Business Bags Finnish Contract.
January 15, 2008... In a new twist on the fiber game, Verizon Business nailed down a contract to provide a fully managed communications network for Ahlstrom, a $2.7 billion global giant that makes such "fiber-based" materials as tea bags and paper in which to...

Tokiva Touts Open Mobile-Communications Platform.
January 15, 2008... Toronto-based Tokiva is beta testing a mobile-communications platform it says provides "open and cost-effective voice, messaging and sharing services on mobile, Web and instant-messaging (IM) systems." Tokiva says mobile users want three...

Sun Pays $1B For Open-Source Giant MySQL.
January 16, 2008... Earlier today, Sun Microsystems announced a definitive agreement to acquire Swedish open-source database house MySQL AB for $1 billion, a purchase that will catapult Sun into the $15 database market and give it ownership of the database that...

Alcatel-Lucent Garners Latino Largesse.
January 16, 2008... Alcatel-Lucent reportedly has landed a massive $1.1 billion, two-year contract from Brasil Telecom to manage and maintain its fixed-line, wireless and data networks. The U.S. manufacturer also won a five-year contract from U.S. Cellular...

Avaya Scouts For Euro Business With 0% Offer.
January 16, 2008... Avaya, in a pitch to garner more European mid-market businesses, is offering a zero-percent, three-year financing plan for equipment leases and services. "Mid-market companies face significant challenges when investing in technology,...

Esnatech Updates Telephony Office-LinX Offering.
January 16, 2008... Esna Technologies Inc. (Esnatech) released a new version of its Telephony Office-LinX unified messaging (UM) and unified communications (UC) platform that comes in three versions for small, medium and large businesses (to 20,000 users). ...

Cisco/BT Authors Walk The Sustainability Walk, Talk The Talk.
January 16, 2008... According to a joint paper being circulated by Cisco and BT, organizations wanting to grow profitably in the future must focus their efforts to benefit shareholders, society and the environment simultaneously. Concentrating on any one of these...

Avistar Ready To License New Patents.
January 16, 2008... Calif.-based Avistar Communications Corporation is the proud owner of seven new patent allowances it says "recognize and protect broad claims in areas of real-time communications over the wide area networks (WANs) that are fundamental to...

Sony-Ericsson Creeps Up On Motorola Handset Share.
January 17, 2008... Sony-Ericsson, closing in on the faltering Motorola, says it passed the 100-million-unit-per-year mark last year and is targeting a move into third place in the cellular handset market within 36 months. Despite the unit sales, the company...

XO Replaces Per-Line VoIP Pricing With Bandwidth Tariffs.
January 17, 2008... XO Communications, in what it's bragging is an industry first, is instituting bandwidth-based pricing offering for converged IP services. Simply put, prices no longer will be based on the number of voice lines a company has. "Unlike other...

SaaS, PaaS, DaaS: Salesforce.com Enters 'The Cloud'.
January 17, 2008... Software as a service (SaaS) maven Salesforce.com, putting a new wrinkle into so-called "cloud computing," is offering what it's calling "Platform-as-a- Service" (PaaS) to run corporate applications on the Force.com Cloud Computing...

Ifbyphone, Voxeo Team For IVR Services.
January 17, 2008... It's a simple question: If a SMB has more telephone conversations with its customers, will its business increase? The answer to that question is "yes," according to Ifbyphone, a voice infrastructure-and-applications development company...

Note To IT Vendors: Vietnam SMBs Ready To Spend.
January 17, 2008... Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in Vietnam reportedly are on track to spend more than $1.4 billion on information and communications technology (ICT) in 2008, up some 11 percent compared with spending last year. According to...

Cablecos Team For High-Speed Business Services.
January 17, 2008... Spanning the Carolinas, cable carriers Charter Business and Time Warner Cable Business Class say they will collaborate in the installation of high- speed, fiber connections to support business applications in both states. Optical Ethernet...

FairPoint Taps Occam For Verizon New England Upgrade.
January 18, 2008... In an unusual move in the year-long drama surrounding Verizon's planned $2.7 billion sale of its landline assets in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont to FairPoint Communications, FairPoint chose Occam Networks as the lead access equipment...

Nortel Unveils UC 'Training Wheels'.
January 18, 2008... Nortel released four application-based unified communications (UC) "starter kits" suitable, it says, for just about any business that wants to migrate to UC painlessly and more cheaply than if companies bought the pieces of the kits...

Startup Promises Enterprises To End 'Wireless Creep'.
January 18, 2008... Strata8, the world's newest cellular carrier (at least for the moment), today launched services in 16 states - but this isn't your same old "normal" celco or a new MVNO of some sort. Strata8 offering services to enterprises only, and only...

Alltel Debuts SalesNOW Smartphone App.
January 18, 2008... Alltel Wireless says it's the first U.S-based carrier to offer small business customers SalesNOW, a contact, activity and deal-management software application designed for the BlackBerry and the Web. According to the carrier, "SalesNOW...

Belden Expands 'Wireless Solution' WLAN Line.
January 18, 2008... LAN innovator Belden now offers a four-radio "XtraThin Access Point" (AP) for use with its Belden Wireless Solution, which it says is "an innovative interference-free WLAN system for real-time business applications with predictable RF...

FDA Asks For More RF Emissions Research.
January 18, 2008... The increasing uptake of wireless devices has spawned a request for more research into potential health effects from high exposure to RF emissions by these devices, says a new National Research Council report commissioned by the U.S. Food...

Siemens Touts Low-Power 802.11n.
January 22, 2008... Siemens has become the latest in a growing group of manufacturers claiming to have the only product that can dish up full 802.11n wireless while conforming to the 802.3af Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) standard or, in simpler terms, a solution...

Radvision Upgrades Enterprise Video-Conferencing Solution.
January 22, 2008... Israel's Radvision, a provider of video network infrastructure and developer tools for unified visual communications over IP, 3G and emerging next- gen IMS networks, now says its SCOPIA Conferencing Platform will support IBM Lotus Sametime....

EMC, Mozy Get 'SaaS'y.
January 22, 2008... Storage industry giant EMC, jumping into the increasingly hot enterprise "Software as a Service" (SaaS) market, has unveiled a SaaS platform along with a new "SaaS"ified enterprise-class version of the Mozy online backup software it bought...

Tango's Enterprise Wi-Fi/Cellular Pas De Deux.
January 22, 2008... Tango Networks is marketing a product it claims is the industry's first enterprise voice-call-continuity (VCC) offering. The claimed VCC breakthrough is an enhancement to Tango's "Abrazo," which enables calls to continue uninterrupted as...

Hosted Wireless Service Replaces Traditional PBX.
January 22, 2008... According to Seattle-based Sotto Wireless, its new "Sotto@SOHO" bundled offering "provides everything needed to get started with an integrated wireless and office-phone communications service that helps businesses with mobile workforces get...

Avaya Adds SIP Capability To IPT Product Line.
January 22, 2008... Avaya is detailing several enhancements to its IP telephony (IPT) solutions it says deliver advanced intelligent-communications capabilities using end-to-end, full-featured Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). The company recently attained...

Ciena Pays Top Dollar For World Wide Packets.
January 23, 2008... In a deal that has major market implications both in terms of technology and competition, Ciena signed a deal to buy fiber-to-the-premise (FTTx) Carrier Ethernet specialist World Wide Packets for about $300 million in cash, stock and assumed...

Motorola Loses $1B On Cellphones, Sales Plunge Continues.
January 23, 2008... Motorola, reporting its full 2007 financials, says it isn't out of the woods yet. It lost more than $1 billion in its mobile-phone business for the year and expects to post an operating loss in the current quarter (in contrast to analyst...

Here Comes 4G: LTE Wins Key Approval.
January 23, 2008... Long Term Evolution (LTE), the technology expected to be used by the vast majority of wireless carriers to dish up next-gen wireless broadband, has been approved by the The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) - a key blessing needed...

Free UC Tutorial Available From Logicalis.
January 23, 2008... Unified communications (UC) is earning IT departments new respect by making it possible to respond more efficiently and effectively to customers. To help IT professionals better understand how their organizations can take advantage of UC...

Linux FoIP Version Works With IBM, Nortel, 3Com.
January 23, 2008... Sagem-Interstar, a provider of boardless IP fax solutions for VoIP networks, says a new Linux version of its XMediusFAX T.38 fax-over-IP (FoIP) server technology will be available globally in April for integration with the IBM System i...

Mega-Memory SIM Cards Could Secure Silicon Revenues.
January 23, 2008... The price and subsequent revenue decline in the subscriber identification module (SIM) smart-card market is pushing silicon and SIM manufacturers to explore new revenue streams or to find novel ways to milk existing ones. As such, these...