AT&T Still Confident in T-Mobile Deal

AT&T remains confident that its T-Mobile acquisition will come to a successful resolution, said Randall Stephenson, AT&T's CEO, speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia XX Conference. Despite the DOJ lawsuit, Stephenson said the deal continues to gain support from the high tech community, labor unions, and numerous politicians because of the advantages it offers -- more services from the combined spectrum, $8 billion in additional network investment, and the repatriation of overseas call center jobs. The trial date of February 13 has...

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Oracle Acquires GoAhead for Service Availability Management Software

Oracle agreed to acquire GoAhead, a supplier of privately-held Service Availability and management software, for an undisclosed sum.GoAhead's packaged service availability software is deployed by leading Network Equipment Providers (NEPs), such as Ericsson, Motorola and Alcatel Lucent to ensure the highest level of up-time for carrier services -- seven 9s of reliability. The middleware leverages the OpenSAF open source high availability software...

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Facebook's Open Graph Protocol Aims for New Ways to Connect

Facebook is working to "define a new language for how people connect", said Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at the company's fourth annual F8 developer's conference in San Francisco. Facebook now has over 800 million users. On a single day last week, over 500 million users signed into Facebook.Facebook is adding the following new capabilities:Timeline -- a visual chronology of major event's in a person's life. This is meant to be long term archive that...

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France Awards LTE Licenses to Four Operators

ARCEP, the office telecoms regulator in France, awarded licences to four operators to use the 2.6 GHz frequency band. The result of the auction is as follows: Bouygues Telecom will be allocated a duplex frequency block of 15 MHz, for which the company bid the sum of €228,011,012. Free Mobile will be allocated a duplex frequency block of 20 MHz, for which the company bid the sum of €271,000,000. Orange France will be allocated a duplex frequency block of 20 MHz, for which the company bid the sum of €287,118,501. Société Française du Radiotéléphone...

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Alcatel-Lucent Pushes Broadband Faster with VDSL2 Vectoring

Alcatel-Lucent is pushing broadband over copper further and faster with VDSL2 Vectoring technology. The company is first to market with a VDSL2 vectoring solution capable of delivering 100 Mbps over existing copper loop lengths of 400 meters. Alcatel-Lucent is equally committed to FTTx and VDSL2, said Stefaan Vanhastel, Fixed Access Product Marketing manager at the company. While fiber access is seen as the end game for wireline access, the...

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Zarlink Finally Accepts Acquisition Bid from Microsemi

After having previously declined multiple unsolicited acquisition bids from Microsemi, the Board of Directors at Zarlink Semiconductor agreed to a new offer. Microsemi will increase the price offered for all of the issued and outstanding common shares and 6% unsecured, subordinated convertible debentures maturing September 30, 2012 of Zarlink by 19% to CAD$3.98 in cash per Share and CAD$1,624.49 in cash per CAD$1,000 principal amount of Debentures plus accrued and unpaid interest to the date Debentures are taken up. The total transaction value...

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