An ill-timed tweak?
By: By Tim McElligott
The bigger AT&T gets, the older Qwest gets and the more Sprint is associated with them, the more unpopular it gets to defend their policies. Defending them pits someone like me against the radicals of the Internet and brands me as a backwards Bell head, a supporter of a dying industry that is best forgotten--and the sooner the better. After all, who needs that old infrastructure when we have the Internet?...
FCC program gets it right for rural
By: Thomas D. Rowley
Kudos to the FCC for its new Pilot Program for Enhanced Access to Advanced Telecommunications and Information Services: A Rural Health Care Support Program aimed at creating a nationwide broadband network dedicated to health care. Why? ...
Finding common cause
By: By Tim McElligott
The nation is divided. Red and blue. Blue and red. Sometimes I think it's significant that the only place you really see those two colors together is on the nation's flag--or on a clown...
About time
By: By Carol Wilson
Last week's Louisiana State Supreme Court decision that ended the legal challenge to the planned Lafayette fiber-to-the-home network put a punctuation mark on a struggle that became emblematic of the challenges municipal networks face...
2007, we hardly knew ya
By: By Tim McElligott
Winter is finally grabbing hold in Chicago this week. I'm not complaining, not with so much of the country buried in snow, whipped by high winds; or bailing floodwater. But I do have a suggestion for independent telephone operators...
Modern English
By: By Tim McElligott
As you can see from the two stories below on Windstream and Embarq, companies, like people, speak different dialects. Both are talking about bundled services...
Mr. Bellweather
I think fiber-to-the-home is the best way to reach the people of Small Town. What do you think, team?...
Rural Staying Power
By: By Tim McElligott
For those predisposed to its allure, small-town USA is not going to lose its appeal anytime soon despite the worst humanity has to offer having been on display there recently in the form of school shootings....
A bigger wallet share
By: By Carol Wilson
At the core of most debates over where and how much service providers should be investing in their networks is the question of whether consumers are willing to spend more of their discretionary income on new entertainment, information and convergence services. ...
Mr. Bellweather
Hi, I'm Mr. Bellweather. I run the phone company here in Smalltown. It makes me a pretty big man...
A New Dimension
By: By Tim McElligott
There is no such thing as a final frontier. Even if mankind lives to explore all we think there is to explore, we'll never be sure there isn't something smaller...
Star power in Beantown
By: By Tim McElligott
VON, the Voice on the Net event, is produced by Jeff Pulver, chairman and founder of pulver.com and iconic figure for the new-age, disruptive success of voice over IP. ...
Questioning the bundle
By: By Ken Pyle, Vice President, Viodi
After pondering the question, "Is the bundle enough?" for almost a year, I posed it to some of the world's leading marketers of telecommunications and entertainment services...
Bokonon on broadband
By: By Tim McElligott
If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no logical reason, writes Bokonon, that person may be a member of your karass...
Pollyanna
By: By Tim McElligott
In case you didn't know, Haley Mills doesn't have a twin sister. That was studio magic that made her twin appear to appear on screen at the same time in the 1961 Disney movie, The Parent Trap...
Buy me, supply me
By: By Dan O'Shea
The process of procuring network equipment was once a methodical and fairly standard one...
Homework never ends
By: By Bernardin Arnason, Principal, Pivot Group
It's funny how things come full circle. Watching my daughter complete her homework recently reminded me how homework never truly ends...
Homeboy advantage
By: By Tim McElligott
A theme traverses these issues of The Independent. It's not a conscious effort on our part to project this theme; it's just there. It's a natural phenomenon reserved primarily for the independent market...
Sellution
By: By Tim McElligott
Telution was one of those independent software companies born of the boon years between 1996 and 2000 (1998 to be exact) that one really wanted to see make it...
Currying favor
By: By Dan O'Shea
One of the residual concerns in the wake of AT&T's announcement that it will acquire BellSouth has been the future of Qwest. Often forgotten by people who viewed big telco competition only as AT&T vs. BellSouth vs. Verizon, Qwest seems to have disappeared even further into the background...
Keeping the focus on community
By: By Ken Pyle, vice president, Viodi
Independent--a word bandied about all of the time when describing the mostly rural telcos discussed in The Independent...
Thinking local
By: By Vince Vittore
One day prior to this issue of The Independent shipping to the printer, AT&T announced its colossal acquisition of BellSouth, an event that could have significant impact on the independent telco market...
Mixed messaging
By: By Vince Vittore
The first week of February, by most measurable factors, was pretty good for independent rural telcos...
Cities get smarter
By: By Carol Wilson
Wireless is rapidly becoming the access technology of choice for municipal networks...
It's all semantics
By: By Dan O'Shea
At the NTCA Expo this week, FCC Commissioner David Copps gave a crowd of rural and independent carriers reason to hope that regulators understand the current shortcomings of the universal service fund (USF) and are working to resolve them. But, he didn't really add anything to what people like him, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and members of Congress preparing for a telecom act rewrite have been saying for the last several months...
