DMT Line Coding Specified for VDSL Standard in North America

The T1E1.4 committee, which is part of The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS), decided to specify only Discrete Multi-Tone (DMT) line coding in its American National Standard (ANS) for VDSL. The DMT modulation method will be specified in the American National Standard, and the Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) method will be specified in a Committee T1 Technical Requirement (TRQ).


The decision follows the release of data from the "VDSL Olympics," a series of performance tests conducted by Telcordia Technologies and BT to help evaluate DMT and QAM's compatibility with VDSL. Among the findings: VDSL-DMT achieved the highest "payload" performance, the longest reach, and outperformed in burst noise conditions.


Richard Sekar, Vice President of Marketing for Ikanos Communications, a supplier of DMT-based VDSL silicon solutions, said the results of the VDSL Olympics and the T1 Committee decision provide the conclusive determination the industry has been waiting for on this issue. Ikanos expects that the certainty of a single VDSL line coding standard will give carriers the confidence to move ahead with plans to upgrade current DSL networks for customers wanting higher speed VDSL connections. On this front, Sekar noted that Millinet, a supplier of VDSL equipment in Korea, has recently decided to switch to the Ikanos DMT VDSL chipset instead of using a competitors' QAM solution.


Mark Tyndall, VP of Business Development for Infineon Technologies, a supplier of QAM-based VDSL silicon, acknowledged the T1 Committee decision as setting a standard for North America, but suggested that the standards question might still be open for carriers in Asia-Pacific and Europe. Tyndall said the rapid adoption of QAM-based VDSL in South Korea of the past year indicates that the technology is market ready. Infineon is hoping the ITU will specify dual line code options for its VDSL standards, allowing each carrier to choose for itself which modulation scheme is best. Infineon will also continue to push for QAM as a solution for Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) solutions. Tyndall further noted that the VDSL Olympics testing compared existing VDSL silicon implementations rather than comparing actual line codes. Earlier this month, Infineon announced a new VDLS Modem-on-Chip (MoC) solution that it claims delivers aggregate data rate of more than 100 Mbps, including asymmetric data-rates of 70/40 Mbps and symmetric data-rates of 50/50 Mbps over single-pair copper wires. This was not the chipset that Infineon submitted for the VDSL Olympics. Sampling of the new silicon is expected in August.
http://www.atis.org/atis/PRESS/pressreleases2003/062003.htm

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France Telecom Sells its 5% Stake in Sprint PCS for $330M

France Telecom sold 56 million Sprint PCS shares through a block trade on the New York Stock Exchange for US$330 million. With the sale, France Telecom finalized the divestment of its remaining 5.4% stake in Sprint PCS.htttp://www.francetelecom.com

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BellSouth to Offer Network Equipment Test Services

BellSouth is expanding its internal testing and assessment facility, BTAC, to include an outsourced service for test creation and execution for equipment suppliers and other service provider. Once a commissioned test has been completed, the client will receive a report documenting performance results that they can share upon request. The BellSouth Test and Assessment Center (BTAC) is located in an 85,000 square foot lab in Birmingham, Alabama. BTAC has 59 network specialists supporting the full range of fault insertion and recovery testing.
http://www.btac.com

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Riverstone Reports Quarterly Revenue of $12.7 Million, Possible Nasdaq Delisting

Riverstone Networks reported quarterly revenues of $12.7 million for the period ending 31-May-03, compared with revenues of $15.1 million in the prior quarter and $30.1 million for the same period last year. GAAP net loss for the first quarter was $19.1 million or $0.15 per share. This compares with a GAAP net loss of $40.6 million or $0.33 per share for the prior quarter.


Riverstone announced that it has received a Nasdaq staff determination indicating that its common stock is subject to delisting from the Nasdaq Stock Market due to noncompliance with Marketplace Rule 4310(c)(14), which requires the timely filing of Form 10-K. Riverstone said its filing has been delayed by an internal review of its accounting practices and that it intends to appeal the Nasdaq determination.http://ir.riverstonenet.com

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Touch America Files for Chapter 11, Sells Unit to 360networks

Citing the difficult economic environment, Touch America and all is subsidiaries filed voluntary Chapter 11 petitions in bankruptcy court. The company has received a commitment for a Debtor-in-Possession credit facility for $5 million from WLR Recovery Fund II, LP, a fund managed by WL Ross & Co. Touch America is undertaking various cost cutting measures, including staff reductions, and said it is planning for the smooth continuation of its business.


Touch America also announced the sale of its Private Line and Dedicated Internet businesses to 360networks for $28 million. The sale proceeds will be used to pay pre- and post-filing obligations. 360networks is also financially backed by WL Ross & Co.
http://www.tamerica.com

• Touch America, which is based in Butte, Montana, resulted from the formation in 1983 of a telecommunications subsidiary of a diversified electric utility. The company operates an optical backbone consists of 22,000 miles of SONET based OC192 facilities, mostly across the western U.S.. It has ATM, Frame Relay and IP networks.



• In December 2002, Touch America sold approximately 70,000 of its switched long-distance-voice customers to Buyers United of Salt Lake City.
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• In October 2002, Touch America activated its next-generation optical backbone, marking the first commercial deployment of Nortel Networks' OPTera Connect HDX optical switch. The HDX switches are being used at large hubs where numerous fiber routes come together. Software and optical switching is then used to connect specific fibers, rather than manually provisioned crossconnects.



• In June 2000, Touch America acquired Qwest's wholesale, private line and retail long-distance business in its regulated 14-state region.

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Cogent Announces Restructuring and $41 Million in New Funding

Cogent Communications has nearly completed the restructuring of its debt and has raised $41 million in cash equity from investors to fund its operations. Over the last six months, Cogent has reduced its total debt from a face amount of over $380 million to $27 million and extended repayment terms, with the company's first principal payment due in 2006. The equity financing will be provided by JVP (Jerusalem Venture Partners), Oak Investment Partners, Worldview Technology Partners, Broadview Capital Partners, Boulder Ventures, and Nassau Capital. Following the transaction the investors, Cisco Capital, and employees will own 99% of the company. Cogent said the restructuring will give it one of the strongest balance sheets in the ISP sector.
http://www.cogentco.com

• In May 2003. Cogent Communications activated optical Ethernet connectivity to its 700th building.
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  In February, Cogent acquired the Internet service business of Fiber Network Solutions, a privately-held service provider based in Columbus, Ohio. FNSI provides Internet service to some 400 businesses located in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
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  In September 2002, Cogent acquired network assets in New York City from FiberCity Networks. The deal included FiberCity's customer base and its building access agreements.
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  In April 2002, Cogent Communications acquired a significant portion of the portfolio of real estate access agreements from OnSite Access, a BLEC communications provider that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Also that month, Cogent acquired a majority of the U.S. assets of PSInet for $10 million.
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  Cogent Communications was founded in 1999 by Dave Schaeffer, the company's current CEO. Prior to founding Cogent, Schaeffer founded Pathnet.

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Unions to Begin Bargaining with Verizon for New Contract

The Communications Workers of America , a union representing 60,000 employees at Verizon Communications, said it is optimistic on reaching a "fair agreement" with Verizon before its current contract expires on 02-August-2003. In a press statement, CWA President Morton Bahr pointed out that Verizon brought in revenues of $67.6 billion and reported profits of $4.1 billion in 2002, despite the telecom slump. While the U.S. productivity rate grew 5.9% between 2000-2002, in that same period, Verizon's productivity, measured in revenue per employee, grew 14.9%. In addition to the preservation of quality jobs and access to jobs in the new growth areas of the company, the CWA is calling on Verizon for improvements in pensions and a wage increase that accounts for the workers' increased productivity.
http://www.cwa-union.org

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Telecom Developpement selects Alcatel for DSL Rollout

Telecom Developpement (TD), a competitive carrier in France, selected Alcatel as its sole supplier for a mass network rollout in all the major cities in France. Under the multi-year contract, TD will deploy the Alcatel 7301 ASAM, which can be used to deliver broadband Internet access services to residential subscribers as well as to offer high speed data services to business and corporate customers, in particular for Cegetel. Financial terms were not disclosed. Alcatel has also been a supplier of networking gear for Telecom Developpement's backbone.
http://www.alcatel.com

• Telecom Developpement (TD) is licensed in France both as a network operator and a provider of telephony services, using the prefix "7" for this purpose. TD's main products - switched minutes and leased lines - are offered to the public through Cegetel, which markets them to the general public and to businesses through the company Cegetel Fixe, in which TD has a 20% stake.

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Qwest Launches its Own "Migrate to Stability" Program

Qwest Communications launched a "Migrate to Stability" marketing campaign seeking to attract enterprise customers stranded by the recent decisions from Sprint and Cable & Wireless to exit the U.S. web hosting business. Qwest, which operates hosting centers in Burbank (California), Chicago, Denver, Sacramento, Sterling (Virginia) and Tampa, Florida, is offering two months of free service.
http://www.qwest.com

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CIENA Unifies Management of Optical And Data Layers

CIENA, which completed its acquisition of WaveSmith Networks earlier this week, announced the availability of integrated optical and data network management with its LightWorks ON-Center Management Suite, extending CIENA's point-and-click service provisioning and other management functions into the data layer. CIENA's ON-Center software now provides management of the Distributed Node (DN) multiservice switches from WaveSmith, as well as multiservice core switches from Equipe Communications. The integration enables end-to-end service provisioning, diagnostics and management across optical and data layers using a single Operations Support System (OSS). CIENA believes its LightWorks Services approach for integrating the two network layers will allow carriers to increase their gross margins in some cases by more than ten points.
http://www.ciena.com

• CIENA sells and supports Equipe Communications' Equipe 3200 ATM/MPLS multiservice core switch as part of an alliance announced in June 2002.

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Alcatel Joins in SATLYNX for European 2-way Broadband Satellite

Alcatel will acquire a 17.9% stake in SATLYNX, a venture that aims to provide two-way satellite broadband services across Europe. Satlynx was established in May 2002 by SES GLOBAL and Gilat Satellite Networks. With the new investment, the value of SATLYNX exceeds EUR 200 million and includes cash of more than EUR 50 million with additional contributions from each of the partners. The new company will also acquire Gilat Europe, which operates a pan-European VSAT network with 25,000 installed nodes. The new company, which will be based in Luxembourg, will offer wholesale services to other carriers and ISPs. Even with the current rates of DSL deployment, the company estimates that 7.3 million homes, or 25% of the potential European broadband market, will be geographically out of reach in 2005. It has initial agreements with BTOpenworld and Tiscali. The new company's name, its board of directors and management team will be announced in the coming weeks. As part of the deal, Alcatel, under contract to SES GLOBAL, will expand and provide SATLYNX's product line to include a DVB-RCS (return channel by satellite) platform. SES and Gilat have also executed an agreement to fund the development of a low cost, Ka-band version of Gilat's existing Skystar 360E products.
http://www.skybridgesatellite.com
http://www.ses-global.com

• In March 2001, SkyBridge, the broadband satellite venture led by Alcatel, began offering wholesale broadband IP services via satellite to service providers using leased geostationary satellite capacity. The announcement expands the operational scope of the company, which had previously been focused solely on launching its own satellites. SkyBridge itself will invest in the ground infrastructure and delivery platform for access services, a portfolio of content distribution services as well as value-added services such as e-learning. The company said it remained 100% committed to its own Low Earth Orbiting (LEO) satellite constellation.

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UTStarcom Announces China Netcom Contact for Henan Province

UTStarcom announced a new $28.7 million contract from China Netcom for new deployments of its IP-based PAS (Personal Access System) equipment in 28 throughout the Henan Province. UTStarcom said it is now seeing a trend in the deployment of its iPAS platform in small cities and more suburban areas, following earlier deployment in bigger cities such as Beijing and Guangzhou.
http://www.utstar.com

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Level 3 Bondholders Convert Debt into New Shares

Longleaf Partners Funds, Berkshire Hathaway, and Legg Mason converted all of their outstanding 9% junior convertible subordinated notes due 2012 into shares of Level 3 common stock. Level 3 raised $500 million from the three institutional investors last year, in part to pursue acquisition opportunities in the communications industry. Level 3 said the conversion reduces its long-term debt by $457 million and generates cash interest savings for the company of approximately $41 million per year. In connection with the conversion, Level 3 is issuing approximately 161 million shares of Level 3 common stock in aggregate to the three investors. Of the original $500 million, $43 million had previously been converted.
http://www.level3.com

• In November 2002, Level 3 Communications agreed to acquire substantially all of Genuity's assets and operations for $242 million.

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China's Hunan Unicom Selects Lucent for Optical Backbone

Hunan Unicom, a subsidiary of China Unicom, selected Lucent Technologies to supply SDH optical transport systems for its provincial backbone. Under the contract, Lucent will supply its new Metropolis ADM MultiService Mux, LambdaUnite MultiService Switch (MSS) and the WaveStar ADM 16/1. Lucent will also deploy network management systems including the Navis Optical Element Management System (EMS) and the WaveStar ITM-SC to help Hunan Unicom integrate the new hardware into its existing SDH network. The LambdaUnite MSSs will be deployed to form the core of the network, connecting 2.5G rings throughout the province and 10G rings to data centers and long-haul switch centers. Financial terms were not disclosed.
http://www.lucent.com

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AT&T Stages Network Disaster Recovery Drill in Chicago

AT&T will conduct a five-day network disaster recovery (NDR) exercise beginning tomorrow in Chicago to evaluate how well it can respond to a simulated disaster that destroys a telephone switching center. The exercises begin with an initial call-out to NDR team members to assemble at the disaster site to prepare for the arrival of AT&T semi-trailers containing switching equipment and self-contained or dedicated power and environmental systems. Once the trailers arrive at the exercise site, the team can roll out up to 15 miles of coaxial and fiber optic cable to interconnect the individual components in the trailers to match the unique configuration of the damaged switching facility. Temporary microwave towers and satellite earth stations also can be erected. The trailers generally travel by road but could be air-lifter or shipped by rail. AT&T said it has strategically located such units in warehouses across the country. Since 1990, AT&T's NDR team has been activated 12 times in response to disasters. The company said it has invested more than $300 million in its NDR program during the past 10 years.
http://www.att.com

• Following the attacks on the World Trade Center towers, most AT&T local business service in southern Manhattan was restored in 46 hours and AT&T business customers were able to participate in the re-opening of the New York financial markets the week after the disaster.

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Acterna Receives Approval for $30 Million Bankruptcy Financing Package

Acterna received bankruptcy court approval for a $30 million debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing package arranged by a group of banks led by JP Morgan Chase Bank and General Electric Capital Corporation. The company said the new funding ensures its ability to continue with its business plan, with a substantial investment in research and development to deliver optical, access and cable communications test solutions.
http://www.acterna.com

• On 06-May-2003, Acterna voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy court protection after negotiating a term sheet with its key lenders. Under the pre-negotiated reorganization, Acterna would significantly reduce its debt by more than $750 million, or 78% of the company's existing debt, while continuing normal business operations.

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Siemens Mobile Acceleration invests in Realeyes3D

Siemens Mobile Acceleration has made an equity investment in Realeyes3D, a start-up based in Paris, France that specializes in advanced image processing software for mobile communication
devices. The Realeyes technology allows users to capture any sort of textual or graphical content with their camera phone for use in messaging or imaging applications. Siemens said the Realeyes3D applications would broaden the wireless market, bringing clear benefits to end users and new revenue sources for network operators. After the now finalized investment round, the principal shareholders in Realeyes3D are Siemens Mobile Acceleration, T-Source, the telecommunications fund managed by I-Source Gestion, Partech International, and the management team. Financial terms were not disclosed.
http://www.siemens.com/mobile-accelerationhttp://www.realeyes3d.com

• Realeyes3D was founded in September 2001 in Paris by Martin Lefébure.

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AT&T Reaches Agreement with Unions, Wages & Pensions Increase

AT&T reached tentative agreements with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) on a contract extension covering about 22,000 employees. Main points of the tentative contracts include wage increases (1.5% in November 2003, 1.5% in May 2004, 1.5% in November 2004 and 1.25% in May 2005) and a pension increase of 5% plus a 4.5% interest credit on cash balance retirement accounts. All other provisions of the current contract agreements remain intact, including medical plans for active employees and retirees. Union ratification is expected to occur over the next few weeks.
http://www.att.com

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Wintegra Broadens Multi-Service Product Family

Wintegra introduced two new silicon devices targeted at the Multi-Service Access (MSA) market, which includes switches, routers and concentrators, as well as media gateways, wireless infrastructure and DSLAMs. The two new WinPath 77xM6 devices provide a highly integrated fully channelized OC-3 (scalable to OC12) solution when teamed with an external FPGA. This FPGA, productized as the Universal Front End version 2 "UFE2" by Wintegra, was first validated with an Altera instantiation using their Stratix family of FPGAs. The new devices could support 84 ports of IMA, ATM UNI, or unstructured CES; 84 ports of Multi-link Frame Relay or Multi-link PPP; 2016 ports of FR, HDLC, PPP, structured CES, with DS0, NxDS0, DS1 granularity; Frame Relay to ATM interworking (FRF.5 and FRR.8.1); Frame Relay Switching; ATM or Packet uplinks; and fine grained traffic management features. Sampling will begin in Q4http://www.wintegra.com

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Wintegra Announces Two New Access Processors

Wintegra unveiled two new Access Packet Processors suited for wireless infrastructure systems, DSLAMs, IADs, Voice over Packet systems, and multiservice edge routers, and switches. Both processors integrate 2 Gigabit Ethernet MACs, 16 Serial Ports (each providing T1/E1 connectivity), support of additional UTOPIA PHYs (up to 127 on each port) and performance of up to 233 MHz. One of the processors includes a MIPS 5Kc core for Control Path operations, while the other relies on an external host processor. Sampling is expected in Q4http://www.wintegra.com

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