Bandwidth: How much is enough? 

By: By Jonathan Hurd, Altman Vilandrie & Company

Verizon’s June announcement that it will expand availability of its 50 megabit per second (Mbps) FiOS broadband service has prompted some to ask, “How much bandwidth could a household need?” To estimate the demand, various analysts have attempted to calculate a household’s future maximum peak bandwidth requirements...

Will PBT go away? 

By: By Ed Gubbins

PBT was supposed to be simple. And it is, according to Fujitsu Network Communications, which today announced that it is now going to push the connection-oriented technology as the “ideal” choice for metro Ethernet transport...

Why carrier-class Ethernet is an intelligent choice 

By: By David Strauss, Optimum Lightpath

Services that enable increased bandwidth and the ability to scale alongside business needs will become even more critical to enterprises seeking to increase productivity without increasing costs. One such service allowing this is carrier-class Ethernet...

Are you smarter than Ethernet? 

By: By Ed Gubbins

At NXTcomm08, you’re likely to hear a lot of talk about making Ethernet more sophisticated, more discerning, and most of all, “more intelligent.” Of course, stressing the need for a more intelligent brand of Ethernet isn’t very flattering to the plain-vanilla kind. But let’s face it, Ethernet has always been in some ways like the Forrest Gump of the networking world...

Capex with a capital C 

By: By John M. Celentano, Skyline Marketing Group

Capital expenditures (capex) remain the most closely watched metric for determining the direction and level of investment that telecom carriers are making in network equipment and services. The problem is that capex is never linear in its behavior. Predicting what the carriers are likely to spend on their networks is a black art, at best...

Infrastructure matters 

By: By Ed Gubbins

The numbers don't lie 

By: By Carol Wilson

Earnings reports are a study in spin -- read a press release announcing even the most dire earnings, and you'll be hard-pressed to find the gloom and doom among the highlighted statistics...

MDU Odd Couples 

By: By Ed Gubbins

Remember the opening to the Odd Couple TV show, which asked whether two divorced men could share an apartment without driving each other crazy? Here at the Broadband Properties Summit in Dallas today, I heard a building owner basically paraphrase that line, talking about telecom providers competing for customers in the same multidwelling unit...

Green packets and broadband 

By: By Kermit Ross

Five global forces drive growth and transformation. They are at work everywhere, albeit at varying levels of intensity, and they will change the telecommunications world...

Public/private potholes 

By: By Ed Gubbins

This has been a tough week for public/private partnerships in the telecom sector. Last night the city of Corpus Christi, Texas, voted to take its Wi-Fi network back from EarthLink, which bought the 147-square-mile network a year ago for roughly the same amount it cost the city to build ($7 million)...

The big bandwidth lie 

By: By Vince Vittore, Yankee Group

Perhaps it all started with Brian Roberts. Standing on the stage on a balmy Las Vegas morning, Roberts wowed the bleary eyed crowd by downloading a 4 gigabit collection of encyclopedias and dictionaries in just a shade under four minutes...

Power crisis looming? 

By: By John M. Celentano, Skyline Marketing Group

Telecom power is a little like Rodney Dangerfield … it gets no respect! Well, not really. But, DC power is one of the last elements to be designed into a telecom network, after the packet-this and optical-that systems are selected...

Telco transformation: A do-or-die proposition 

By: By Kermit Ross, Millennium Marketing

For the telcos, the 20th century was all about growth. A telco’s size was measured by its access lines. Its mission was to add more lines every year. But the 21 century offers a different challenge...

Microsoft, Yahoo! and the myth of the dumb pipe 

By: By Rich Karpinski

So where’s the service provider bid for Yahoo! now that it’s on the market? Obviously, it’s nowhere to be seen. And that’s a good, sensible thing...

The riddle of the convergence gateway 

By: By Joe McGarvey, Current Analysis

To answer subscribers’ cravings for communications and entertainment services that will flow across any type of access network and display on any type of device, carriers need to reconstruct the edges of their networks to perform the session management acrobatics required to fulfill these end user expectations...

Cable concerns 

By: By Carol Wilson

The Internet didn't invent conspiracy theories, but it has given them a more powerful voice and the ability to go global in hours if not minutes. When the first speculation surrounding cuts in two undersea fiber optic cables connecting India to Europe ran to thoughts of sabotage, paranoia seemed to be in full flower...

DSL decline 

By: By Ed Gubbins

There’s been a lot of talk lately about efforts to pump more power and speed into DSL. Whether its bonding VDSL2 pairs, bonding ADSL with cable, reallocating upstream and downstream bandwidth, reducing noise on the line or just giving the signal a little boost, everyone’s interested in squeezing more speed out of DSL...

Ask Steve: Our new monthly Q&A column 

By: By Steve Hilton, The Yankee Group

Welcome to our monthly column, Ask Steve. We’re going to tackle small and medium business-focused questions every month. We’ve received some great questions so far and will try to get to all of them. This month we’re going to look at smart phone applications and broadband connectivity. Keep those great questions coming!...

Q&A: Gillis Cashman, MC Venture Partners 

By: By Ed Gubbins

After eight years at MC Venture Partners, Gillis Cashman made partner this month at the venture capital firm, which focuses on technology and communications startups. Cashman, who sits on the boards of Cavalier Telephone, Zayo Bandwidth and cable player Baja Broadband, spoke with Telephony’s Ed Gubbins about the future of CLECs and current economic trends shaping the telecom service provider space and investment in it...

Hopeful signs on the cost vs. consumption curve 

By: By Ed Gubbins

Telecom carriers have struggled for years with contradictions between their cost structure and their revenue streams. Life would be easier for carriers if their customers would pay more according to what they consume, though how could they ever be convinced to do that?...

Embarq’s third act begins 

By: By Ed Gubbins

I had the pleasure of spending some face time with Dan Hesse this summer for an in-depth and exceedingly well-written profile I wrote about him and Embarq. Hesse has a warm, easy smile, but he is frighteningly tall...

Interesting times 

By: By Rich Karpinski

As the year ends down, the year-in-review stories wind up. Let it never be said that Telephony missed a chance to add our two-cents. Thus: the 2007 Best and Worst issue, on newsstands now, as they say. Or you can hop over to our Web site and see our Top-X lists right now...

The new digital divide 

By: By Teresa Mastrangelo

Though I applaud Verizon for making fiber to the home a cornerstone of its future -- the FiOS network has reduced operating costs significantly while giving consumers faster speeds, higher quality, and unique services and features -- in reality, it poses a problem that highlights the potential for a new type of digital divide: fiber vs. copper...

Unbundled DSL 

By: By Ed Gubbins

Embarq says it is offering standalone DSL service, but only to customers who threaten to cancel their bundled services. Now that the company has admitted that, though, the notion they’re using it “only” as a retention tool seems a bit slippery...

Beyond our control 

By: By Ed Gubbins

Since we reported that Houston’s Optical Entertainment Network had abruptly and mysteriously discontinued service earlier this month, many of you have contacted me wanting more information on what had happened to the company. Get in line...