BellSouth: 180 Central Offices on Generator Power

BellSouth reported that 180 of its central office locations are currently running on generator due to a loss of commercial power in affected areas. The company has 750,000 customer lines in the areas most heavily damaged areas by Hurricane Katrina.BellSouth said it is still assessing the full impact on the network and its customers' operations, and as a result, it is too early to project the total magnitude of destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina. "This is not a normal hurricane restoration situation," said Bill Smith, Chief Technology Officer....

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Walt Disney and Kudelski to Develop Push VOD for Europe

Walt Disney Television International (WDTV-I) Ventures & Business Development Group and the Kudelski Group announced a joint venture to develop and market turnkey Push Video-On-Demand (VOD) and Digital Video Recorder (DVR) services. The Push VOD solution would run on standard satellite, cable, terrestrial and IP Digital Video Recorder hardware platforms, and will be made available to digital television operators worldwide (excluding the US, Canada and Japan).The system will offer a selection of movie and other TV content delivered to a STB...

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Skype Cites Growing Developer Community

Skype announced that more than 400 hardware and software products have been created so far by the more than 100 developers using its Application Programming Interface (APIs), which is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.Skype has awarded a first prize of EUR 2000 to Jyve in its first developer competition for a plug-in that lets webmasters enable Skype and call forwarding, presence, browser synchronization and auto-responding features on their sites. Khaos Labs received a special mention for its Free ActiveS COM wrapper, which has been used by...

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Cavalier Telephone Selects Amino's MPEG-4 Set-top

Cavalier Telephone, a CLEC based in Virginia with 180,000 lines, has chosen Amino's AmiNET124 set-top box for its IPTV deployment. The contract is part of a substantial multi-year agreement and deployment will commence in October 2005. Further details of the contract, including value and quantities, have not been disclosed. The AmiNET124 is Amino's first single-chip IP set-top box which supports the new MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) video compression standard....

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Hong Kong Broadband Network Deploys Cisco ROADMs

Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN) is expanding its coverage and capacity with a Cisco IP Next Generation Network (IP NGN), using Cisco ROADM (Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer) technology together with HKBN's existing ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform (MSTP) optical core. The expanded optical core will assist HKBN in achieving its goals of increasing the scope of its service offerings and expanding its network coverage to 80% of homes in Hong Kong. ROADM enables service providers to add, drop or pass through any combination of...

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airBand Names Mark F. Spagnolo CEO

airBand Communications, a fixed wireless broadband connectivity provider based in Dallas, named Mark F. Spagnolo as the company's new president and CEO. Spagnolo most recently led Broadwing Communications. He also served as CEO of UUNET.airBand said it is serving more than 2,000 businesses, including Continental Airlines, Fujitsu, Solomon Smith Barney, The Staubach Company, and WebMD. http://www.airband....

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MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance and the ATM Forum Complete Merger

The MFA Forum, the new organization formed through the merger of the MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance and the ATM Forum, held its first meeting last month in Ottawa. The merged group will focus on optimizing and interworking the three primary telecoms transport technologies -- ATM, MPLS & Frame Relay -- in a unified and streamlined technical committee and on representing the industry with a single voice."The first meeting of the MFA Forum was a great success," said Andrew G. Malis of Tellabs, and president and chairman of the MFA Forum. "With...

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Harmonic Introduces New HD Multi-Codec Encoder

Harmonic introduced its new DiviCom MV 3500 encoding platform, a multi-format high definition (HD) encoder supporting either MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), SMPTE VC-1 or MPEG-2. The full-featured DiviCom 3500 encoding platform, which builds on Harmonic's existing lines of multi-codec standard definition encoders, provides the performance, video quality and interoperability -- from the headend to the subscriber premises -- that operators need to offer a rich...

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Canon Launches New Network-ready Video Cameras

Canon introduced two network-ready cameras featuring two-way audio features, built-in servers and optical zoom lenses. Both the new Canon VB-C50FSi Fixed Network Camera and the new Canon VB-C50i/VB-C50iR Pan/Tilt/Zoom Network Camera feature an advanced 26X Optical Zoom Lens and a 12X Digital Zoom and 640-by-480-pixel resolution video with up to 30 frames-per-second quality. The two cameras use a quarter-inch, 340,000-effective-pixel CCD for high-quality...

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3Com Teams with Nuasis to Offer IP Contact Center

3Com introduced an IP Contact Center module that routes customer contacts -- phone, email, web and fax -- to customer service agents located anywhere on an enterprise network. The 3Com IP Contact Center product is licensed from Nuasis.The 3Com IP Contact Center module is an IP-based application geared for medium and large enterprise customers. The module consolidates multiple contact center systems such as legacy automatic call distributors (ACDs), interactive voice response units (IVRs), and computer telephony integration (CTI) components on a...

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Senator Sununu Scheduled to Speak at Fall 2005 VON

Senator John Sununu (R-NH) has been scheduled to speak at Fall 2005 VON in Boston on Monday, September 19th.Last year, Senator Sununu proposed the "VOIP Regulatory Freedom Act of 2004," which aimed at encouraging the growth of VoIP by definitively classifying it as an information service and limiting potential state regulations. http://www.von....

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Ericsson Unveils Latest IP-PBX

Ericsson has launched a stand-alone version of its MX-ONE IP communications platform - a full-featured IP-PBX system for enterprises deploying a converged voice and data network from day one.The latest release of the Ericsson MX-ONE system serves up to 7,000 users with integrated mobility and extensive collaboration features, including instant Messaging, corporate directories and presence profile management. It can be integrated with standard enterprise software such as Microsoft Office and IBM Lotus Notes. Ericsson said analog, digital, mobile...

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Microsoft Acquires Teleo for VoIP / MSN Integration

Microsoft has acquired Teleo, a developer of VoIP software and services for the consumer market. Teleo, a San Francisco-based start-up, had launched a beta application that integrates with Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer to provide a click-to-call VoIP connectivity to cell phones, regular phones or other PCs. The company was founded in 2003. Financial terms were not disclosed.Microsoft said it will combine the Teleo technology with the existing VoIP investments of MSN to further develop products and services for consumers.http://teleo...

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Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom Tops 3.36 Million ADSL Lines

Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan's incumbent telecom operator, had 3.36 million ADSL subscribers as of 30-June-2005, a 23.3% increase year-over-year. Chunghwa added 160,000 subscribers in the second quarter of 2005.The total number of internet subscribers was nearly 3.96mn as of 30-June-2005, a 7.1% increase year-over-year. In the second quarter of 2005, Chunghwa added 91,000 new subscribers.At the end of June 2005, mobile subscribers remained at 8.1 million, as the company said it continued to clean up inactive prepaid subscribers to increase the...

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Widevine Releases Cypher 3.0 for Video Content Security

Widevine Technologies introduced Cypher 3.0, its third generation content security suite with new levels of reliability, flexibility and ease-of-use for telco, cable, satellite and internet services providers.Cypher 3.0 now guarantees continuous availability for any type of content, on any device, at any time -- a critical requirement for operators who differentiate on service quality. The systems offers expanded ecosystem support for several new standard and high-definition set-top boxes and PVRs from Amino, ASUS, HwaCom and Motorola. The new...

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Verizon Wins FiOS TV Approval in Florida County

Verizon was awarded a 15-year video franchise by the Manatee County Commission in Florida. Verizon now has the authority to offer FiOS TV to the 235,000 residents in the unincorporated portions of the county. The company said this is the largest population to be served by a Verizon franchise agreement to date.So far, Verizon has placed 1.8 million feet of fiber thus far to serve Manatee County. Verizon will extend FiOS TV to additional geographic areas within the county as wire centers are completed.In addition, Verizon said the Manatee County...

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