BT Confirms 60% Lower Local Loop Unbundling Prices

By investing in new automated processes, BT has been able to reduce shared local loop unbundling (LLU) prices by a total of 60% since May 31 this year. Effective from September 30 the connection charge for the shared access service will go down to £37 (in May 2004 this had been £117), and annual rental will remain at £27.12 (was £53 in May 2004). BT said further price cuts are anticipated. http://www.btplc.com

• Earlier this month, Cable & Wireless announced its intention to pursue the broadband market in the U.K. via local unbundling from BT. Cable & Wireless said its initial plans include a target to unbundle up to 400 exchanges by the second half of 2005 which will give Cable & Wireless access to approximately 30% of sites in the UK . The company's local loop unbundling capital investment is expected to be £40-50 million in the year to 31 March 2005. An additional £15 - 35 million will be required in the year to 31 March 2006, subject to the speed of subscriber growth.

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Chelsio Hires Former Sun, Intel Executives

Chelsio Communications, a start-up offering 10-Gigabit Ethernet server adapters and protocol acceleration technology, announced the appointments of John Brennan, former Sun Microsystems engineering vice president, and Eric Taborek, former sales and marketing executive with Intel Corporation, to senior staff positions at the company, both reporting to Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO.


Brennan comes to Chelsio from Sun Microsystems, where he was vice president of hardware engineering for Sun's midrange and high-end servers. He will oversee the hardware and software engineering teams at Chelsio.


Taborek joins Chelsio from Intel, where he most recently managed Intel's worldwide relationships with key industry partners, including Cisco Systems. Taborek joined Intel following its acquisition of VxTel, where he was vice president of sales and marketing. http://www.chelsio.com

• In August, Chelsio Communications, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California, introduced a 10 Gbps Ethernet NIC priced at $1,995. The new half-size PCI-X card is a streamlined version of Chelsio's T110 host bus adapter, which achieves high-performance and low-latency by providing protocol off-load in silicon. Chelsio also leverages a VLIW (very long instruction word) "Terminator" ASIC that can handle more than one million concurrent sessions, enabling the T110 cards to support up to 64,000 simultaneous connections.

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Paid Movie Downloads Follow Digital Music's Lead

Through the first half of 2004, paid movie downloads accounted for only 0.35 of video units that were purchased or rented, including traditional channels and pay-per-view (PPV) and video-on-demand (VOD) services, like Movielink and CinemaNow, according to a new study from The NPD Group. From a demographic standpoint, 80% of those paying to rent downloaded movies during this time were male.


The NPD Group said its survey found that as with digital music, the young adult (18- to 24-year-old) age group is taking the lead in paid movie downloading. For January through June 2004, young adults represented 26% of all download rentals. By comparison, this age group represents only 16% of overall video/DVD buyers or renters. Just over half of those downloading movie rentals were younger than 35, while over 80% were younger than 45.


NPD data show that digital music customers tend to be heavier buyers of music CDs, and that pattern is echoed in digital movie rentals. Those consumers paying to rent digital movies from the Web are twice as likely to be heavy movie buyers (i.e., they purchased seven or more movies in the past three months) relative to consumers who acquire movies though PPV or VOD. In addition, 34% also reported being heavy renters (i.e., they rented seven or more movies in the past three months), which is significantly higher than those who used PPV or VOD.


In Q2 2004, Movielink, a broadband VOD service, boasted the largest share of the digital movie rental market with a 33% unit share, followed by MovieFlix with 13%. Compared to the average mix of genres that are rented or purchased, these consumers were much more likely to obtain videos from the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre. The most popular video downloaded during this quarter was "Independence Day," followed closely by "Matrix Revolutions," "Matchstick Men," "Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone," and "Star Trek Wrath of Khan."


The NPD Group said its VideoWatch report collects video acquisition information on a continuous basis from members of NPD's consumer panel of more than 2.5 million registered members. Detailed purchase information is collected from an average of 3,000 video buyers and renters each week. http://www.npd.com/videowatch.html

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SBC Declares Third-Quarter Dividend

The board of directors of SBC Communications declared a quarterly dividend of 31.25 cents a share on the company's common shares. The third-quarter dividend is payable on Nov. 1, 2004, to stockholders of record at the close of business on Oct. 8, 2004. http://www.sbc.com

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Avvio Extends 10 Gbps to 200km w/o Dispersion Compensation

Avvio Networks, a start-up based in Lowell, Massachusetts, announced that its "A1020G-X" extended reach OC192 SONET / 10GbEthernet regenerator with FEC encoding can now cover spans of up to 200 km of SMF-28 fiber without external dispersion compensation. It is available with fixed or widely tunable DWDM interfaces.


The A1020G is a 1RU device that can be configured as a network edge device or as an in-line regenerator. It can be used with Avvio's A1040 quad OC-48 to OC-192 multiplexer for a complete OC-48 to OC-192 network upgrade. http://www.avvionetworks.com

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Alcatel Cites Gains in Satellite Broadband

Alcatel Space announced the selection of its "DSL in the Sky" broadband satellite system by a major Mid-East operator, as well as the launch of commercial service by Satlynx S.A., a supplier of high-speed two-way network services via satellite for Europe. The system has already been chosen by Divona Télécom in Tunisia, and by other operators in Asia.


Alcatel Space's "DSL in the Sky" solution comprises the Alcatel 9780 DVB-RCS platform plus associated terminals. It is based on the DVB-RCS standard (digital video broadcasting-return channel via satellite) and can be integrated in terrestrial DSL networks. The system supports downlinks of up to 45 Mbps and uplinks of up to 2 Mbps. http://www.alcatel.com

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Mexico's Iusacell Selects Lucent for CDMA2000 Expansion

Mexico's Grupo Iusacell selected Lucent Technologies to expand its CDMA2000 1X network nationwide. Under the contract, Lucent will supply equipment, software and services for the network expansion, and will deploy new capabilities for Iusacell's Intelligent Network platform, enabling the introduction of prepaid voice and data services. Iusacell will continue to offer data services at up to 153 Kbps. Lucent Worldwide Services will provide network installation and maintenance. Financial terms were not disclosed. http://www.lucent.com

• Earlier this month, Nortel Networks announced that Grupo Iusacell had migrated its circuit switches to a packet infrastructure using the Nortel Networks Succession Communication Server (CS) 2000 Superclass softswitch. Iusacell has also deployed Nortel Networks Passport 15000 and Passport Packet Voice Gateways in Mexico's main cities as the basis for its new IP-based core data infrastructure. The core VoIP network support the operator's long-distance traffic, and positions the carrier to expand and deploy 3G services. Financial terms were not disclosed.

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AT&T Declares Quarterly Dividend

AT&T's Board of Directors today declared a regular dividend of $0.2375 (23.75 cents) per share, payable November 1, 2004, to AT&T common shareowners of record on September 30, 2004. http://www.att.com

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Azul Systems Debuts Network Attached Processing

Azul Systems, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, introduced its "network attached processing compute solution" designed to provide grid-like power computing for Java and J2EE platform-based enterprise applications. The company is expected to unveil a new appliance that transparently redirects application workload to a "compute pool" of resources across a corporate network. The technology does not require any change to applications, or the existing infrastructure configuration. Compute pool appliances are simply connected to the network and Azul software is installed on the application hosts. Azul's technology is expected to work with J2EE platform products, including BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere application servers. http://www.azulsystems.com

• Azul Systems is led by Stephen W. DeWitt, who previously was the Vice President and General Manager of Content Delivery and Edge Computing for Sun Microsystems, where he joined following the acquisition of Cobalt Networks. Prior to joining Cobalt, DeWitt served at Cisco Systems as Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise Network Management Business Unit and Vice President of Enterprise Marketing.

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Lockheed Martin to Build Navy's Next Gen Satellite System

Lockheed Martin was selected to lead a team to build the U.S. Navy's Mobile User Objective System (MUOS), a next-generation narrowband tactical satellite communications system. The new satellites, which will deliver simultaneous voice, data and video in real time to mobile terminals around the globe, will replace the current narrowband tactical satellite communications system known as the Ultra High Frequency Follow-On (UFO) system. Anticipated launch date for the first MUOS satellite is planned for 2010.


Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor and systems integrator for the MUOS program, and its A2100 bus will serve as the MUOS spacecraft platform. General Dynamics C4 Systems will lead the user-entry and integrated ground segments of the MUOS program, supplying a secure ground network, satellite control and network management, and a JTRS-compliant terminal solution. Work will begin to build to produce the first two satellites and associated ground control elements. The contract also provides for options on three additional spacecraft. With all options exercised, the contract for up to five satellites has a total potential value of $ 3.26 billion. http://www.lmco.com

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