BroadSoft to Resell Carbon Twelve's VoIP Toolbar

BroadSoft will sell and support Carbon Twelve's miPA Lite and miRECEPTION end-user software applications, which interface to its BroadWorks platform. Carbon Twelve' has been a participant in BroadSoft's Third-Party Developers Program for hosted VoIP.



Carbon Twelve's miPA Lite integrates all of the BroadSoft CommPilot client functionality into a call control toolbar embedded in Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Internet Explorer. It lets users click on icons within these Microsoft applications to control all their advanced voice features, such as selective call forwarding and do not disturb, voicemail to email, and simultaneous ring. Users can also click on phone numbers in Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Internet Explorer to automatically initiate calls from their regular or IP phone.



Carbon Twelve's miRECEPTION is a premier, PC-based attendant console that provides receptionists with a vivid and ergonomic interface that is easy to learn and use for increased productivity. For example, receptionists can instantly determine an employee's availability status to provide immediate feedback to callers and visitors. miRECEPTION is also well suited for receptionists that are shared among multiple companies. Receptionists can see which company incoming calls are designated for and answer accordingly. http://www.broadsoft.comhttp://www.carbontwelve.com

• Carbon Twelve is based in Sydney, Australia.

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Ciena Warns of Lower than Expected Revenue

CIENA expects to report revenue of approximately $75 million for its third fiscal quarter ending 31-July-2004, representing slight sequential revenue growth and year-over-year revenue growth of approximately 9% percent. The company stated previously that it anticipated revenue growth of up to as much as 30% from fiscal second quarter revenue of $74.7 million.



CIENA attributed the slower than expected sales to an ongoing environment of uncertainty resulting in cautious spending and deployment delays by its large service provider customers, including a deceleration of DSL-related orders in North America.



Due in part to its ongoing, company-wide cost-reduction efforts, CIENA anticipates lower-than-expected research and development, sales and marketing and general and administrative expenses for the period. CIENA expects its loss per share (GAAP) for the fiscal third quarter will be reported in a range of $0.24 to $0.26. http://www.ciena.com

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Dow Chemical to Implement VoIP

The Dow Chemical Company awarded a seven-year contract to IBM to transform and manage its global network. The contract covers services support for local area networks, wide area networks, voice, video and e-enabled conference rooms. Additionally, IBM will provide electronic mail for over 50,000 Dow employees and contractors, support for 2,800 servers and field services in 63 countries. IBM will also transform Dow's voice network with VoIP. http://www.ibm.com/services

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Wayport Raises $20 Million to Expand its Access Services

Wayport has raised approximately $20 million through a private placement. Wayport intends to use the funds for strategic acquisitions and to invest in key areas of the company to accelerate deployments at hotels, airports, McDonald's, UPS Stores and other strategic venues.



The number of locations that Wayport now provides high-speed Internet service to has increased by 275% from a total of 800 a year ago to over 3,000 as of June 2004, with 2,000 locations installed in the past 180 days. http://www.wayport.net/

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Level 3 Supplies IP VPN for CSC/Sears

Level 3 Communications is supplying Computer Sciences Corporation with an IP VPN solution to support its recently announced agreement with Sears, Roebuck and Co. Level 3's data networking services will allow Sears to replace multiple legacy networks with a single MPLS-based network that converges voice, video and data traffic. Financial terms were not disclosed. http://www.level3.com

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MCI VoIP Supports "True" 9-1-1 Capabilities

MCI announced that its "Advantage" VoIP service has now been supporting 9-1-1 capabilities at fixed locations for more than two years. In addition, the company has teamed with the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) and regional emergency communication organizations to develop and implement long-term solutions for 9-1-1 services to support mobile users.



MCI noted that its VoIP service "true 9-1-1," or E9-1-1, capabilities by utilizing the existing 9-1-1 network to route calls to the appropriate Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) since 2001. This allows the VoIP caller's location and phone number to be automatically displayed in front of the 9-1-1 call taker so emergency assistance can be dispatched to a location even if the caller cannot communicate. In addition, it ensures that 9-1-1 calls are routed to the local emergency response teams for the area where the call was placed.



MCI also said that it supports an administrative approach to maintain funding of 9-1-1 resources at a level equivalent to those generated by current or evolving funding processes. MCI is remitting 9-1-1 service fees in accordance with local 9-1-1 requirementshttp://www.mci.com

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MetaSolv Lands Multi-Million Dollar VoIP Contract

MetaSolv Software was awarded a multimillion dollar contract by major U.S. carrier to supply its activation platform for next-generation VoIP services. The name of the carrier was not disclosed. The MetaSolv platform will be used to activate VoIP network infrastructure and subscriber services worldwide as it migrates away from circuit-based services. http://www.metasolv.com/

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AT&T Awarded IP Networking Contract by Global Mining Co.

AT&T was awarded a three-year, $2.25 million contract to provide an integrated IP voice and data service to Imerys, a global mining company. Imerys will deploy VoIP among its 30 U.S. locations. To close the sale, AT&T worked closely with Solarcom, a technology consultant based in the greater metro Atlanta area.



AT&T recently announced plans to accelerate expansion of its business VoIP service portfolio. http://www.att.com

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CableLabs Selects Broadcom's Voice Codec

CableLabs has chosen the Broadcom BroadVoice16 voice compression codec as one of two royalty-free voice codecs for all future PacketCable 1.1 and 1.0 certified and qualified embedded multimedia terminal adapters (EMTAs) and PSTN media gateways beginning in April of 2005, pending successful conclusion of certain conditions such as demonstration of multi-vendor interoperability. A mandatory voice compression codec in PacketCable products provides cable operators with universal toll-quality voice compression for VoIP. Prior to the new codec requirements, toll-quality voice compression codecs within the PacketCable specification were optional, due mostly to relatively complex and expensive royalty agreements frequently associated with the use of ITU-based voice compression codecs.



Broadcom's BroadVoice16 solution is a low-bit rate voice compression codec designed for toll-quality VoIP networks. The company said its BroadVoice16 reduces the bandwidth requirements of VoIP service by over 50%. Broadcom also offers a BroadVoice32 solution, which is a 32 Kbps voice codec that provides enhanced quality telephone service approaching natural voice or CD quality. http://www.broadcom.com

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Toshiba and HelloSoft Demonstrate DSP-Free VoIP Phone

HelloSoft introduced a VoIP phone software suite optimized for the Toshiba's embedded controller, which is built on a single ARM processor core. The device implements all VoIP functions, including codecs, line echo cancellers, acoustic echo cancellers, telephony components, and telephony signalling stack. http://www.hellosoft.com/http://www.chips.toshiba.com/

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InfiniRoute Launches VoIP Peering Service with Route Control

InfiniRoute Networks, a start-up based in San Francisco, launched a carrier-neutral VoIP peering service for wireline, wireless, and emerging carriers featureing route control functionality. The service, which runs over InfiniRoute's own Managed Voice Platform (MVP), provides an interconnection infrastructure that allows carriers to exchange VoIP traffic with global partners.



InfiniRoute Networks said the IP route optimization technology used in its MVP protects carriers from quality of service degradations associated with IP network performance problems. InfiniRoute ensures that all routes are up and performing adequately. Outages are resolved according to service level agreements (SLAs), redistributing traffic to other termination points as necessary. InfiniRoute also monitors traffic for round trip time, latency, packet loss, and jitter by destination and route. Network degradations are identified and traffic is re-routed to a path providing better voice quality. Historic and graphic data is available for trend analysis. http://www.infiniroute.com

• InfiniRoute Networks was established in 2004 through the merger of two other start-ups: IP Deliver and Proficient Networks. Established in 2001, Proficient Networks provided a platform that measures end-to-end IP network performance, responds quickly to automatically fix problems and prevents network congestion. Established in 2002, IP Deliver provided comprehensive VoIP network management services.



• Investors in InfiniRoute include: BV Capital, Canaan Partners, and El Dorado Ventures.

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Avaya to Acquire Spectel for Audio Conferencing

Avaya agreed to acquire Spectel, a supplier of audio conferencing solutions, for approximately $103 million in cash. Spectel's open, software-based audio conferencing solutions can be scaled to serve enterprises as well as global service providers. The company offers enterprise on-premise, managed on-premise and service provider solutions, including applications for advanced services, such as integration with other productivity software suites, sophisticated operator support functions and wireless capabilities.



Building on a relationship of more than four years between the companies, Avaya will continue to serve the enterprise market with Spectel's on-premise and service provider conferencing solutions. Avaya also plans to integrate Spectel technology with its own IP communications applications suite to provide businesses with expanded converged conferencing capabilities in the future.



Spectel has approximately 210 employees and offices in Dublin, Ireland, Andover, Massachusetts and other strategic locations. The company currently serves more than 500 customers globally. http://www.avaya.comhttp://www.spectel.com/

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MetaSwitch Reports Rapid Deployment of its VoIP Softswitch

Big River Telephone, a locally owned telecommunications provider in the Missouri-Illinois-Kentucky region, has completed the hot cut-over of 1,000 trunks - a "heart transplant" of its network - in just 20 days after making the decision to purchase a MetaSwitch Class 5 softswitch. Big River is now carrying 30 million minutes of VoIP traffic per month through its MetaSwitch VP3500 Class 5 Softswitch. The MetaSwitch platform is serving over 4,000 lines and trunks, a number which is expected to increase as Big River uses the switch for new applications including VoIP over Cable, DSL and FTTH. The company was also recently one of the first to deploy Broadband over Power Line (BPL).



MetaSwitch said its key advantage it the ability to act as a "traditional" Class 5 switch with protocols such as SS7 and ISDN, while enabling a smooth migration to a next generation network architecture based on SIP, H.248 and MGCP. Big River is using the flexible feature server interface for an IP-based conferencing and voicemail system that was developed in-house. The company plans to build on that application with call management, follow-me, click-to-dial and other advanced capabilities. Financial terms were not disclosed. http://www.metaswitch.com

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Qwest's Q2 Revenue Declines by 4%

Qwest Communications reported a second quarter 2004 net loss of $776 million, or $0.43 per diluted share, including special items. Revenue for the quarter was $3.44 billion, a 4.3% decrease from the second quarter of 2003, and a sequential decline of approximately one%. The net effect of the special items was an incremental charge against the current quarter's results of $487 million, or $0.27 per share.

• CAPEX: capital expenditures for Q2 totaled $486 million, versus $505 million in Q2 2003. The decrease in capital expenditures was largely the result of a reduction in information technology projects, which was partially offset by the deployment of additional DSL facilities.
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• BUNDLES: penetration increased to 36%, compared to 32% at the end of the first quarter. Qwest also plans to introduce new service bundles in Q3.
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• DSL: added 109,000 DSL subscribers in Q2 to end with 853,000 total DSL subscribers. In addition, the company deployed approximately two thousand remote terminals (RTs) during Q2, expanding its DSL footprint to cover over six million households. Qwest expects to exceed one million DSL subscribers by year end and to make DSL services available to about 65% of households within its operating region. Additionally, Qwest has partnered with Best Buy to make DSL services available at 82 of its retail locations in the 14-state local service area.
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• LONG DISTANCE: added 733,000 long distance lines in Q2, taking total lines to 4.1 million. Long-distance penetration of total retail lines increased to nearly 30%, as compared to 24% at the end of the first quarter. Qwest also announced that the number of previously reported long-distance lines in the fourth quarter of 2003 was overstated by approximately 133,000 lines. Accordingly, the total line count as of the fourth quarter of 2003 and the first quarter of 2004 have been adjusted to 2.2 million and 3.4 million, respectively. This change had no effect on revenue.
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• VoIP: In the third quarter, Qwest launched its business class VoIP services in four markets. The company remains on track to complete the rollout of business and consumer VoIP services by the end of the year to all major metropolitan markets within the local service area, as well as to businesses in select out-of-market areas, by the end of the year.

http://www.qwest.com

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Netrake Tunes its Session Controller for PacketCable

Netrake has enhanced its session controllers with support for the PacketCable 1.2 CMSS signaling specification. The company's nCite session controller, acting as a Border Proxy within the defined PacketCable 1.2 network architecture, now complies with the CMSS signaling specification defined by CableLabs. This allows cable MSOs to deploy VoIP and other SIP-based multimedia services in a standards- based solution ensuring interoperability when connecting with other cable MSOs or VoIP carriers.



Netrake said its nCite session controller allows MSOs to configure and use a different mode of operation when connecting to a "trusted" network provider - such as another cable-operating entity that complies with PacketCable service agreements and IP transport agreements. When using the "trusted" mode of operation the nCite provides transparency for the PCMM Application Manager to provide QoS services for multimedia applications in the cable MSOs DOCSIS access network. Netrake also supports "untrusted" service provider networks, such as a wholesale IP carrier providing transit or PSTN termination services. When using the "untrusted" mode of operation the nCite hides the cable MSOs network topology from the service provider it is interconnecting with, thus increasing security of operations. Netrake's nCite session controller also gives service providers the ability to provide different QoS for the media streams within a multimedia session.



Several leading cable operators have been testing Netrake's session controllers for several months now. The company expects to make its first cable MSO customer announcement within a few months. http://www.netrake.com

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Pure Networks Offers Port Magic for Digital Homes

Pure Networks, a start-up based in Seattle, is gaining market traction for its "Port Magic" software, which automatically configures most home networking routers to securely open and close ports as needed. This enables home networks to run Internet applications without go through the technically challenging process of opening an closing ports on the home router. Pure Networks said that more than 500,000 digital home consumers have activated its Port Magic product.



Pure Networks is currently offering a free 14-day trial for new customers of Port Magic for Windows. The software retails for $49.95. http://www.purenetworks.com

• In May 2004, Pure Networks announced a new technology agreement with America Online under which the Port Magic software is available in the latest version of the AOL 9.0 Optimized SE software.



• In May 2004, Pure Networks secured $7 million in Series A funding led by Mayfield.

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