Microsoft Sees Professional Broadcasters Move to Windows Media 9 over IP

At this week's National Association of Broadcasters convention (NAB2003) in Las Vegas, Microsoft said more professional broadcast editing suites are moving to desktop PCs and its Windows Media 9 series encoding. For example, The Associated Press is unveiling a software application that allows journalists in the field to transmit news video via satellite phone or the Internet using Windows Media 9. For its part, Microsoft announced a series of partnership agreements with broadcast equipment vendors, including:

• BBC Technology, which will integrate Windows Media 9 into its Colledia Workflow platform for news producers, editors and journalists to access, use and deliver high-quality media and metadata.
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  Front Porch Digital and Harris Automation, which will use Windows Media 9 to replace their tape-based archival systems.
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  Inscriber, which offers a master control server designed as a hub for video graphics and playout for local, regional and cable broadcast and video distribution.
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  Panasonic, which is introducing new Digital Content Management (DCM) systems supporting Windows Media 9 Series for media archiving, management, analysis and delivery.
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  Telestream, which is demonstrating a broadcast workflow automation product for the capture, organization, search and review of multiple live video feeds using Windows Media 9 Series and built on the Microsoft .NET Framework.
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  TANDBERG Television, which is showing a new hardware-based real time encoder for video preprocessing.
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  Thomson's Grass Valley, which is offering an Internet encoder that provides real-time capture and digitization of video from camera, file, tape or physical media to Windows Media 9 Series.

http://www.microsoft.com

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European Commission Orders France to Comply with Universal Service Requirements

The European Commission served formal notice on French authorities to comply with a court order requiring remedial action in the system for financing universal service in telecommunications. A European Commission directive in 1996 established mechanisms for sharing the net cost of universal service when providing this service represents an unfair burden on the operator in question. Member States must comply with various provisions designed to ensure that the cost of universal service is assessed in a transparent, proportionate way. The EU said the purpose of these provisions is to guarantee that the financing mechanism does not result in excessive charges being made on the competitors of the service provider responsible for universal service to the latter's benefit. The dispute with France involves accounting questions of the respective contributions by the different service providers to financing universal service from 1997 to 2001. The EC is also questioning arrangements for the settlement of overpayments by alternative service providers to France Telecom or to the universal service fund.http://europa.eu.int/

• On 03-January-2003, the European Commission launched a formal investigation of the EUR9 billion in financial aid presented to France Telecom by the government of France. The European Commission said it wonders whether the French authorities are providing France Telecom with funding that it could have obtained under normal market conditions. The formal investigation procedure will whether the State has acted like a private investor.
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  On 05-December-2002, France Telecom announced a financial restructuring that includes EUR 15 billion in new equity. The French government, which holds a 55% interest in the company, is providing EUR9 billion of this amount. Under the “15+15+15�? plan, France Telecom would also make operational improvements to increase free cash flow by EUR15 billion to reduce debt, and the company would reschedule EUR15 billion of debt.
  

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Broadmargin Secures $21 Million for Telecom Cost Management Software/Services

Broadmargin, a start-up based in Fairfax, Virginia, raised $21 million in private equity investment for its software and services for telecom cost management. Broadmargin's proprietary BillTamer Cost Management software application helps large corporations and competitive telecom carriers to manage interconnect costs. The investment was led by ABS Capital Partners with participation from Concert Capital Partners.
http://www.broadmargin.com

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Broadcom Reprices Employee Stock Options

Broadcom announced a voluntary stock option exchange for its employees as means to retain and provide an incentive to key employees. Under the program, eligible employees holding options to purchase Broadcom common stock with exercise prices per share of $23.58 or more will be given the opportunity to exchange those options for a number of new shares or new options based on certain formulas. In general, the higher the exercise price of the old options, the fewer new shares that will be issued and the fewer new options that will be granted. In connection with the offer, Broadcom expects to incur an estimated non-cash charge of up to approximately $238 million in the quarter ending 30-June-2003. The actual amount of the charge will depend upon the actual number of eligible options tendered and accepted for exchange for new shares and new options. Additional terms are posted online.
http://www.broadcom.com

• Broadcom (Nasdaq: BRCM) shares closed at $13.49 on 07-April-2003, up 2.7% for the day.

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Extreme Networks Reports Quarterly Revenue of $85.2 million

Extreme Networks reported quarterly revenue of $85.2 million, compared to $90.2 million for the preceding quarter. Including deferred compensation totaling $1.6 million, the company reported a net loss of $7.6 million or $.07 per share. Extreme Networks said it is beginning a major new product cycle for its switching portfolio.
http://www.extremenetworks.com

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Wi-Fi Alliance Expands List of Certified Products to 677

The Wi-Fi Alliance has now certified 677 products from 113 companies for Wi-Fi compatibility. Certification testing began in March 2000.
http://www.wi-fi.org

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Navini Raises $25 Million for its 2.4, 2.6 and 3.5 GHz Wireless Broadband

Navini Networks, a start-up based in Richardson, Texas, raised an additional $25 million in Series C funding for its non-line-of-sight, wireless broadband technology. Over the past several months, Navini has announced deployments and trials of its Ripwave products with the following companies: BellSouth (Daytona, Florida); IBAX (Italy); IntroWeb (The Netherlands); Liberty Technologies (Panama); Rioplex Wireless (Rio Grande Valley, Texas); Sprint (Houston, Texas); WINTEL (Trinidad and Tobago); and YourInter.Net (Indiana, Pennsylvania). Austin Ventures, Granite Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Sternhill Partners, all existing investors in the company, led the new round of financing. The company has raised $91 million to date.
http://www.navini.com

• Navini's broadband wireless access platform uses Multi-Carrier Synchronous Beamforming technology to provide non-line-of-sight access at broadband data rates for up to 1000 users per antenna face. The company claims up to 50% lower total-cost-of-ownership than DSL or cable networks, and up to 70% lower total-cost-of-ownership than previous fixed wireless systems.
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  Navini Networks was founded in early 2000 by Wu-Fu Chen and Dr. Guanghan Xu, a former professor at the University of Texas at Austin, School of Electrical Engineering.

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Vitesse Chip Selected for Lucent's Metropolis Access Mux

Vitesse Semiconductor is supplying its Timestream chips for use in Lucent's Metropolis DMX SONET Access Multiplexer. Vitesse's Timestream chips include an OC-192/STM-64, 4X OC-48/STM-16 pointer processor plus section and line terminator, featuring hardware based APS switching, B1, B2 and B3 error accumulation and BER calculation, and POH monitoring. Vitesse also offers a 5 Gbps VT1.5 TSI switch and a 2.5 Gbps column aligner and pointer processor.
http://www.vitesse.com

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Alcatel Offers Enterprise VLAN Management Tool

Alcatel released two enhancements for its enterprise OmniVista network management data solution. A new OmniVista Locator tool enables a network operator to find the current location of any network-attached device, eliminating the need to query each individual switch in the network. OmniVista Locator can access cached information to give historical results to a query, or do a real-time search to give up-to-the-minute results. Alcatel is also extending its PolicyView management application to its OmniCore switch family, enabling point-and click implementation of complex priority schemes to ensure prioritized delivery of voice and data.
http://www.alcatel.com

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Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom Cuts ADSL Prices

Chunghwa Telecom announced an ADSL promotion aimed at helping the government of Taiwan achieve its target of 6 million broadband users by the end of the year.

Chunghwa Telecom ADSL Plans & Rates (all prices in US Dollars)
Download rate (bps)	512K	512K	1.5M	1.5M	3.0M
Upload rate (bps)	64K	512K	64K	384K	512K
Monthly circuit leasing fee	$17.15	$25.90	$20.02	$25.90	$40.34
HiNet ISP charge	$14.38	--	$20.11	$25.59	$28.78
Hook-up fee (per computer)	$43.22 under all plans

Chunghwa is offering substantial discounts (nearly 50%) during the first five months of service. There are also loyalty discounts for subscribers who stay with the service over a year.
http://www.cht.com.tw

• As of January 2003, Chungwa's HiNet ISP service was serving more than 1,600,000 ADSL subscribers.

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One million UK Consumers Now Using Alternative Carriers

Over one million UK consumers are now using carrier pre-selection, a service that enables them to use an alternative phone company to BT without changing their phone line and without dialing extra numbers. Carrier pre-selection enables different phone companies to carry different calls.
http://www.oftel.gov.uk

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Japan's Yahoo! BB Adds 181,000 DSL Subscribers in March

Yahoo! BB, the Japanese broadband service provided by Softbank and Yahoo! Japan, issued its latest month progress report.

Yahoo! BB Subscribers
	Mar-03	Feb-03	Jan-03	Dec-02	Nov-02	Oct-02	Sep-02
Yahoo! BB lines installed	2,363k	2,181k	1,972k	1,691k	1,461k	1,208k	1,011k
Yahoo! BB phone users	1,974k	1,806k	1,585k	1,294k	1,028k	773k	520k
Central offices	2,144	2,135	2,098	2,045	1,822	1,549	1,300

http://bbpromo.yahoo.co.jp

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Conversent, a CLEC, Reaches Profitability

Conversent Communications, a privately-held CLEC based in Marlboro, Massachusetts, announced that it has achieved "free cash flow" status. The company said it attained positive free cash flow in January 2003, three months earlier than it had anticipated. It had previously achieved positive EBITDA status in March 2002. Conversent currently provides voice and data services to more than 33,000 business customers and employs 570 sales, technical and support staff in 22 offices. The company plans to add 20 new sales associates to expand into new geographic markets.
http://www.conversent.com

• In October 2002, Conversent awarded a $35 million contract to Lucent Technologies to expand its multi-service network throughout the Northeast states. At the heart of Conversent's network is the Lucent 5ESS Switch. Conversent also uses Lucent's AnyMedia Access System and Stinger DSLAMs.
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  In March 2001, Conversent Communications secured $186 million in a second round of funding for rollout of its network. The funding included $105 million in senior secured debt committed by Fleet, CIT, GE Capital Corporation, IBM Credit Corporation, and Bank of New York. The remainder of the investment is $81 million in private equity led by cable entrepreneur Robert Fanch, former Chairman of Fanch Communications. Since 1998, Conversent has raised $229 million in financing.
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  Conversent Communications was co-founded in 1998 by Robert Fanch and Conversent's president and CEO, Robert Shanahan.
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  Fanch Communications, which had 537,000 cable customers primarily in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Michigan, was acquired by Charter Communications in November 1999 for $2.4 billion.

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Agere Delivers Low-K Dielectric, 0.13 Micron DSP, Outsources Fabrication to TSMC

Agere Systems delivered a production-qualified communications chip based on, low-k dielectric 130 nanometer (nm) (0.13 micron) technology that significantly accelerates chip speed and reduces power consumption for wireless base stations. The copper interconnect in the integrated circuit is separated by a thin layer of insulation dielectric film material. The new DSP16411 chip operates 20% faster (285 MHz) and with 20% less power (1.2volts) than competing solutions. It also has 66% more memory than Agere's previous generation device. Agere's newest DSP chip for wireless base stations also marks a significant shift for the company towards a fabless model of operation - the new chip is being produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Agere said it plans to use the TSMC 130 nm process technology with low-k dielectrics to produce several other types of chips, including ASICs, network processors, switching chips, and framers.
http://www.agere.com

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Riverstone Introduces 10 GbE Layer 3 Switches Priced at $9,995 Per Port

Riverstone Networks introduced a new line of 10 Gigabit Ethernet Layer 3 switches with wire-speed 10 Gigabit performance at less than $10,000 per port, including optics. Citing tests from The Tolly Group, Riverstone said the XGS switches provide wire-speed 10 Gigabit throughput across all packet sizes (64 to 1,518 bytes), with low jitter and latency. The XGS switches include a sixteen-slot chassis ($32,575) and an eight-slot chassis ($19,980). A 10 Gigabit Ethernet one-port line card (LAN PHY) is priced at $9,995; a 10-port Standard Copper 100/1000 is $8,495, and a 10-port Standard GbE LC is $8,995. Riverstone said the performance and pricing of the new platform would drive 10 Gig deployments in large campus networks.
http://www.riverstonenet.com

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Extreme Networks Launches its Next Gen BlackDiamond Switch

Extreme Networks launched its third-generation "Triumph" switching chipset to increase the port density of its BlackDiamond chassis-based switch by up to 275% while maintaining the performance and line-rate throughput with Layer 3 services. The new chipset is being delivered in two new BlackDiamond modules that can be used to scale a single BlackDiamond 6816 chassis switch to up to 360 Gigabit Ethernet connections. The module options are for either 24-port auto-sensing 10/100/1000 copper ports ($12,995 list) or 16 port fiber 10/100/1000 ports ($13,995). In addition to increased density, the new silicon provides ingress and egress rate shaping for traffic management, along with port-based management and flow control for traffic protection. With the new switching modules, the BlackDiamond switch can support eight ingress, eight egress queues and one egress super-queue per port so that each port can be individually configured to rate shape traffic. Extreme said the new modules maintain line-rate forwarding performance, even while supporting QoS, full Layer 3 routing services, and security services such as ACLs, Intrusion Detection and Network Login. Extreme's chipset also provides advanced Denial of Service (DoS) attack protection through hardware classification, processing and acceleration of common IP control traffic functions.
http://www.extremenetworks.com

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P-Com Cancels Acquisition of Procera

P-Com has terminated its letter of intent to acquire Procera Networks, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California that offers Layer 7 switching technology. P-Com said it must remain focused on the fixed wireless market.
http://www.p-com.com

• On 27-January-2003, P-Com, a provider of point-to-point, spread spectrum, and point-to-multipoint broadband wireless products, announced plans to acquire privately held Procera Networks, which designs and builds Layer 7 switches that provide wire-speed routing, switching, flow metering and packet shaping. Financial terms were not disclosed. Procera's Layer 7 switch provides granular management of bandwidth and applications. At the time, P-Com said microwave radio suppliers have traditionally handed off bandwidth management to specialized third party networking devices. With the Procera technology, P-Com's wireless solutions would be able to groom network traffic by prioritizing applications.



• Also in January 2003, P-Com and Telaxis mutually terminated their planned merger. The deal would have combined P-Com's point-to-point, spread spectrum, and point-to-multipoint broadband wireless products with Telaxis' FiberLeap products, which also provide wireless extensions for fiber networks.

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Path 1 Reveals Video X-Y Routing Over IP

Path 1 Network Technologies announced a professional-grade video platform with X-Y routing capabilities designed for broadcasters and television service providers migrating their video transmissions to IP. The new multi-port Chameleon vidX product line offers mixing and routing of up to hundreds of streams of Standard Definition and High Definition video for use by broadcasters, Cable MSOs (for Video on Demand), and for DSL packet-based IP networks.
http://www.path1.com

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Octasic Offers Echo Cancellation and Voice Quality Enhancement Chips

Octasic, a fabless semiconductor vendor based in Montreal, Canada, announced commercial availability of its echo cancellation and voice quality enhancement (VQE) products. Octasic's OCT6100 Series is a family of voice chips with densities ranging from 128 to 672 channels, and power consumption of less than 3mW per channel. The feature set includes noise reduction, acoustic echo control, signaling tone detection, audio conferencing and other capabilities for use in the wireless, VoP, and TDM segments of the telecommunications industry.
http://www.octasic.com

• Octasic was founded in 1998 and has been an outsourced design house for ATM and IP voice-over-packet solutions for major telecommunications vendors, such as Ericsson, Alcatel, Nortel Networks, NEC and Fujitsu. The company is now developing its own line of ASICs for key VoP functions: packetization, aggregation and mediation; compression; and echo cancellation. Octasic offers specialized processors performing each one of those individual functions.

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BeamReach Raises $15 Million for Beam-Forming Broadband Wireless

BeamReach Networks, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California, raised $15 million in third round funding for its broadband wireless access systems based on adaptive beam-forming technology. BeamReach's BeamPlex system based on Adaptive MultiBeam OFDM technology has been involved in an extensive trial with Verizon in Virginia since July 2002. Investors in this series C financing include The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Sofinnova Ventures, Inc., Walden International, Mitsui & Co. Venture Partners, Inc., and London Pacific Life and Annuity Company.
http://www.beamreachnetworks.com

• BeamReach Networks is developing a broadband wireless access system based on adaptive beam forming and null steering technology, enabling it to deliver services to thousands of users over a large cell area of up to 21 miles in radius. BeamReach's platform, which initially operates in MMDS and WCS spectrum, combines adaptive beam forming, frequency diversity, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and time division duplexing (TDD). The system would be able to support end-user service rates ranging from 64 kbps to 1.5 Mbps downstream and as high as 1.2 Mbps upstream. Base stations are engineered to handle full link rate and capacity at full cell radius over non-line-of-sight (NLOS) paths of up to 21 miles. BeamReach claims its technology yields a 10 times improvement in spectral efficiency and up to 16 times improvement in cell coverage area over 3G technologies.
  BeamReach Networks is headed by Bob Kelsch, who previously held senior executive positions at Nortel Networks. Its technical team is led by Dale Branlund, who was one of three founders and Vice President of Engineering of Radix Technologies. The company is based in Sunnyvale, California.

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