Microsoft Offers Hosted Exchange Platform

Microsoft announced the availability of its Solution for Hosted Exchange, a platform that allows service providers to offer rich e-mail communication services to small and medium-sized businesses as well as consumers. The system enables self-provisioning, delegated administration and server consolidation. Hosted Exchange offers a way to create, manage and update individual or multiple users on multiple service plans, and enables service providers to develop self-service Web pages that allow customers to change service plans. http://www.micro...

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ADTRAN announces environmentally hardened, line powered DSLAMs

ADTRAN announced a new family of environmentally sealed DSLAMs. The Total Access 1100 Outside Plant (OSP) DSLAMs are line-powered and can be installed in such outdoor locations as pedestals and poles. The first product in the series is the Total Access 1124, which offers 24 ports of ADSL with integrated splitters from a DS1 network uplink and can be located up to 80,000 feet from a central office when using ADTRAN's Line Powering Units. http://www.adtran....

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MSN to Offer Free Advertising-supported Video via Broadband

Microsoft announced that its MSN Network will offer a wide variety of high-resolution, on-demand broadband video content for free. Special programming from NBC News and MSNBC.com is available now in a Beta version of MSN Video. Additional content from multiple providers and custom programming choices will be added to the service for the full consumer launch this winter in the United States only. The free service will be supported by advertising. MSN Video will include 15-second video ads for every five to six minutes of content as well as contextual...

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Movielink Offers Internet VOD Model for Telcos

Broadband video on-demand is here today, said Jim Ramo, CEO of Movielink, speaking at USTA Telecom 03. Movielink, which is backed by five of the top Hollywood studios, offers hundreds of films in either Windows Media or Real format. Over a 1.5 Mbps broadband connections, downloading a feature-length film takes about 30 minutes, although a new "Movies in Minutes" feature allows viewing to begin after only a few minutes of streaming the content into a cache. Ramo said the big Hollywood studios are backing Movielink in order to drive digital rights...

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RBOCs Outline Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) Plans

"Deep fiber deployments offer the only future proof architecture," said Peter Hill, VP Technology Planning & Deployment at BellSouth, speaking at USTA Telecom 03. Three key advantages are a longer planned service life with less ongoing maintenance, potential regulatory advantages over the existing copper plant, and a rapidly narrowing cost differential compared with copper. Hill said the joint RFP for FTTP issued by BellSouth, Verizon and SBC provides the market leverage to really stimulate the industry. BellSouth has been pursuing a fiber-to-the-curb...

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USTA Telecom 03 -- A Regulatory Panel Discussion

"If consumers have choices between multiple providers, reducing regulation is good," said FCC Commissioner Kevin Martin, speaking at USTA Telecom 03. On the converse side, where not much competition has taken hold, Martin believes regulations should remain in force. Regarding the Universal Service Fund (USF), Martin said he was troubled by some state and federal decisions that imply that wireless is a full substitute for wireline service or that USF could be used as a means of regulating competition. On the question of Vonage and other broadband...

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Sprint Extends and Simplifies Its Global Data Service Level Agreements

Sprint introduced simplified service level agreements (SLAs) across its global data portfolio. The new SLAs offer a tiered structure of performance metrics, guarantees on jitter (the variation in latency that could impact videoconferencing applications), and a 100% credit guarantee for premier SprintLink IP services. The same performance metrics and contract language are provided for IP, frame relay, private line and ATM services. All SLAs include service delivery attributes including installation and availability. The SLA levels are: Network...

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MCI Names Chief Ethics Officer

MCI announced the appointment of Nancy Higgins as executive vice president of Ethics and Business Conduct and Chief Ethics Officer reporting to Chairman and CEO Michael Capellas. Higgins most recently served as vice president, Ethics and Business Conduct for Lockheed Martin.MCI said it would provide ethics training for its 55,000 U.S.-based employees and contractors. It also has implemented a "Zero-Tolerance Policy" dictating that any suspected violation of MCI's Code of Ethics and Business Conduct will be fully investigated and dealt with immediately....

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Luminous Unveils SONET/SDH Multi-Service Provisioning Platforms

Luminous Networks introduced new versions of its multi-service provisioning platforms for delivering data services over legacy SONET/SDH infrastructure. Luminous Networks, which has been an early developer of metro access solutions based on Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) and MPLS, said its new SONET/SDH interfaces are a natural extension of its PacketWave family of products.A key differentiator for Luminous' new PacketStream MSPPs is the ability to support up to 254 nodes per ring. The platforms support OC48/STM16 SONET/SDH rings and lower speed...

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AT&T to Supply IP VPN for The Associated Press

AT&T was awarded a $2 million, three-year global networking contract from The Associated Press (AP), to supply an IP VPN that will connect the AP's 242 news bureaus worldwide. The network will use ATM trunks for AP's key hubs in Europe and the U.S. AT&T's Global Managed Internet Service covers AP's distributed locations. http://www.att....

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DIRECTV U.S. Adds 326,000 Customers in Q3

DIRECTV U.S. added 811,000 gross subscribers and after accounting for churn, 326,000 net subscribers in Q3 2003, giving it a total subscriber base of 10.28 million, 12% more than this time last year. When including subscribers in the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative ("NRTC") territories, the DIRECTV U.S. platform ended the quarter with 11.85 million total subscribers. DIRECTV U.S. reported quarterly revenues of $1.93 billion, an increase of 20% over last year's third quarter revenues of $1.62 billion. ARPU increased approximately...

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Cisco Reaches 200 Customer Milestone for MPLS

Cisco Systems said MPLS deployments have more than doubled over the past year by customers such as Bell Canada, BellSouth, BT, T-Systems, Infonet Services, O2, and Telecom Italia. The company now has over 200 MPLS deployments worldwide.Cisco Systems also announced a new capability called "IOSMPLS Bandwidth-Assured Layer 2 Service" that enables service providers to connect any transport at Layer 2 over a single IP/MPLS converged infrastructure. The new Cisco MPLS Bandwidth-Assured Layer 2 Services architecture provides increased resiliency with...

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SeaChange Positions VOD for Telcos

SeaChange is positioning its VOD System for delivering Standard Definition (SD) and High-Definition (HD) VOD content over xDSL and FTTx architectures using a variety of codecs. At ITU Telecom World and USTA Telecom, SeaChange demonstrated television-quality video delivered over IP networks at Standard Definition (SD) quality at 1.0-1.5Mbps, and HD quality (720p and 1080i) at 6-8Mbps.www.seachangeinternational.comSeaChange's customer list includes Adelphia, Time Warner, Cablevision, Comcast, Insight, Mediacom, Rogers, RCN and othe...

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Local Loop Bonding Used for HDTV over ADSL

Net to Net Technologies and TANDBERG TV demonstrated an HDTV over ADSL capability using a local loop bonding mechanism to combine the bandwidths of two ADSL lines. Net to Net's ADSL Loop Bonding technology was used to provide aggregated bandwidth of just over 21 Mbps by combining two ADSL lines. One HDTV MPEG-2 stream, encoded at 15 Mbps, and one standard definition MPEG-2 stream, encoded at 3 Mbps, were simultaneously transported over the bonded ADSL lines. The test simulated a typical household within 10,000 feet of the telephone company central...

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Michael Powell: Industry Reaches Regulatory Crossroads

"We are sitting at the most important crossroad in 100 years of telecom regulatory policy," said FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell, speaking at the USTA Telecom 03 conference in Las Vegas. Powell said his greatest concern at this point is how the nation will develop a new regulatory framework for broadband IP services rather than simply stumbling upon a policy that results from many haphazard efforts to regulate new IP voice and video offerings. What is clear is that while the Telecom Act of 1996 sought to promote competition, it did not provide...

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VideoTele.com Encodes Local Programming for Digital TV

VideoTele.com introduced a new line of encoders and decoders designed for service providers who wish to offer local video content to their customers. The M2-10 family of products includes the M2-10E, a half-width, single rack unit device that provides MPEG-2 video and MPEG-1 audio encoding over an Ethernet WAN interface. DVB-ASI and Dolby Digital options are also available.TCT West of Basin, Wyoming has deployed the M2-10 products to offer customers live and on-demand broadcasts of local sporting events, town hall meetings and other community...

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