FCC Commissioner McDowell Disqualifies Himself from AT&T+BellSouth Merger Vote

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell disqualified himself from voting on the proposed AT&T+BellSouth merger approval vote, leaving the Commission evenly split between two Democrats and two Republicans. McDowell cited his earlier employment by COMPTEL, a lobby group of competitive carriers that has opposed the ILECs. In a statement, McDowell said promises made during his Senate confirmation hearing, and his own personal ethics, led him to withdraw from participating in the vote.http://www.fcc.govEarlier this month, the General Counsel of the FCC...

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Agere Debuts New Product Category -- BluOnyx Mobile Content Server

Agere Systems unveiled its BluOnyx Mobile Content Server, a new consumer product category designed to un-tether users from the PC and stationary storage devices by giving them access to content and applications in a portable device. The BluOnyx server, which will be shown at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in January, enables mobile users to share and stream music, video and business files to or from electronic devices ranging from cell phones,...

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Loral Skynet to Merge with Telesat Creating Global FSS Provider

Loral Skynet will merge with BCE's Telesat division to create one of the world's largest operators of telecommunications satellites, with a combined fleet of eleven satellites and four additional satellites to be launched over the next three years. The new company will have combined trailing 12 months revenue for the period ended September 30, 2006 of approximately US $568 million (CAD 658 million) and US $4.9 billion (CAD 5.6 billion) of backlog,...

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Carriers Plan New Terabit Capacity Trans-Pacific Express Optical Cable

Verizon Business signed a construction and maintenance agreement with a consortium planning to build an undersea optical cable system directly linking the U.S. mainland and China.The new Trans-Pacific Express (TPE) will initially provide capacity of up to 1.28 Tbps, with a design capacity of up to 5.12 Tbps to support future Internet growth and advanced applications. Customers will have access the cable system at 10 Gbps wavelengths. Construction of the new cable system, which will extend more than 18,000 kilometers, will begin in the first quarter...

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Juniper Adds T-series Physical Interface Card

Juniper Networks announced a new T-series physical interface card (PIC) with long reach optics and other advanced features designed for its T-series core routers. The new 4xOC-192 PIC features standards-based 10 Gigabit Small Form Factor Pluggable (XFP) optical transponders and inverse multiplexing to 40 Gbps.The new 4xOC-192 PIC enables providers to transport either a single OC-768 stream or four discrete OC-192 connections by using cost-effective 10 Gbps optical transponders and leveraging their installed base of T-series routers. XFP optics...

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Intel Installs WiMAX in Egyptian "Digital Village"

Working with Egypt's government, business and education leaders, Intel has installed a WiMAX network in Oseem, a city of 200,000 in Egypt. The wireless network connects two public schools, a health care center on wheels, a municipal building and an e-government services kiosk. Intel also donated and installed computers in the mobile health center and PC labs at the two schools where students and teachers can regularly connect to the outside world for the first time."The next billion Internet users will be from rural areas like Oseem," said Intel...

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Alcatel-Lucent Introduces Higher-Density 10-Gigabit Ethernet Enterprise Switch

Alcatel-Lucent introduced a new model of its 10-Gigabit Ethernet core switch chassis, featuring twice the capacity of the existing Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch 9700. Also available are a new high-density 10-Gigabit Ethernet module and a new power-over-Ethernet (PoE) Gigabit Ethernet module.The Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch 9000 family is deployment in the enterprise network core and aggregation layer where large amounts of user data being consolidated for 10 Gigabit connections. Similar to the other OmniSwitch 9000 models, the new Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch...

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Linksys Announces Skype iPhone

Cisco's Linksys division unveiled a new iPhone for Skype that works on 802.11g networks. The iPhone Wireless-G Phone for Skype (WIP320) makes Skype portable by integrating it into a Wireless-G handset, allowing consumers to place calls from anywhere they can connect to a wireless access point. The product is offered in North America through distribution, online retailers and VAR partners. Europe, Asia and LATAM availability is planned for Q1 2007....

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OIF Finalizes Scalable System Packet Interface

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) has finalized the Scalable System Packet Interface (SPI-S) implementation agreement.SPI-S is a channelized, streaming-packet interface that scales from 6 Gbps to hundreds of Gbps for chip-to-chip and backplane applications. It is a successor to the widely deployed OIF SPI 4.2 interface, and leverages the OIF's Common Electrical Interface (CEI) to take advantage of high rate serial physical interconnects. SPI-S is specified to run over CEI, which is defined at 6 and 11 Gbps for both short reach and long reach...

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