Stories by Network World staff

Carrier Briefs

Cidera Inc., formerly known as SkyCache, this week rolled out its Cidera Big File Mover content distribution service. Like Cidera's Streaming Media Service, Big File Mover is supported on Cidera's satellite system. The new service is designed for customers who need to move multimegabit files to many locations on the Internet. Cidera also announced that Road Runner, a cable modem Internet access service provider, has signed up for Cidera's Streaming Media Service. Road Runner is using the service to more effectively deliver broadcast content to its more than 550,000 customers.

Enterprise Apps Briefs

Startup eTime Capital, in Sunnyvale, California, has begun offering an Internet-based service for real-time accounting and reconciliation of commercial transactions as an alternative to paper-based exchanges between trading partners. The service, which costs about $5 per transaction, requires eTime Capital to perform some systems integration work with the trading partners' enterprise resource planning systems so accounting data can be pulled out of back-end systems for Internet-based processing.

Briefs

The scramble for IT talent continues to get ever more intense . . . and creative. Nortel Networks Corp. recently hired 34 soon-to-be graduates of Santa Clara University's computer engineering school - one-third of this year's class - en masse to tackle an upcoming project as a ready-made team.

Briefs

Wingra Technologies Inc. in June will ship a major upgrade to its NetJunction message switch, which is used by large companies such as TimeWarner and British Aerospace to integrate different e-mail and groupware systems.

Briefs

Touch America, the carrier buying Qwest Communications International Ltd.'s long-distance business in the US West region, announced that its parent company is spinning off its energy businesses to concentrate on telecommunications. The parent, Montana Power, will get rid of electricity, natural gas, coal and oil interests to reshape itself as a next-generation carrier rather than a traditional, dividend-paying utility. Qwest said they chose Touch America to take over the US West region long-distance voice and data business because telecom won't be a sideline for the new player. Qwest soon won't be able to carry long-distance traffic in the 14-state US West region because it is buying US West, which doesn't yet have the required state-by-state long-distance approvals.

Briefs

Lucent Technologies' Enterprise Networks Group - to be spun off as a separate firm later this year - last week announced a trade-in program for users of 3Com Corp.'s LAN switches. 3Com said last month it would discontinue its CoreBuilder family as of June 30. Effective now through Sept. 30, 3Com users can trade in the switches for a variety of other products. For example, a free seven-slot Cajun P550 Gigabit Switch chassis can be had with each trade-in of select CoreBuilder 5000/9000 chassis and up to $770 for the trade-in of CoreBuilder 7000 ATM modules toward the purchase of Cajun M770 ATM modules.

Briefs

Touch America, the carrier buying Qwest Communications International Ltd.'s long-distance business in the US West region, announced that its parent company is spinning off its energy businesses to concentrate on telecommunications. The parent, Montana Power, will get rid of electricity, natural gas, coal and oil interests to reshape itself as a next-generation carrier rather than a traditional, dividend-paying utility. Qwest said they chose Touch America to take over the US West region long-distance voice and data business because telecom won't be a sideline for the new player. Qwest soon won't be able to carry long-distance traffic in the 14-state US West region because it is buying US West, which doesn't yet have the required state-by-state long-distance approvals.

Briefs

Wingra Technologies Inc. in June will ship a major upgrade to its NetJunction message switch, which is used by large companies such as TimeWarner and British Aerospace to integrate different e-mail and groupware systems.

Briefs

Fixed-wireless local-loop provider WinStar Communications Inc. has reached a key milestone by securing contracts with the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) for certain federal buildings in Baltimore, Cincinnati and Los Angeles. GSA contracts are considered indispensable for government business because the GSA acts as a government landlord and it provides preapproved lists of vendors to government technology buyers. Ironically, WinStar executives recently have gone before Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to demand rules forcing private and public landlords to provide access to newer carriers, while real estate groups have countered that plenty of such deals are being signed without regulatory intervention.

Briefs

VocalTec Communcations Ltd. in Fort Lee, New Jersey, is launching a hosted voice-over-IP telephone service for e-commerce firms. By installing VocalTec's HTML code on its Web server, a company can establish IP-based phone calls with any online buyers who have a multimedia PC sound system.

Briefs

MCI WorldCom Inc. today is expected to unveil a new managed e-mail service for enterprises in conjunction with Critical Path, a key provider of messaging platforms to service providers. Options will include fully hosted Microsoft Exchange e-mail and collaboration applications, and integration of internally managed mail servers. The managed service will allow network administrators to retain control of moves, adds and changes while turning over all or part of e-mail management - including virus scanning, content filtering and other functions - to the carrier.

Briefs

With an eye toward supporting an embedded Linux operating system in its Internet Exchange (IX) architecture products, Intel Corp. last week made a minority equity investment in Lynx Real-Time Systems. Lynx develops embedded, real-time operating systems for telecommunications applications. Lynx already offers a suite of embedded Linux products, such as BlueCat Linux, which supports Intel's x86 architecture. Intel has been bolstering its investments in network technologies, having recently bought Basis Communications for $450 million with plans to incorporate Basis' network-processor technology into Intel's IX architecture.

How We Did It

We used a 10M-bps switched Ethernet network for the tests. We used four 200-MHz PCs with 128M bytes of RAM to act as the remote server, with the Apex and Cybex products. Netscape Communicator 4.71 acted as the browser interface with the Compaq Computer Copr. and Hewlett-Packard Co. products.

How We Did It

We installed the server cards on an NEC Corp. Direction SPB 450-MHz Pentium II server with 128M bytes of RAM, running Windows NT Server 4.0 with Service Pack 4 applied. Our FTP server was a Dell Computer Corp. Dimension XPS Pro 200n with a 200-MHz Pentium Pro processor and 64M bytes of RAM running Windows NT Server 4.0 with Service Pack 4 and Internet Information Server 4.0. The FTP server and the remote access server (RAS) had a 100M-bps Ethernet connection to a 3Com SuperStack II Dual Speed Hub 500.

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