Caerus Appoints Ron Harden E.V.P. of Sales & Marketing

Ron Harden has joined Caerus as E.V.P. of sales and marketing. He joins Caerus, Inc. from broadband service provider Grande Communications. Prior to that, he was a director and chief operating officer at PointOne Telecommunications, a network provider that offered VoIP and data services to wholesale and enterprise markets. Harden previously worked with three other prominent telecom organizations: Williams Communications, where he served as vice president of sales and marketing, WorldCom Inc., and the original WilTel, where he had varied executive management responsibilities in sales and marketing for both wholesale and retail channels. He has also previously served as chairman of the CompTel/Ascent Alliance board.



Volo Communications is a next gen service provider that offers voice, data and enhanced services to carrier customers including, tier 1 and 2 carriers, CLECs, ISPs, cable providers, resellers and IXCs, utilizing both TDM and Packet Technology. Volo Communications is a wholly owned subsidiary of Caerus. http://www.volocommunications.com

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World Wide Packets Closes Additional $8.7 Million in Funding

World Wide Packets, a start-up based in Spokane, Washington announced a second close to its current round of funding, bringing the total new investment to approximately $24.5 million. Earlier this year, the company raised $15.7 million in the first closing of its third round of funding for its Ethernet-based last mile access solutions. New investors Argo Global Capital and Entrepedia Ventures participated in the oversubscribed second close of $8.7 million.



World Wide Packets features a Layer 2 Ethernet-to-the-Subscriber architecture that runs over either copper or active fiber connections. The company's product line spans central office aggregation boxes, neighborhood concentrators and customer premise equipment, supporting IP voice, video and data services. World Wide Packets also provides a network management system with extensive provisioning capabilities. Because it leverages a Layer 2 Ethernet network architecture, the company said its network architecture more easily accommodates wholesale service models whereby multiple ISPs, voice carriers or video providers share the same network. http://www.worldwidepackets.com

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Aperto Raises $20 Million for WiMax Solutions

Aperto Networks, a start-up based in Milpitas, California raised $20 million in Series D financing for its WiMAX-class broadband wireless access systems. Aperto supplies a family of base stations, subscriber units, and associated radios and antennas in 2.5, 3.5 and 5 GHz frequency bands for global point-to-point and point-to-multipoint deployments. The new funding will be used to expand the company's sales initiatives, further develop its technology portfolio to complete certification of 802.16/WiMAX-compliant products, and increase support for its existing customer based. Aperto claims over 120 service providers in over 40 countries. The new funding was led by JK&B Capital and included participation from Aperto's key existing investors including Canaan Partners, Alliance Ventures, Innovacom, Tyco Ventures, Labrador Ventures, and Satwik Ventures. Aperto has now raised $77 million in financial backing to date.



Aperto Networks is a founder and leading contributor to IEEE 802.16a/d as well as to ETSI-BRAN standards, and a board member of the WiMAX Forumhttp:///www.apertonet.com

• In November 2003, Aperto Networks signed an agreement with Intel to develop equipment built with Intel's IEEE 802.16 compliant silicon scheduled for introduction in the second half of 2004.

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Mangrove Systems Hires Two Key Executives

Mangrove Systems, a start-up based in Wallingford, Conn., named John Gamelin as Vice President of Technology, and Paul Doolan as Vice President of Network Architecture. Gamelin previously served as co-founder and later, Vice President of Engineering with Tellium. Before that, he was a senior scientist at Bellcore. Doolan is credited with early development work in MPLS, including work on Cisco's Tag Distribution Protocol (TDP). For two years he led the Item's Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) work and was a founding member of the MPLS Forum. Doolan previously served with Cisco Systems, DEC, Ascom Nexion and most recently, Ennovate Networks as Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President.



Mangrove Systems is developing a line of "Multiservice GFP Switching platforms that will bridge the divide between today's TDM-based metro networks and the packet-centric networks of the future."http://www.mangrovesystems.com

• In April 2003, Mangrove Systems secured over $20 million in financing for its development of a GFP-based Transport Aware Switching system. GFP (generic framing procedure) is a method of supporting a wide range of service types and protocols (TDM, Ethernet, ATM and storage transport) over embedded SONET infrastructure.



• Mangrove Systems was founded in mid-2002. The company is headed by Jonathan Reeves, who formerly founded and served as Chairman and CEO of Sahara Networks (acquired by Cascade and then Ascend), and who also founded Sirocco Systems (acquired by Sycamore Networks).

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Circuit City to Offer Vonage IP Phones

Circuit City will begin offering adapters for Vonage's IP broadband phone service in its 600 stores across the U.S. Consumers with broadband connections can sign up for Vonage service and purchase a Vonage starter kit from Circuit City for $99.99. The offer includes activation and two months of the Vonage service.



Vonage continues to add more than 15,000 lines per month to its network. http://www.vonage.com

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Alcatel Selected for DSL in United Arab Emirates

Etisalat, the United Arab Emirates' incumbent telecommunications operator, selected Alcatel for its nationwide DSL deployment. Etisalat will use the Alcatel 7300 Advanced Services Access Manager (ASAM) DSL access network solution together with full end-to-end Network service management capabilities. Financial terms were not disclosed. http://www.alcatel.com

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Brazil's Telemar Signs New Outsourcing Deal with Siemens

Brazil's Telemar awarded a two year contract to Siemens Information and Communication Networks (ICN) division to manage its internal network in the states of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and Esp�rito Santo, where the carrier has larger volumes of traffic and subscribers. In addition to the maintenance services provided by Siemens to Telemar since 2001 for local exchanges, as well as the transmission system and accompanying infrastructure, the company is now taking over the maintenance of the carrier's large, traffic-intensive exchanges, gateways, optical backbone and satellite networks, WLL networks, and the entire power and air-conditioning infrastructure. Financial terms were not disclosed.



Telemar serves nearly 17.5 million telephone lines connected to 4,300 main voice exchanges and has 180,000 data transport ports online. http://www.siemens.com/networks/

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AT&T and Microsoft Settle Voice Patent Claim

Microsoft agreed to settle a patent dispute with AT&T concerning technology for the transmission of voice over an IP network. AT&T alleged that its technology was being used in Microsoft's NetMeeting and TrueSpeech products. Under the deal, Microsoft has made a payment to AT&T and the parties agreed to appeal a single issue to the Federal Circuit, with another payment contingent on the outcome of the appeal. http://www.att.comhttp://www.microsoft.com

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Level 3 to Terminate Vendor Agreement With Allegiance Telecom

Level 3 Communications reached an agreement to terminate a multi-year contract under which it has to purchase wholesale dial access services, including the use of operating equipment, from Allegiance Telecom. Level 3 assumed the contract with Allegiance as part of its acquisition of Genuity's assets last year. To settle the contract, Level 3 has agreed to pay Allegiance $54 million in cash. The company has approximately $200 million of outstanding debt in the form of capital lease obligations that will be eliminated as a result of the settlement. The deal requires the approval of the bankruptcy court that is overseeing the Allegiance case. http://www.level3.com

• In February 2004, XO Communications won a bankruptcy court auction to acquire the assets of Allegiance Telecom and its subsidiaries except for Allegiance's customer premise equipment sales and maintenance business, its managed modem business and certain other Allegiance assets and operations. The wining bid was for approximately $311 million in cash and approximately 45.38 million shares of XO common stock. XO said the acquisition would make it the nation's largest national local telecommunications services provider, with approximately 330,000 customers and more than $1.6 billion in revenue. The company will have the largest network of nationwide connections to regional Bell operating companies' networks of any other CLEC, and double the PoPs within the 36 markets where both XO and Allegiance operate.

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Utah Legislature Allows UTOPIA Project to Proceed

The Utah Legislature passed an amended version of a bill (SB66) that allows the cities already formally engaged in city fiber projects to proceed. It creates additional requirements for public meeting protocols, and clarifies the definition of "open network." The city councils in UTOPIA member cities, and Provo with the iProvo project, retain the authority to decide for their communities what makes sense going forward.

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Samsung Life Insurance Deploys IP Contact Center

Samsung Life Insurance has deployed an all IP-based contact center with 960 agents.
The contact center is powered by the Cisco IP Contact Center (IPCC) customer contact software and was installed by Hewlett-Packard Korea. Samsung Life Insurance's contact center is also the first large call center to migrate from legacy private branch exchange (PBX) technologies to an end-to-end all-IP-based solution. The contact center is handling up to 90,000 calls per day. Samsung Life Insurance reports that with the IP Contact Center its agents were able to process up to 20 percent more calls per day while the interactive voice response (IVR) system handled six times more calls than the previous system. Average waiting time and handling time was also reduced. Financial terms were not disclosed. http://www.cisco.com

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3Com Unveils New IP Business Phone

3Com introduced the first member of a family of enterprise IP desktop phones that supports the 3Com call control protocols and SIP. The 3Com 3102 Business Phone features an enhanced acoustic design, leveraging the emerging wideband audio standard, which significantly enhances speech transmission compared to conventional PSTN. A typical PSTN phone line reproduces speech at 3.3 kHz, whereas the new 3Com 3102 phone can relay IP conversations at a frequency of 7 kHz or higher. The phone also supports IEEE 802.3af Power over Ethernet via its RJ-45 Ethernet connector. It has a list price of $310 U.S. http://www.3com.com

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Caspian Networks Routers Pass Acceptance Testing by DoD

Caspian Networks' "Aperio" flow-state router passed network testing by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC). Caspian said the testing affirms that its QoS guarantees don't come at the expense of interoperability or performance. Caspian adheres to standard IP protocols, such as BGP, MPLS and OSPF. Its Apeiro IP router offers per-flow traffic policing, shaping and burst tolerance guarantees, which allow network service providers to enforce rigorous ATM-like quality of service. http://www.caspian.com

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OIF Completes Two Network-to-Network Interface Agreements

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) approved two implementation agreements (IAs) that address control plane protocols needed for end-to-end optical connections.



The Intra-Carrier External Network-to-Network Interface (E-NNI) 1.0 Signaling IA enables end-to-end connection management by providing a uniform way for carriers to interconnect network domains. It was derived directly from carrier requirements.



The second IA the OIF membership has approved is an update to the UNI 1.0 Signaling IA, addressing extensions to RSVP-TE signaling protocols. The UNI 1.0 Signaling Release 2 IA defines a set of services, signaling protocols and mechanisms used to transport signaling messages and the auto-discovery procedures that aid signaling. The agreement is aimed at assisting client and transport network equipment vendors in supporting UNI 1.0 and defines UNI signaling based on adapting GMPLS RSVP-TE specifications. While not changing UNI 1.0 functionality, the new agreement reflects recent developments in other standards bodies and builds upon lessons learned from the OIF's multi-vendor interoperability event conducted at the OFC 2003 show in Atlanta.



The OIF said the advent of the automatic switched transport network has made it necessary for carriers to employ interoperable procedures for requesting and establishing dynamic connection services across diverse networks. Both of these IAs facilitate end-to-end auto provisioning of bandwidth services. http://www.oiforum.com

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ENTEL Bolivia Selects Zhone's DSLAMs

ENTEL Bolivia has completed a wide-scale upgrade of its network using Zhone's "Raptor" DSLAMs. The Zhone DSLAMs offer integrated IP termination, software selectable ATM or IP uplinks and an ability to upgrade to a fully functional Voice+Data NGDLC. Financial terms were not disclosed. http://www.zhone.comhttp://www.entel.com.bo

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FaceToFaceMeeting Offers Multipoint, Consumer Videoconferencing Service

FaceToFaceMeeting began offering a multipoint videoconfereing service aimed at consumers with broadband connections. The service enables up to 10 participants to join in a call, with all of them appearing on screen, "Hollywood Squares" style. There is no per minute or per meeting fees. The $30 monthly subscription provides for unlimited calls to anywhere in the world there is another on-line subscribing FTFM member. http://www.facetofacemeeting.com

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Ringgold Telephone Launches Minerva Middleware and Amino Set-Top Box

Ringgold Telephone Company, a local exchange service provider in Georgia, has deployed Minerva Networks' iTVManager video services management software and Amino's AmiNET 110 set-top box (STB) to offer their IP-based advanced television services to an additional 2,200 subscribers. Ringgold has been providing bundled voice, video and data services over its ADSL network since spring 2002.



Minerva said its middleware client software can deliver superior graphics and performance when running on cost effective STBs, such as AminoAmiNET 110, that contain low cost CPUs and limited memory. As electronic program guide (EPG) and other critical data is cached in the subscriber's STB, EPG scrolling and channel surfing do not trigger an interaction with the middleware back-office server, enabling fast and reliable operation even in very large deployments. Amino said its AmiNET 110 embedded video decoder features advanced post-processing filters capable of preserving video quality even at low bit rates, enabling network operators to offer broadcast quality television services to two TV sets over a single ADSL line.www.minervanetworks.com

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SBC Launches Quadruple Play with Satellite TV

SBC Communications and EchoStar Communications launched SBC/ DISH Network satellite TV service across SBC's 13-state service area.



SBC's residential service bundles now include a "quadruple play" or TV, wireless, broadband and local/long distance service on a single, monthly bill. The SBC/ DISH Network satellite TV programming prices start at $29.99 a month and include local channels (where available) at no additional cost, free standard professional installation for up to four TVs, no long-term commitment requirements, no equipment to purchase, and a choice of receivers, such as a digital video recorder (DVR) and a high-definition receiver.



In the future, SBC and EchoStar plan to develop set-top boxes that combine the features of satellite TV, digital video recording, broadband, home networking and telecommunications services - moving to truly integrated telecommunications and entertainment services.



SBC said its relationship with EchoStar is modeled after its SBC-Yahoo! alliance. For the past six months, an SBC-EchoStar team has worked to develop simplified ordering tools, integrate billing systems, train thousands of employees and create "a seamless customer experience."http://www.sbc.com

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Broadvox Launches Flat-Rate Residential VoIP in U.S.

Broadvox Direct, a start-up service provider, launched a $29.95 unlimited calling VoIP for residential and small business broadband users. The service debuted in the Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit metropolitan areas this week, and is being followed by a nationwide rollout that is expected to cover 87 major markets by the end of 2004.



Broadvox is operating own facilities- based network. Its advanced feature set includes "find me, follow me" call forwarding, click-to-call, online voicemail retrieval, fax-to-email, a friends-and-family option. The company also offers more than 25 standard features such as call waiting, caller ID, call forwarding, voicemail and three-way calling, all free of charge with any service plan.



All services are delivered over cable or DSL Internet connections, with subscribers using their existing corded or cordless analog phones attached to an adapter that converts digital voice packets into an analog signal. One adapter can be used for all the phones in the home or office, and for up to two distinct lines. Adapters are supplied free of charge.



Broadvox Direct is a privately held company is headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio. For more information, visit . http://www.BroadvoxDirect.com

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MCI Adds VoIP Access Capabilities, Teams with Broadsoft

MCI has expanded its VoIP service to immediately include access via the company's fastest growing VPN service, Private IP. In addition, the company is working with BroadSoft to provide extended hosted communications capabilities, delivering enhanced voice and data applications in a secure corporate network environment.



MCI said that with the domestic introduction of Private IP to its VoIP product suite, companies that traditionally use Frame Relay and ATM networks can transition to IP and achieve more secure, converged voice, data and video communications among their employees.



MCI's recent Private IP network expansion provides companies with an MPLS platform for converged communications. http://www.mci.com

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