FCC Joins FTC on Do Not Call List

The FCC will coordinate with the Federal Trade Commission on the implementation of a national do-not-call registry for consumers who wish to avoid telemarketing calls. The registry is nationwide in scope, includes all telemarketers (with the exception of certain non-profit organizations), and covers both interstate and intrastate telemarketing calls. Calls regarding political and religious speech will not be subject to the do-not call requirements. The national database will be administered by the FTC. The FCC will not require states to discontinue...

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Department of Defense (DoD) Sets Sights on IPv6

The Department of Defense is ready to begin trials of equipment and applications based on IPv6 protocol within 30 days, said John Osterholz, director of architecture and interoperability for the Department of Defense, in a keynote address at the IPv6 Summit in San Diego. The DoD, which has an annual IT budget exceeding $30 billion, will focus its information resources to create "predictive battlespace awareness" that combines intelligence and operations technologies in a connected, real-time environment. In a memorandum issued earlier this month,...

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XO Offers 'Insurance' Policy for Global Crossing Restructuring

XO Communications issued a revised proposal for a bankruptcy restructuring of Global Crossing that would run in parallel with the company's current efforts to emerge from bankruptcy under the terms of its current Purchase Agreement with Singapore Technologies Telemedia. XO said it is making the new offer because of Global Crossing's deteriorating financial condition coupled with its pending request to extend, until mid-October, STT's exclusive rights to close a deal with Global Crossing. If approved, Global Crossing's request would prevent the...

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Secure Optical Ethernet Connections Multiply into NYSE, AMEX

The Securities Industry Automation Corporation (SIAC), the technology subsidiary of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the American Stock Exchange (AMEX), has signed over 100 enterprise customers to access its Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure (SFTI) network. The milestone was reached less than two years after the events of September 11, 2001. SFTI uses designated access centers and a highly redundant infrastructure to offer firms physically and geographically diverse routing, thus reducing the likelihood of service-impacting outages....

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Broadcom Expands Wi-Fi Chip Portfolio

Broadcom announced three additions to its wireless LAN product portfolio: 802.11g and 802.11a/g USB 2.0 adapters, and a new wireless networking processor for secure 802.11a/g enterprise access point and router applications. Broadcom said the USB interface gives users the ability to easily add standards-compliant 802.11g and 802.11a/g to desktop systems without removing the PC chassis cover. USB 2.0 technology delivers 480 Mbps of bandwidth, which is necessary to support 54 Mbps wireless connections, while legacy USB 1.1 systems are capable of...

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Orative Receives $6 Million for Enterprise Mobile Telephony

Orative, a start-up based in Menlo Park, California, raised $6 million in its first round of venture capital financing to support its development of enterprise mobile telephony software. Product plans have not been disclosed. The investment came from Mayfield and Diamondhead Ventures. http://www.orative.comOrative is headed by Paul Fulton, who previously was Executive in Residence at Mayfield. Prior to joining Mayfield, Fulton was Vice President and General Manager of 3Com's Wireless Divisi...

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Argonne National Lab Deploys CIENA's ONLINE Metro DWDM

Argonne National Laboratory, one of the U.S. Department of Energy's largest research centers, has deployed CIENA's ONLINE Metro DWDM platform in two separate networks. The first application is to provide OC-48 and OC-192 channels between the Laboratory located 25 miles southwest of Chicago, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Champaign, Illinois and several other research and education institutions in the state. The second application is to provide OC-48/OC-192 links between locations in the TeraGrid and Illinois Wired/Wireless...

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Sorrento Networks to Acquire LuxN

Sorrento Networks agreed to acquire LuxN, a start-up provider of optical access solutions, for a combination of stock, warrants, and cash, including some of the cash currently held by LuxN. LuxN claims 25 customers, including Time Warner Telecom, Hawaii I-Net, Yipes Enterprise Services, and numerous universities for its optical access products, which combine CWDM and DWDM on the same platform. Warrants to purchase 400,000 shares of Sorrento will be issued to the Series A-1 Preferred stockholders of LuxN upon the completion of the transaction,...

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Twentieth Century Fox and Shaw Enter Long-Term VOD Agreement

Twentieth Century Fox signed a long-term agreement to provide movies and other programming content for Shaw's Video-on-Demand (VOD) and Pay-Per-View (PPV) services. Shaw serves 2.9 million customers in Canada. Twentieth Century Fox is one of the first major Hollywood studios to partner with Shaw on these new services. http://www.shaw...

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SMC Pushes Gigabit to the Desktop at $50 per Connection

SMC Networks announced two new 10/100/1000 Gigabit switches and a new 32-bit Gigabit Ethernet PCI network card at new price points for the industry. SMC's five and eight port EZ Switch 10/100/1000 will be available in July, and carry MSRPs of $134.99 and $194.99, respectively. The new EZ Card 1000 PCI network card has an MSRP of $29.99. The new products bring Gigabit Ethernet prices to just over $50 per connection MSRP. http://www.smc....

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FCC Sees Very Healthy Competition in Wireless

In its just released Eighth Annual Report on Commercial Mobile Radio Services (CMRS), the FCC found the wireless industry is fundamentally competitive and delivering on the promise of greater service, more extensive coverage and lower prices. Highlights of the 2002 report include:the number mobile telephone subscribers in the U.S. rose from 128.5 million to 141.8 million, resulting in a nationwide penetration rate of roughly 49%the mobile telephone sector generated more than $76 billion in revenue for 2002more than 95% of the total U.S. population...

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KT Tests Lucent's Universal Gateway for Circuit-to-Packet Migration

KT (formerly Korea Telecom) is testing Lucent Technologies' APX 8000 Universal Gateway system as a means of migrating traffic from circuit networks to an IP-based network. Lucent's APX 8000 Universal Gateway will be deployed at KT's Research Center in Daeduk by the end of July. The equipment will act as a trunk access media gateway accepting dial, VoIP and fax-over-IP traffic and then interfacing with KT's softswitch. Lucent's multi-protocol system supports H.248, IPDC, SIP, H.323, V.92, and Personal Handyphone System (PHS) protocols. It achieves...

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IPv6 Sets Internet2 Land Speed Records

Researchers from Caltech and CERN set a new Internet2 Land Speed Record by transmitting a single IPv6 stream at 983 Mbps for more than an hour from Geneva, Switzerland to Chicago, Illinois, a distance of 7,067 km (more than 4,000 miles). The new record was set through the efforts of the DataTAG project and CERN using a standard Linux TCP implementation. The researchers said the efficient use of long distance networks at gigabit per second speeds is critical to the future of the high energy and nuclear physics community. The Internet2 Land Speed...

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IEEE Selects VDSL DMT Line Coding for Ethernet in the First Mile

The IEEE's 802.3ah Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) Task Force selected DMT as its worldwide line-coding standard for VDSL. The selection of DMT by both the IEEE and the T1E1.4 Working Group (see below) paves the way for carriers to expand their deployments of VDSL. Ikanos Communications said that since its VDSL-DMT chipsets became available in Q4 of 2002, it has shipped more than 500,000 ports. http://www.ikanos.comLast week, the T1E1.4 committee, which is part of The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS), decided to specify...

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