A few years ago, the race between the new telecommunications entrants was to see who could offer the most bandwidth by building out the fattest pipes. Now that upstarts like Qwest, Global Crossing and others have built out their massive networks and have nearly unlimited bandwidth at their disposal, the race is on to fill the pipes.
Nortel Networks Corp. bought closely held optical networking company Xros Inc. (pronounced Kai-ros) today for $3.25 billion. The acquisition will help Nortel, the leading supplier of optical networking gear, increase the capacity its switches and other routing gear can handle.
The evolution of Intel Corp. has in many ways paralleled the development of the technology business over the last three decades. In the '70s, it was essentially a memory company - its first product was a 64-bit static RAM chip. In the '80s, after its microprocessors were chosen as the brains for the first IBM personal computers, Intel went on to dominate the market for PC processors. In the '90s Intel moved beyond chips, producing more and more of a PC's guts: motherboards, adapters and other pieces.
What do you get when you cross a new-world telecom giant with an aging Baby Bell? That's what Qwest Communications is about to find out.
Transmeta Corp., most famous for being the employer of Linux creator Linus Torvalds, finally pulled the covers off of its business today. It turns out that the formerly secretive company is positioning itself to compete with Intel, using designs that can power a new breed of Internet devices.
1stup.com, a quiet leader of the free-ISP movement, has struck again.
The company whose branding campaign, "Intel Inside," once pointed up the fact that their products were the brains of PCs and appliances has had a change of heart.
The FCC is talking increasingly tough when it comes to pending mergers. Rather than scaring off companies, this approach is inspiring them to look for increasingly clever and circuitous methods to appease regulators. The most recent are Bell Atlantic and GTE, who are proposing spinning off their Internet divisions as an independent company.
Routers might not seem sexy. But because they tell data packets where to go, they are the synapses of the Internet. And the router business, long dominated by Cisco Systems, is about to get hot.
Surprisingly, the company making waves is Nortel Networks. The Canadian manufacturer of networking equipment is known more for reliability than innovation.
Telecom 99, the world's largest telecommunications trade show, kicked off Monday, and participants confronted a far different landscape than the one they saw four years ago, when the event was last held.
Cable and Wireless didn't exactly set the world on fire after buying MCI's Internet backbone last year. But Cable and Wireless now has an explanation: It says MCI ripped it off. But the company may not be able to entirely pass the buck for its misfortunes.
The current buzzword of the Internet Economy is "convergence", that magical intersection where the Web will meet television, and everyone will make boatloads of money.
It was tough enough being a commuter in San Francisco yesterday, with a morning rush-hour power outage shutting down public transportation and traffic lights, but it had to be worse for Webmasters without backup power.
Sun Microsystems engineers have been working quietly on a new Java technology called Jini since 1995.
Part of the original vision for Java, it was put on the back burner while Sun waited for Java to gain widespread acceptance.