Qwest Raises its Bid for MCI

Qwest Communications made a new offer to acquire MCI. The new bid includes $13.50 in cash (excluding MCI's March 15 dividend payment of $0.40 per share) and 3.373 Qwest shares (subject to adjustment under a collar which fixes the value of the Qwest shares at $14.00 provided Qwest's share price is between $3.32 and $4.15) per MCI share. Qwest's previous proposal was $10.10 in cash (excluding MCI's March 15 dividend payment of $0.40 per share) and 3.735 Qwest shares (subject to adjustment under a collar which fixes the value of the Qwest shares at $15.50 provided Qwest's share price is between $3.74 and $4.57) per MCI share.


MCI's Board of Directors has agreed to review the revised proposal.


In a statement, Qwest's CEO, Richard C. Notebaert, said he remains committed to a Qwest/MCI transaction and believes it will deliver superior value to MCI shareholders as well as significant benefits to customers, employees and other stakeholders. He expressed concern that MCI's Board appears to be favoring Verizon and not allowing Qwest to present its best case.
http://www.qwest.com

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Verilink Launches VoIP Partner Program

Verilink launched a new channel program designed to establish and develop a core group of partners with specialization in the selling and support of its VoIP products, including the 8000 Series and 3000 Series VoIP integrated access devices (IADs).


Charter partners in the authorized Telephony Partner Program include AllenCOM, Alliance Datacom, Digital Connections, Graybar, ICOMM , NetDigital, and Phillips Communications. Interlink Communication Systems and Tech Data, master distributors for Verilink products, will participate in the program supporting the new sales channel with program management, volume pricing, pre-sales technical support, and distribution services.
http://www.verilink.com

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Infineon Introduces ADSL2+ Chip

Infineon Technologies introduced a low-power, low-cost ADSL2+ chip supporting data rates of up to 25 Mbps. The new "GEMINAX PRO" ADSL2+ chipset is designed for high-density, DSL central office applications. Infineon said power consumption is about 30% lower than conventional chips, and a correspondingly lower amount of heat is produced. This will enable higher densities -- approximately one third more ADSL2+ connections -- without requiring additional cabinet space or cooling.


The GEMINAX PRO chipset consists of a 16-channel ADSL2+ Digital Front End (DFE) and a 4-channel Analog Front End (AFE), with integrated low-power Class D line drivers.


The GEMINAX PRO also features "switched-mode" that is already being employed widely in portable audio devices (such as MP3 players) due to its extremely low power consumption levels. The first prototypes for the new chip will be shipped in May, and volume production will begin in autumn 2005.
http://www.infineon.com

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Texas CLEC Deploys MetaSwitch's Distributed Softswitch Architecture

1stel, a Texas-based CLEC, has adopted the MetaSwitch distributed network architecture for carrier-class VoIP. Following the deployment of an initial system in February of last year, 1stel now has three MetaSwitches serving subscribers across the state. Particularly important to 1stel's network expansion plans was Metaswitch's ability to deliver all the major next generation protocols (SIP, H.248 and MGCP) in a distributed configuration, with highly scalable, collocatable media and signaling gateways controlled by a central call agent. Financial terms were not disclosed.

http://www.metaswitch.com
http://www.1stel.com

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OIF to Conduct Ten-Week Worldwide Interoperability Demo

AT&T, China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, NTT Laboratories, Telecom Italia and Verizon will host the Optical Internetworking Forum's (OIF's) second Worldwide Interoperability Demonstration. The carrier hosts will provide test facilities, engineering staff and real-world network connectivity continuously from mid-April through mid-June. A public demonstration of the testing will take place at SUPERCOMM 2005, June 7-9, in Chicago.


This year's OIF Worldwide Interoperability Demonstration will highlight solutions for support of Ethernet services over multi-domain SONET/SDH transport networks by employing OIF Implementation Agreements (IAs) in a multi-carrier, multi-vendor environment.


The OIF Worldwide Interoperability Demonstration 2004 addressed signaling of SONET/SDH connections from network edge-to-network edge. The 2005 event will go farther by demonstrating complete client-to-client Ethernet-over-SONET/SDH signaling. This enables Ethernet clients to signal for dynamic connections, which the SONET/SDH network provides, without requiring the client to be aware of the underlying server layer network.


Furthermore, the global interoperability event will include testing of data plane interoperability of Next Generation transport network functions such as GFP/VCAT/LCAS. This will demonstrate to the industry that this suite of ITU-T standards will support multiple vendor network environments. http://www.oiforum.com

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Telstra Launches Global VoIP Solution

Telstra introduced a global VoIP offering aimed at multinational corporations. Telstra's T-VoIP service runs over the company's global IP VPN platform. Companies are able to interconnect geographically dispersed PBXs over a VPN at rates ranging from 128 Kbps through 155 Mbps. In a converged scenario, voice and data traffic share the same local access loop. http://www.telstra-usa.com

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AT&T Plans Network Disaster Recovery Exercise

AT&T will conduct a Network Disaster Recovery (NDR) exercise on April 5th at its headquarters in Bedminster, New Jersey. Twenty-three self-contained equipment trucks and AT&T's Global Network Operations Center will be used to test and evaluate how well the company can respond to a natural or man-made disaster.


AT&T said it has invested more than $300 million in its Network Disaster Recovery program over the past ten years.


Since 1990, the NDR team has been activated 12 times in response to disasters, including restoring service after south Florida's Hurricane Andrew in 1992; the Northridge, California earthquake in 1994; tornadoes in Oklahoma in 1999; the September 11 attacks on New York City's World Trade Center; and the wildfires in San Diego in 2003.


http://www.att.com

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BellSouth Offers IP VPN Class of Service Options

BellSouth introduced Network VPN Class of Service, a feature that enables enterprise customers to assign higher levels of priority to critical data traffic traveling on BellSouth's managed IP-VPN network.
The service ensures traffic prioritization from the customer premises all the way through BellSouth's core MPLS network, ensuring hierarchical routing of data. Customers can designate traffic into four different classes: real-time, interactive, priority business and best effort.


BellSouth's Managed Network VPN offers site-to-site connectivity, links remote users to headquarters information and provides Internet access on a single, secure platform. BellSouth said the new Class of Service option paves the way for additional convergence by allowing enterprises to assign high priority to VoIP, video and imaging applications.

http://www.bellsouth.com

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Nortel Names Gary Kunis as CTO

Nortel Networks named Gary Kunis as CTO.
Until 2002, Kunis was the Chief Science Officer at Cisco Systems. Earlier in his career, Kunis was involved in the design, implementation and operation of large scale data and telecommunications networks for several U.S. government agency programs, including the Department of Defense, U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, NASA, as well as for civilian agencies while working for
the Boeing Company.


In addition, Nortel announced that Brian McFadden, a 26-year Nortel veteran and the current CTO, has been appointed to the role of Chief Research Officer (CRO).
http://www.nortel.com

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SBC Outlines IP Video Architecture for Project Lightspeed

SBC awarded a $195 million, multi-year contract to Scientific-Atlanta to provide IP-based video equipment for Project Lightspeed in its 13-state service area. Scientific-Atlanta will supply IP video equipment for an IP video operations center (VOC), two national IP video super hub offices (SHO) and 41 IP video hub offices (VHO). Scientific-Atlanta will provide encoders, satellite dishes, video routers, and professional services as part of the contract. Scientific-Atlanta will also provide professional services related to the initial design and builds of the VOC, SHOs and VHOs.






The IP video operations center will serve as a command center, monitoring the availability and quality of all of the content traveling through SBC's network using Scientific-Atlanta's ROSA Element Manager system. The super hub offices (SHOs) receive, process, and encode video and TV programming from satellite feeds into IP packets. This content is then sent to the video hub offices (VHOs), typically one per major metropolitan area, via SBC's national IP-based network. In the VHOs are servers that have the electronic intelligence necessary to deliver IP video-on-demand, over-the-air TV programming, interactive applications, etc. The VHOs will also acquire and encode local video content.


SBC described the contract as another major step forward for Project Lightspeed, which is slated to begin delivering services under the U-verse brand in late 2005 or early 2006.http:/www.sbc.com
http://www.scientificatlanta.com

• In November 2004, SBC announced a $400 million, 10-year agreement with Microsoft to provide next-generation television services using the new Microsoft IPTV Edition software platform.



• In October 2004, SBC announced a five-year, approximately $1.7 billion primary supplier agreement with Alcatel to provide network equipment and video system integration services for Project Lightspeed. Alcatel's network equipment includes core network access, aggregation and switching equipment platforms that will provide the Internet Protocol, packet-based network technologies that connect the customers to the video hub offices. Additionally, Alcatel will work with SBC – and now Scientific-Atlanta – to ensure seamless video systems integration.

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China's State Council Selects Alcatel NGN

China's State Council Information Office (SCIO) selected Alcatel's Next Generation Network (NGN) solution to upgrade and optimize its communication network.


Alcatel Shanghai Bell will provide the Alcatel 5020 Softswitch to build a nation-wide next-generation network for SCIO, covering more than 50 branches in major cities and provinces including Beijing, Shanghai, Xinjiang and Tibet. The new network will be deployed in conjunction with the Alcatel OmniPCX Enterprise, an integrated communications platform that enables traditional voice telephone systems and IP telephony, as well as user-centric unified communications applications. Upon completion of the project in June 2005, SCIO staff will be able to access new services, including video conferencing, and voice virtual private network (VPN), any time, any place via any terminal, such as the PC, softphone, desk phone, mobile handset and PDAs. Financial terms were not disclosed.
http://www.alcatel.com
http://www.alcatel-sbell.com.cn

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European Commission Recommends Leased Line Price Ceilings

In a bid to boost competition, the European Commission is recommending that its Member States adopt price ceilings for wholesale leased lines that reflect the real cost of supplying them. A report from the Commission recommends "best current practices" in wholesale leased line pricing and provides competitive market benchmark prices for the entire EU.


The report finds that the EU single market is distorted by substantial variations in leased line prices. For a 2 Mbps line, 5 km long, the price in the most expensive Member State is seven times higher than in the cheapest.


"Leased lines are fundamental building blocks for the development of a world class high-speed communications infrastructure in Europe. Competitive pricing of leased lines will expand the range and cut the costs of electronic communications services that are made available to business users and end-users across the EU, and in particular to small and medium-sized enterprises, which have much to gain from lower prices for business services offered by operators making use of these inputs," said Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding.


The new price recommendations cover wholesale leased lines at 64 kbps, 2 Mbps, 34 Mbps and 155 Mbps and for line lengths of up to 2 km, up to 5 km, up to 15 km and up to 50 km.
http://www.eu.int

• In January 2005, the European Commission recommended that binding delivery deadlines should be introduced for the wholesale leased lines needed by suppliers of high-speed electronic communications services. Leased line delivery times vary substantially across the EU: for 2 Mbps lines, the delivery time in the slowest Member State is five times longer than in the fastest.

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NetCentrex Reports 2004 Revenue of EUR 26M, up 30%

NetCentrex, a supplier of softswitching solutions, revenue growth of more than 30% for 2004, with consolidated results totaling over EUR26 Million (US$34 Million). In addition, orders grew more than 80% between 2003 and 2004.


The company said the growth came from new markets such as Eastern and Central Europe, as well as an acceleration of triple play deployments in Western Europe, where its customers are activating more than 4,000 VoIP lines per day. A list of new customers includes Eircom (the incumbent in Ireland), Tiscali, Telefonica Deutschland, HomeNet Communications (a U.S. provider of integrated triple play voice, video and data services), Al-Pi (a Spanish service provider), and Iceland Telecom.
http://www.netcentrex.net

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Taiwan's Chunghwa Reaches 3.1 Million DSL Subscribers

Chunghwa Telecom, the incumbent operator in Taiwan, had 3.1 million ADSL users as of 31-Dec 31, 2004, a 26.6% YoY increase. Including dial-up, the total number of Internet subscribers was about 3.8 million. The company is expecting another 650,000 of net new ADSL subscribers in 2005.


Overall, Chunghwa Telecom reported total revenues for year 2004 was NT$185.2 billion (US$, a 1.5% YoY increase. Of this, 38.9% was from fixed-line services, 38.2% from wireless services and 21.2% from Internet and data services. Internet and data revenue for year 2004 increased by 10.5% YoY to approximately NT$39.3 billion.


The total number of mobile subscribers was 8.2 million, a 0.9% YoY decrease that was due to an effort to limit the number of inactive users by lowering the percentage of prepaid subscribers.


Total fixed line revenues for year 2004 declined by 7.0% to NT$72.1 billion, mainly due to fixed-line competition, mobile substitution and a continuous migration of dial-up internet subscribers to ADSL. Chunghwa's total fixed line subscriber base stood at approximately 13.2 million as year end 2004, a 0.8% YoY increase.


http://www.cht.com.tw/

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