EMBARQ Rolls out "Smart Connect" Business FMC Service

Embarq, the fifth largest local communications company in the U.S., introduced a "Smart Connect" service that allows calls to move seamlessly between a business' wireless and wireline networks -- without interrupting the call. EMBARQ began its tiered rollout of this new technology by launching in Las Vegas, Orlando and Charlottesville, Va.



The general capability can be enhanced further with the EMBARQ "Smart Connect Plus", which enables calls to automatically move between the EMBARQ wireless network and the on-premise Wi-Fi network, whichever is strongest, without manual transfer of the call. This helps to reduce wireless costs, and improve coverage and call quality. EMBARQ also said its smart network connection will help minimize dropped calls, allow for better management of wireless charges and provide efficient integration of mobile workers.



EMBARQ Smart Connect will work with any wireless device and network service provider.



EMBARQ Smart Connect Plus employs the Starcom Pocket PC 6700 phone allowing automatic moves between Wi-Fi and wireless networks. This handset combines Evolution Data Optimized (EVDO) and Wi-Fi data functionality.

http://www.embarq.com

• EMBARQ is using NewStep Networks' fixed-mobile convergence platform.

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Cantata Integrates Media Server with Sonus' IMS Architecture

Cantata's SnowShore IP Media Server has been integrated with Sonus' IMS-ready architecture to perform the Media Resource Function (MRF) and facilitate the seamless delivery of subscriber-focused services and applications that enrich the communication experience. The integration brings together Sonus' ASX Feature Server and IMX Multimedia Application Platform with Cantata's software-based SnowShore IP Media Server, enabling the delivery of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and VoiceXML (vXML)-based applications through scripting capabilities and multimedia processing.

http://www.cantata.comhttp://www.sonusnet.com

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Alcatel Posts Quarterly Revenue of EUR 3.335 billion, 1.4% Growth, 34% Margin

Alcatel reported Q3 revenue of EUR 3.335 billion, up 1.4% compared with EUR 3.289 billion (up 2.7% at constant EUR/USD exchange rate) in the same period last year. The gross margin was 33.6%. Operating profit amounted to EUR 258 million, a 7.7% operating margin.



Third Quarter Business Update:

Segment Breakdown	Third Qtr	Third Qtr	Second Qtr
In EUR million	2006	2005	2006
Revenues
Fixed Communications	1,363	1,282	1,363
Mobile Communications	994	1,092	1,007
Private Communications	1,001	928	1,034
Other & Eliminations	(23)	(13)	(20)
Total	3,335	3,289	3,384
Income from Operations
Fixed Communications	151	121	133
Mobile Communications	64	116	80
Private Communications	50	64	51
Other & Eliminations	(7)	(23)	(1)
Total	258	278	263

Serge Tchuruk, Alcatel's Chairman and CEO, stated: "The third quarter once again confirmed Alcatel's leading position in the transformation of networks toward a high bandwidth, full IP architecture providing enhanced triple play services to end users and reducing operating costs for the carriers.



"In the wireline sector, this translated into increasing traction for our IP, access, optical and applications solutions in the carrier and enterprise markets where Alcatel's revenues (excluding the seasonal submarine activity) grew by over 10%. The strong inroads of Alcatel in the IP routing market were again highlighted by a near doubling of revenues over the same period last year. Likewise, terrestrial optics as well as enterprise applications revenues grew by over 20% and 30% respectively, with Alcatel's product portfolio clearly outpacing competition.



"This strong performance was partially offset by a decline in our wireless revenues, whose annualized growth had averaged 25% in eight successive quarters, and where the evolution toward IP technologies and new video services is still at an early stage."http://www.alcatel.com

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Lucent Posts Quarterly Revenue of $2.56 billion, 5% Growth, 44% Margin

Lucent Technologies reported revenues of $2.56 billion for its fourth fiscal quarter, an increase of 25 percent sequentially and an increase of 5 percent from the year-ago quarter. Net income was $371 million or 7 cents per diluted share. These results compare with net income of $79 million or 2 cents per diluted share in the third quarter of fiscal 2006, and net income of $372 million or 7 cents per diluted share in the year-ago quarter.



"We are pleased to have ended what's been a challenging year with a strong quarter. As anticipated, we posted our highest quarterly revenue period for the year, driven primarily by mobility deployments in North America, and we recorded a gross margin of 44 percent. In addition to the rollout of our EV-DO Rev A and HSDPA solutions during the quarter, we also continued to convert IMS trials into contracts, announcing that KPN, The Netherlands' largest service provider, had selected Lucent's IP Multimedia Subsystem solution (IMS) to replace its legacy public switched-network. Lucent Worldwide Services, was also chosen as the prime integrator for the migration to KPN's All-IP network," said Lucent Technologies Chairman and CEO Patricia Russo.



Some highlights:

• Gross margin was 44 percent of revenues as compared with 41 percent in the third quarter of fiscal 2006 and 46 percent in the year-ago quarter.



• On a sequential basis, revenues in the United States increased 40 percent to $1.77 billion, and revenues outside the United States increased 1 percent to $789 million. Compared with the year-ago quarter, U.S. revenues increased by 17 percent and revenues outside the U.S. decreased by 14 percent.



• Mobility Access revenues were $1.277 billion, up 54% from Q3.



• Multimedia Network Solutions were $440 million, down 3% from Q3.



• Converged Core revenues were $157 million, up 7% from Q3.



• Service revenues were $644 million, up 11% from Q3.



• Lucent continues to expect the merger with Alcatel to close by the end of the calendar year.

http://www.lucent.com

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BellSouth Reaches 3.4 Million DSL Users

BellSouth reported Q3 revenue of $5.2 billion, up 2.9 percent compared to the same quarter of 2005. Income from continuing operations was approximately $1.1 billion, up 29.6 percent compared to the same quarter of the previous year. Earnings per share (EPS) from continuing operations of 58 cents, up 31.8 percent compared to the third quarter of 2005. Normalized EPS from continuing operations of 65 cents increased 27.5 percent compared to the third quarter of 2005.



Some highlights from Q3 2006:

• Communications Group revenues were $4.7 billion, a 2.4 percent increase over the third quarter of 2005. Adjusting for the one-time customer credits of $44 million issued during the third quarter of 2005, revenue growth was 1.4 percent.
  
  
• Network data revenues exceeded $1.3 billion, a 12.8 percent increase over the third quarter of 2005, due to improvements in both retail and wholesale data services. Retail data revenues grew 19.5 percent year-over-year driven by retail DSL revenues, while wholesale data revenues grew 3.3 percent as growth in wireless transport more than offset declines in general transport services.
  
  
• BellSouth added 176,000 new DSL customers, reaching a total of more than 3.4 million.
  
  
• BellSouth added 118,000 long distance subscribers, giving it 7.6 million long distance customers representing approximately 63 percent of its mass-market customer base.
  
  
• Nearly 65,000 customers added DIRECTV service to their bundle, resulting in a total of 756,000 customers.
  
  
• As of Sept. 30, 2006, total access lines were 19.0 million down 6.9 percent year-over-year.
  
  
• For the quarter, total access lines declined 301,000. Retail residential access lines declined 135,000 reflecting losses to wireless substitution and cable telephony service. Retail small business access line gains were 20,000, offset by a decline in retail large business access lines of 13,000 lines. Wholesale lines declined 174,000 compared to June 30, 2006.

http://www.bellsouth.com

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VeriSign Provides ENUM Services for AOL Wireless Messages

AOL will use VeriSign's ENUM Data Access Service for the delivery of messaging traffic to wireless devices within North America. ENUM is the emerging standard that uses the domain name system (DNS) to map telephone numbers to Web addresses or uniform resource locators (URLs).



"AOL's use of the VeriSign ENUM Data Access service is a strong statement of the power of ENUM in action and VeriSign's ability to deliver on new technologies for the convergence of all types of communications," said Bill Wolfe Senior Vice President of Communications at VeriSign.



Delivery of messages from IP devices to mobile devices requires a comprehensive directory service to map each telephone number to the service provider owner or subscriber. In addition to telephone number mapping, the service also requires a real-time check to determine if the number has been ported to another service provider.

http://www.verisign.com

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Nortel Demonstrates Uplink Collaborative MIMO

Nortel demonstrated wireless transmission using Uplink Collaborative MIMO, a technique that could enable operators to serve up to double the number of mobile broadband subscribers supported in a cell site as current wireless technologies allow. Developed by Nortel, Collaborative MIMO is part of the WiMAX industry standard and is also being proposed for 3GPP WCDMA Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and 3GPP2 CDMA EV-DO Rev-C standards.



"Uplink Collaborative MIMO creates a technological disruption that offers revolutionary improvement in wireless network capacity and provides a clear path to 4G Mobile Broadband - of which WiMAX is the first technology," said John Hoadley, chief technology officer, Mobility and Converged Core Networks, Nortel.



The demonstration at Nortel's Advanced Wireless Lab in Ottawa, combined Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MIMO) antennas at both the cell site and on 4G devices with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission technology. Nortel said the combination of these two technologies offers the ability to deliver the highest network bandwidth and greatest spectral efficiency capabilities at the lowest cost.



With OFDM, a single channel within a spectrum band is divided into multiple, smaller sub-carriers that transmit information simultaneously without interference.



MIMO allows multiple data streams to be transmitted at the same time and on the same sub-carriers through interference-free MIMO spatial channels. Due to unique spatial channels that result for each antenna path, interference between data streams is reduced. As a result, OFDM-MIMO substantially increases the bandwidth and spectral efficiency.



Nortel describes Uplink Collaborative MIMO as a further enhancement that enables the use of the same channel sub-carriers by multiple devices and subscribers - effectively allowing them to share the same sub-carrier without interference. Without Collaborative MIMO, the traffic being carried on a single sub-carrier would not be maximized across multiple subscribers. The result would be that the traffic would be severely limited, preventing users from having a true broadband experience and limiting VoIP capacity such that conversations would be unintelligible.

http://www.nortel.com

• In March 2005, Nortel was the first company to demonstrate OFDM-MIMO at 37 Mbps peak data rates in 5 MHz of spectrum in the downlink, with the transfer of a 128 MB file in just 30 seconds.

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Avaya's Quarterly Revenue Rises 5%

Avaya's fourth fiscal quarter 2006 revenues increased five percent to $1.364 billion compared to $1.296 billion in the same period last year. Net income was $48 million or 10 cents per diluted share.



Year-over-year revenues increased in both the company's products and services segments, as well as across all geographic regions. Worldwide product sales rose nine percent compared to the same period last year, with IP line shipments increasing in the high 20 percent range.



"We finished fiscal 2006 with a strong quarter," said Lou D'Ambrosio, president and CEO, Avaya. "The transition by enterprises to IP telephony and Intelligent Communications continued to drive growth in product sales and IP line shipments."http://www.avaya.com

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D-Link Ships 200Mbps PowerLine Network Kit

D-Link began shipping 200Mbps PowerLine Network Kit that lets users build a home network using existing electrical wiring in their homes. The kit contains two PowerLine adapters, Ethernet cabling and an installation disk. The suggested retail price is $219.99. http://www.dlink.com

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Ikanos Chairman and CEO Steps Down

Ikanos Communications announced the resignation of its chairman and chief executive officer, Rajesh Vashist, effective immediately. No reason was given. Daniel K Atler, the Company's chief financial officer, will assume the role of interim CEO while a search is conducted for Mr. Vashist's replacement. In addition, G. Venkatesh has been named as executive chairman of the Ikanos Board of Directors. Mr. Cory Sindelar, currently vice president of finance, will assume the role of interim chief financial officer during this period.

http://www.ikanos.com

• Earlier this month, Ikanos Communications cut its revenue expectation for Q3 and outlook for Q4 citing product delays and weakness in its markets. Ikanos now expects Q3 revenue approximately $36 to $37 million, compared to previously issued guidance of between $40 to $43 million.

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Cisco Systems Names New CIO

Cisco Systems named Rebecca Jacoby as Senior Vice President & Chief Information Officer (CIO), effective immediately. Jacoby was previously Vice President, Customer Service and Operational Systems, Cisco Systems. Jacoby will report to Randy Pond, Senior Vice President of Operations, Processes and Systems.

http://www.cisco.com

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T-Mobile Tests GSM/Wi-Fi Service in Seattle

T-Mobile USA began testing a fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) service in Seattle that lets callers roam between its GSM network and a Wi-Fi network. The trial service, which is priced at $20 per month for subscribers with monthly packages of $40 or more, lets users make unlimited, nationwide calls using a home Wi-Fi router without using airtime plan minutes. It also enables unlimited calling from T-Mobile hotspot locations.

http://www.theonlyphoneyouneed.com/

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Deutsche Telekom Forms T-Service Unit, Consolidating Customer Support

Deutsche Telekom announced the formation of a new "T-Service" business unit that will handle all customer service functions, including call centers and T-Punkt outlets. Deutsche Telekom will be hiring around 4,000 additional people, and around 35,000 employees will be added from T-Com.



"We expect the unions to work with us," stated Heinz Klinkhammer, Chief Human Resources Officer of Deutsche Telekom. Under the current framework conditions, such as the rapid pace of technological change, the expansion of regulation and the disproportionately high costs of labor, it is not economically viable to continue employing the same number of people at the same conditions in Germany in future. In the field of customer service and call centers, for example, market remuneration is between 30 and 50 percent below the salaries Deutsche Telekom pays. "We can only safeguard these jobs in the long term if we succeed in consistently aligning our employment and remuneration structures with the market," said Klinkhammer and appealed to the unions to support the plans.



Deutsche Telekom is also seeking to increase the number of weekly working hours.



The previously announced cuts of 32,000 jobs by 2008, which Deutsche Telekom is implementing without compulsory redundancies at a cost of more than EUR 3 billion, remain unaffected by these discussions.

http://www.telekom.de

• In November 2005, Deutsche Telekom announced a major staff reduction program that will see employment levels fall by 32,000 workers in Germany over the next three years. This includes about 7,000 employees whose positions will be outsourced from DT subsidiary Vivento on a permanent basis. These employees will no longer work for Deutsche Telekom, but for other companies. One example of this are the Vivento Call Centers. While a further 25,000 employees are to leave the Group, around 6,000 new staff are to be employed. The new positions might include young technical staff and trainees for T-Punkt shops. This would put the net reduction of jobs over the next three years at 19,000. A majority of the cuts were expected to occur at T-COM, where some 20,000 jobs will be cut as part of the company's "Simplicity" project. Other cuts will include 1,500 in the Group's centralized functions and 5,500 at T-Systems. However, 5,000 jobs will be created for the rollout of the company's fiber-optic network.

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Intelsat Partners with Telenor on Euro Fiber Network

Intelsat and Telenor Satellite Broadcasting AS agreed to interconnect the two companies' fiber networks in London.

The London interconnect, being established as an extension of Intelsat's successful partnership with Broadwing Communications in the U.S., will allow Intelsat to provide its customers worldwide with services originating and terminating in six of Telenor's European points-of-presence (PoP). Content will pass through the interconnect in first generation, with no format changes or conversions necessary. This will allow Intelsat to better support coverage of sports and news events originating in the region, and improve access to DTH platforms on Intelsat and Telenor satellites that are co-located at 1 degree W.

For Telenor, the deal provides access to services on Intelsat's 51 satellites and GlobalConnex Media fiber and teleport network. This enables Telenor to offer global, end-to-end solutions to its broadcast customers who are primarily located in the UK, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe.

http://www.intelsat.comhttp://www.telenorsbc.com

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Broadwing Offers Usage-Based Billing for MPLS Services

Broadwing Communications is offering a converged services platform enhancement that will enable real pay-for-use metered billing to customers.



Broadwing said that unlike burstable service options that charge for an enterprise's traffic "high-water mark," its metered billing is based on the actual amount of data delivered across the network. The result is a converged MPLS VPN platform that supports on-demand, liquid bandwidth.



The billing option is aimed at customers with cyclical traffic patterns, business continuity requirements or transactional accounting needs. The service will be generally available in November of this year.



"Metered billing and Broadwing's vision of true telecom utility are a natural fit for today's enterprise needs," said Jamey Heinze, Broadwing's senior director of data product management.

http://www.broadwing.com

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Sprint Launches First EV-DO Rev A Network in San Diego

Sprint has launched the first EV-DO Revision A service. The upgraded network in the San Diego market is now able to deliver significantly faster average upload speeds of 300-400 kbps (compared with 50-70 kbps of current EV-DO networks). Average download speeds should also increase to 450--800 kbps from 400-700 kbps.



San Diego is the first of 21 markets where Sprint will roll out EV-DO Revision A this year with coverage expected to reach more than 40 million people. By 3Q 2007, Sprint's Power Vision network is expected to be completely upgraded to the faster EV-DO Revision A.



Sprint currently offers three EV-DO Revision A-compatible connection cards: the Pantech PX-500, Sierra Wireless Aircard595 and the Novatel Wireless S720. The company is also planning to launch its first mobile broadband USB modem.

http://www.sprint.com

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Mintera Expands Executive Management Team

Mintera, a developer of 40 Gbps systems for metro-core, regional and ultra long-haul networks, has appointed Niall Robinson as Vice President of Product Marketing. Most recently as Vice President of Marketing at Optovia Corporation, Robinson was responsible for establishing the strategic product direction and market development of Optovia's innovative Hut-Skip amplifier portfolio. Prior to Optovia, Robinson was Director, Photonic Systems Integration and Product Management at Qtera, which was acquired by Nortel.

http://www.mintera.com

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