Call it the "quid" without the "pro quo." In a grand bargain over the past few years, the government has allowed the eight dominant local carriers - the seven original Bells plus GTE Corp. - to shrink to four in exchange for written promises to begin competing with one another.
Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) has quietly proven to be a hit in big carrier networks. AT&T Corp. and WorldCom Inc. have used the traffic engineering technique to essentially turn their frame relay networks into IP VPN look-alikes, as we've reported in stories about AT&T's IP-Enabled Frame Relay and WorldCom's Business Class IP, recently renamed Private IP Services.
Vendors of integrated-access devices for the customer premise face an inherent challenge. IADs are not the kind of thing that end users just wake up one day and decide to buy. The very idea of "integrating" access implies that the customer is looking for a single carrier to handle voice, data and Internet connections, either at the access level or (less frequently) in a totally converged, end-to-end network service.
The folks at DSL equipment start-up Catena Networks Inc. all carry the company slogan, "Everyone Wants Broadband," superimposed against the company logo on the back of their business cards.
Many local exchange carriers, from giant Bells to small-town independent telcos, are coming under pressure to do something about their remote neighborhood terminals that extend ordinary voice lines but block DSL signals.
Snapshot from a few years ago: Lucent Technologies Inc. CEO Rich McGinn had just wrapped up a keynote address when a show attendee stepped up to ask a question. McGinn's speech had focused on changes in carrier networks, so the attendee - a network manager at a financial institution - asked McGinn what data products Lucent could offer him.
Infonet Services has added an off-net component to its global packet telephony service to let multinational corporations pay low per-minute tolls when calling outside the company.
There's a fascinating paradox about competitive local exchange carriers that leads to confusion about their role in today's telecom arena.
Openly repudiating the policies of US West Inc., the company it bought, Qwest Communications International Inc. this week dropped 17 lawsuits against telecom regulators and said it would welcome local competitors with open arms.
Two of the hottest new places for carriers to place broadband gear are on cable TV pipes and the common facilities of multitenant office buildings. And with carriers clamoring for guaranteed access to points where public networks meet customer premises, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has found itself in the middle of a lobbying frenzy on both fronts.
DSL vendor AccessLan Communications Inc. says carriers no longer have to say "Sorry, service not available" when people respond to DSL ads and find they're sitting behind digital loop carrier systems.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission Thursday postponed for up to two weeks a key decision whether to regulate multiple service providers' access to multitenant buildings.
Do you ever read in the pages of Network World or another publication about some controversy in the telecom or Internet industries and say to yourself: "Why is it always one group of vendors arguing with another group? Why isn't the user voice represented?"
On the cusp of a major government decision about service-provider access to multitenant office buildings, the nation's leading real estate-owned carrier is fighting back against allegations that it prevents rivals from entering its buildings.
Sonus Networks Inc. this week introduced a Web-based system for unified management of all the distributed elements in its packet telephony suite for service providers.