VON: Alcatel-Lucent CTO calls for P2P hybrids
By: By Sarah Reedy
BOSTON--Offering a “plumber’s view” of current and future networking trends, Paul Mankiewich, Alcatel-Lucent’s chief technology officer for North America, told VON attendees of the need for telcos to engage with an emerging class of mesh-centric service providers, adopting an approach that combines the best elements of peer-to-peer and traditional networking...
VON: HD over copper a “non-issue” for AT&T
By: By Carol Wilson
BOSTON--AT&T will have no problems doing multiple streams of high-definition (HD) video over its U-verse network at scale, Jeff Weber, vice president of products and strategies at AT&T operations, asserted in a speech here at the VON show today...
VON: Pulver tells telcos: Be a ‘blade of grass’
By: By Rich Karpinski
BOSTON--The future of communications -- a combination of real-time and asynchronous connections driven by social networks -- may occur completely off the public switched telephone network, said Jeff Pulver, chairman of Pulvermedia, at the opening keynote address at this week’s VON show in Boston...
Gaming emerges as middleware differentiator
By: By Sarah Reedy
Gaming is fast becoming a differentiator in the competitive middleware market, a trend illustrated by Game Now, an on-demand gaming service offered by middleware vendor SeaChange International...
VON: IPTV providers forced to prove ‘quality of experience’
By: By Carol Wilson
BOSTON--Service providers once thought building networks with 99.999% reliability was all they needed to do, until delivering data services required them to also offer quality of service. Now IPTV is pushing them even further, requiring service providers to deliver quality of experience (QoE), Tektronix Vice President of Marketing Lyn Cantor told a Telephony IPTV Workshop audience here today...
Privacy, piracy and deep packet inspection
By: By Carol Wilson
The controversy that has blossomed over Comcast’s use of deep packet inspection (DPI) technology to rate-shape peer-to-peer traffic comes at an awkward time in DPI’s life cycle. Read more of this special report on DPI...
Covad acquired by private equity firm
By: By Ed Gubbins
Covad Communications has agreed to be acquired by Platinum Equity for about $304 million in cash, the companies announced today...
TelcoTV: Reporters’ Notebook
By: By Carol Wilson
ATLANTA--AT&T is constantly bombarded with questions about the capacity of its U-verse network, given that it will rely on fiber-to-the-node technology and copper connections into the home...
Verizon gives a glimpse of futuristic FiOS apps
By: By Carol Wilson
BASKING RIDGE, N.J.--As its FiOS network nears the end of its fourth year, when it was projected to pass 7 million households, Verizon this week gave the media a glimpse of what has been going on behind the curtains to add new functionality to the system...
TelcoTV: Comverse builds converged IPTV apps
By: By Carol Wilson
ATLANTA--Comverse is not the first name that pops to mind when you think of IPTV, but the company does, in fact, have a history in the consumer video business, having developed the user interface for LodgeNet and other hotel video services, as well as being well-established in wireless applications, including ring tones, messaging and more...
Microsoft values Facebook at $15 billion
By: By Rich Karpinski
Call it a Web 2.0 shootout: Microsoft beat out Google and Yahoo for a shot at Facebook’s advertising business, investing $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook. The deal values Facebook at $15 billion (on just $150 million annual revenues), instantly making it the fifth largest Web property in terms of market capitalization...
TelcoTV: DSL Forum restructures spec releases
By: By Carol Wilson
ATLANTA--The DSL Forum, a group that has grown beyond its DSL roots into broadband deployment, today unwrapped a new structure for its work and a Release 2.0 version of its industry benchmarks and milestones...
TelcoTV: IP Prime adds three rural telcos
By: By Carol Wilson
ATLANTA--In the latest in its series of coming-out parties, IP-Prime announced three new telco customers for its IPTV service here at the TelcoTV show today...
TelcoTV: Telcos need to innovate in packaging
By: By Carol Wilson
ATLANTA--Telephone companies getting into the video business need to capitalize on the fact that they don’t have a history in the industry and develop packaging and pricing of video services that is different from cable, the head of Starz advised today...
TelcoTV: AT&T previews IPTV’s future
By: By Carol Wilson
ATLANTA--Based on Peter Hill’s preview of what AT&T Labs has in store for IPTV, most of its new content draws heavily on the ‘IP’ part of the product...
TelcoTV: Calix, Microsoft team on IPTV
By: By Carol Wilson
ATLANTA--Calix announced this morning that it has established a licensing relationship with Microsoft that will enable its technology to interoperate with the Microsoft platform...
TelcoTV: CEOs share IPTV lessons learned
By: By Sarah Reedy
ATLANTA--Transforming a company from a traditional telco into a modern converged communications and entertainment provider is no small task, but you don’t need to tell this to the CEOs who are already taking their companies through the revolution...
TelcoTV: Cox exec enters lions’ den
By: By Carol Wilson
Cox Communications’ Steve Necessary ventured into the lion’s den Tuesday afternoon, as a cable executive at an IPTV conference...
TelcoTV: Motorola says goodbye to traditional TV scheduling
By: By Sarah Reedy
Forty-two percent of video-on-demand viewers believe that in 10 years time, traditional TV scheduling will no longer exist, said Andy Li, director of engineering for Motorola’s On Demand Solutions, today at TelcoTV. This, in short, is Motorola’s vision...
Verizon’s FiOS gets 20-20 vision
By: By Carol Wilson
Verizon Communications today launched a symmetric 20 Mb/s service over its FiOS network, setting a new industry standard for speed and addressing the growing need for upstream bandwidth to accommodate user-generated content...
TelcoTV: Watching TV remains the killer app
By: By Sarah Reedy
ATLANTA--Despite the many interpretations of the term “interactive television,” TV-watching remains the core experience that consumers want more of, according to Dave Grubb, vice president of business development for Motorola, at today’s TelcoTV Motorola workshop...
AT&T “approaching” 10,000 IPTV installs per week
By: By Ed Gubbins
AT&T nearly doubled the weekly installation rate of its U-verse IPTV service in the third quarter, the company announced along with its quarterly earnings today...
Verizon launches global satellite service
By: By Carol Wilson
Verizon Business today announced a new portable satellite service aimed at letting multinational businesses carry their communications with them...
TelcoTV: New video content, STB player emerges
By: By Carol Wilson
ATLANTA--A new company has emerged, promising to give telecom service providers relatively easy entry into video services using a combination of wireless and wireline access and specially designed consumer equipment...
MFA Forum becomes IP/MPLS Forum
By: By Carol Wilson
The MFA Forum, a group formed from the merger of three other groups – the ATM Forum, the Frame Relay Forum and the MPLS Forum – is changing its name once more and sharpening its focus...
