Former FCC Chairman Michael Powell Joins Providence Equity Partners

Providence Equity Partners, a private venture capital firm, has hired
Michael K. Powell, former Chairman of the FCC, as a senior advisor. He will advise the firm on technology and regulatory issues in the media, communications and information industries, on selected new investment opportunities, and on certain of the firm's existing investments. The firm said Powell has chosen to affiliate exclusively with Providence Equity Partners in the private equity field.


Michael K. Powell spent over seven years as an FCC Commissioner, and was Chairman of the FCC from January 2001 to March 2005. Before being named an FCC Commissioner in 1997, Mr. Powell was Chief of Staff of the Antitrust Division in the Department of Justice.


Since 1990, Providence Equity has invested in more than 80 communications and media companies. Some of its past portfolio investments have included Allstream (formerly AT&T Canada), Brooks Fiber Properties, Casema (a Dutch cable operator), eircom (the incumbent fixed line operator in Ireland that was privatized in 2001), Kabel Deutschland, PanAm Sat, Telcordia Technologies, Warner Music Group, Western Wireless, and Yankee Entertainment and Sports (YES), among others.
http://www.provequity.com

• In July, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), a premier venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California, announced the hiring of Former Secretary of State Colin Powell as a strategic limited partner. Colin Powell is the father of Michael Powell.

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Qwest Continues to Negotiate with Union

Talks between Qwest Communications and the Communications Workers of America continued over the weekend. The current labor contract expired on Sunday morning. CWA represents Qwest workers in 13 states: Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Idaho, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. http://www.cwa-union.org/http://www.qwest.com

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Blockbuster Cites Movie Rental Malaise

Shares in Blockbuster tumbled last week to historic lows after the company reported that its Q2 revenue decreased 1.6% to $1.40 billion from $1.42 billion for the second quarter of 2004. Net loss for the second quarter of 2005 totaled $57.2 million, or $0.31 per share.


Blockbuster said its new online movie rental business is starting to show results, but that it is feeling "the impact of the
declining store-based video rental industry."http://www.blockbuster.com

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Agilent to Sell Chip Division

Agilent Technologies has reached a deal to sell its semiconductor division to an investor group led by Silver Lake Partners and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, according to various media reports. An announcement is expected on Monday, following the release of the company's quarterly results.

http://www.agilent.com

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FCC Vows No Tolerance for USF Violations

The FCC issued $1.5 million in fines to two telecom carriers for apparent violations to of the Universal Service Fund (USF) and regulatory fee rules. In a statement, the FCC said it was demonstrating a "no tolerance policy for any carrier that fails to pay its required USF and other regulatory obligations. Apparent violations like these distort the marketplace by causing carriers in compliance with the requirements to carry a disproportionate share of the costs of funding these programs and frustrate the purposes for which Congress and the Commission established the programs."


The two carrier being fined are Telecom Management, Inc., and OCMC, Inc.


The USF program ensures that consumers in all regions of the nation have access to affordable, quality telecommunications services. Regulatory fees distribute the cost of certain regulatory activities. Under the Communications Act and the Commission's rules, every telecommunications carrier that provides interstate service must contribute to these programs on an equitable basis.
http://www.fcc.gov

• In June 2005, the FCC launched a formal inquiry into the management, administration and oversight of the Universal Service Fund, which helps provide affordable phone service in rural areas, fund Internet access and telecommunications equipment in the schools and libraries, bring telemedicine services to rural areas, and assist low-income families with their phone bills. Since 1997, the Universal Service Administrative Company, or USAC, which administers the fund, has disbursed approximately $30.3 billion from the fund. Money collected for the USF has been declining for some time. The FCC has been considering changes to the way it collects money for the USF. Currently consumers pay a percentage of their long distance service bill each month. The FCC is considering switching to a monthly flat fee based on telephone numbers.



• Every year, the nation's universal service fund (USF) pays out approximately $673 million for low-income programs and about $3.0 billion to support high-cost rural services.


• In February 2005, a group of consumer organizations called the "Keep USF Fair Coalition" filed a "Fair Share Plan" for Universal Service Fund (USF) collection with the FCC. he coalition argues that under the current revenue system, high volume long distance users pay the most, while those who use less pay less. It believes the new system under consideration would shift the burden of paying for Universal Service to those who use the system the least. The "Fair Share Plan" proposes to expand the USF contribution base to include all revenues derived from telecommunications, including services using VoIP. It proposes to establish a contribution factor cap to be applied to the revenue-based approach; carriers would still be assessed based on revenues up to that cap amount, and would still have the right to charge their end users a USF recovery charge not to exceed the percentage they are charged. The balance of the funds needed to support USF would come from a numbers-based charge.

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Sprint Nextel Completes Merger

Sprint and Nextel Communications completed their merger, creating a larger company with extensive nationwide spectrum, more than 44 million wireless subscribers with the highest ARPU in the U.S. On a "pro forma" basis, Sprint Nextel reported revenues of $40.8 billion for the year ending December 31, 2004. The combined company has approximately 80,000 employees with its corporate headquarters in Reston, Virginia, and its operational headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas.


Gary Forsee is the president and chief executive officer of Sprint Nextel and Tim Donahue is executive chairman of the combined company.


Sprint Nextel has begun the process of separating the operations of Sprint's local telecommunications business, including consumer, business and wholesale operations, and will seek regulatory approvals to spin off the local telecommunications business to Sprint Nextel shareholders in a tax-free transaction, which is expected to be completed in 2006. The local telecommunications business, led by Daniel Hesse, chief executive officer - designate, will have its own management team and board of directors, consisting of an equal number of designees from Sprint and Nextel. The local telecommunications business, which has approximately 7.5 million local access lines in 18 states and as of June 30, 2005 had revenues of more than $6 billion during the prior 12 months, will be the largest independent local telecommunications company in the United States. It will have commercial operating relationships with Sprint Nextel for mobile and long-distance network services, and will receive certain transitional services, including corporate support functions. Its corporate headquarters will be in the Kansas City metropolitan area.
http://www.sprint.com

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Sony Ericsson Releases Walkman Phones in North America

Sony Ericsson announced the release of its first Walkman phone in North America.




The new W800 combines a Bluetooth-enabled GSM phone with a digital music player, an FM radio and a two-megapixel auto-focus camera with an active lens cover. It ships with a 512 MB Memory Stick PRO Duo, allowing it to hold approximately 125 music tracks, or 10-12 full length CDs, from an existing music collection. The device is compatible with MP3 and AAC formats and includes software for transferring music CDs onto the phone via a PC.
http://www.sonyericsson.com

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TIA Lobbies for Federal Funding for Telecom R&D

the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) will establish a sixth division whose sole focus is increasing federal funding for communications technology research. In 2004, the association convened a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Council to advocate for increased federal funding for communications-related basic research in the face of sustained reductions in industry research spending and an intensely competitive global environment. Participation in the CTO Council has grown to nearly 30 TIA member company CTOs and senior research executives, and the council has produced a white paper and timely recommendations for addressing this critical issue.

http://www.tiaonline.org

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Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to Offer 6 Mbps Link

NASA successfully launched the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on August 12 on a mission to provide a high-resolution survey of the planet. The spacecraft is designed to transmit data to Earth at rates as high as 6 Mbps -- ten times higher than previous Mars orbiters -- from a distance of 100 million kilometers (62 million miles). NASA expects the Orbiter to transmit more than 34 Terabytes of data over its two-year primary science mission. The orbiter's radio operates in the X-band of the radio spectrum, at a frequency of around 8 Gigahertz.


The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will also test a Ka-band (32 Gigahertz) telecommunications package, which allows much higher data rates to be transmitted and could be used for future missions.http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/overview/

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Siemens Invests in Dune Networks for Scalable Switching Fabric

Siemens Venture Capital has made an equity investment in Dune Networks, a developer of traffic management and scalable switching fabrics. Financial terms were not disclosed.


Dune Networks, which is based in Sunnyvale, California with R&D in Israel, offers a Scalable Architecture for Networking Devices (SAND) chipset provides a non-blocking switching fabric, ingress/egress traffic management and scheduling. The design allows equipment to scale in terms of port rates, port densities and service types, without requiring changes to the core switching fabric and traffic management functions. At the rate level, pipe rates scale from 10Gbps to 40Gbps, 100Gbps and beyond, all interconnecting through the same fabric. At the pipe count level, the number of pipes in the system scale from a single pipe to tens, hundreds and up to 2048 pipes. Dune Networks said its scheduled-fabric chipset would be able to provide backwards and forwards compatibility for diverse services, including TDM, ATM and Ethernet.
http://www.dunenetworks.com
http://www.siemens.com

• In June 2004, released a 20Gbps and a 10Gbps full-duplex traffic manager device as part of its Scalable Architecture of Networking Devices (SAND) chipset architecture. The devices feature one or two SPI4.2 interfaces and a switch fabric interface. Dune Networks said its traffic manager devices provide a unique ability to interconnect and communicate via the fabric interface allows any system of any size to provide end-to-end rate and weight guarantees for packet flows. Such an arrangement enables end-to-end rate guarantees of packet flows across a complete system and not just locally within a line card. This scheme enables the system to provide specific Committed Information Rate (CIR) and Peak Information Rate (PIR/EIR) for a packet flow from an ingress port (e.g. access port) to an egress port (e.g. uplink port).



• Dune Networks is headed by Eyal Dagan (CEO), who previously was a co-founder and CEO of Charlotte's Web Networks, a privately held company focused on developing high-end core equipment for next generation optical networks. Before founding Charlotte's Web, Eyal was the Vice President of R&D for the Switching Division of MRV Communications

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Nokia Powers Vodafone New Zealand's 3G Network

Vodafone New Zealand is launching 3G enabled services. In May 2004, Vodafone announced that it had chosen Nokia to supply its 3G network infrastructure to Vodafone Australia and Vodafone New Zealand. Nokia is providing the complete 3G core and radio networks, supplying, deploying and testing the equipment in the field. Nokia is also providing 3G network management, monitoring and maintenance services in an arrangement known as Managed Services.
http://www.nokia.com

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Effnet Licenses IP Header Compression to Qualcomm

Effnet has licensed its IP Header Compression software to QUALCOMM for future integration into select chipsets for CDMA2000 1xEV-DO and WCDMA (UMTS) products.


The Effnet Header Compression software helps provide efficient delivery of Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) services over CDMA2000 1xEV-DO and WCDMA networks.
http://www.effnet.com

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Siemens Foresees Transport Capacity Gains Enabled by GMPLS

Siemens predicts that future transport networks will be able to transfer up to 30% more data than at present simply through better capacity utilization enabled by GMPLS. The increased efficiency of transport networks is possible thanks to intelligent software, which utilizes possible synergies in the installation of standby capacities to create a safety buffer against supply system outages. This enable operators to use network capacity to a greater extent with the same costs,.

Software being developed by Siemens uses GMPLS protocols to enable individual transport network elements to intercommunicate automatically via the data path. In the future, this will enable new transport layer connections to be established in the same way as today at the IP level. Siemens and its partner Sycamore Networks already offers a first GMPLS solution.

http://www.siemens.com/index.jsp?sdc_p=cz3s5uopn1031735fl1mi1031685&sdc_contentid=1287397

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