With Wall Street credit gridlocked, potential deals to consolidate rural telephony companies are slim. It's a buyer's market - assuming the buyer can find the capital. Leveraged buyouts are unlikely to happen in the current macroeconomic environment because of a strong allergy to issuing debt and the short-term demands for [...]

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed a pair of bills designed to preserve phone services to people in rural and high-cost areas of California. Under the new laws, funding will continue to flow into subsidy programs for basic phone services in rural areas. The California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has deregulated [...]

Independent telco FairPoint Communications, which is still in the process of taking over the former Verizon Communications network properties it acquired earlier this year, announced that it will expand broadband capabilities into 51 communities in Vermont using different technologies. The primary technology will most likely be DSL, but FairPoint also [...]

Telepresence continues to be one of the hottest technologies of 2008, as BT this week announced its launch of inter-company telepresence communication capabilities, and Tandberg separately expanded and upgraded its telepresence product family. Both moves come not long after Cisco Systems announced an upgrade for its telepresence system. BT's launch [...]

The first phase of the Trans-Pacific Express (TPE) submarine cable system has been activated. The new 18,000 kilometer (over 11,000 mile) fiber optic undersea cable directly connects Mainland China, the U.S., South Korea and Taiwan. Currently, the system runs at 5.12 terabits. When phase two is completed, TPE will be [...]

The nation's two biggest telcos promised a Senate committee yesterday that they would not track the web usage of Internet users without definitive consent. The statements by AT&T and Verizon collectively take a swipe at Internet service providers who favor "opt out" policies for consumers who don't want their usage [...]

AT&T recently hosted an event to talk about some of the cool, future technologies and services it's working on, and one of the questions that probably occurred to many people was, "Nice, but will it be available in my lifetime?" As it turns out, some of the visions the telco [...]

Cisco Systems has agreed to acquire Jabber, a highly-regarded developer of presence technology and messaging applications that had lured previous investments from France Telecom, Intel and others. Aside from the France Telecom link, the deal could have significant implications for service providers and for Cisco's ongoing effort to realize more [...]

The California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has approved price hikes of up to $3.25 a month on landline phones in 2009 and 2010. Under new rates approved Thursday, basic local phone service may increase by as much as 30 percent next year and an additional 23 percent in 2010. All [...]

Consumers in two states are not happy with their AT&T bills, prompting local TV stations to charge to the rescue. And you might want to leave your account passwords in your will. A North Carolina man had to fight with AT&T to cancel his dead mother's phone service. Gene Turner didn't have his [...]

Verizon Business announced that it had activated service for multi-national customers aboard the Trans-Pacific Express submarine cable network that links the U.S. with mainland China, South Korea and Taiwan. Access to Japan will come in the next phase of the TPE project. The TPE had previously been activated on a preliminary basis to handle [...]

AT&T CTO John Donovan and AT&T Labs engineers provided a glimpse of the future in New York City this week, demonstrating several new technologies and applications that involved wireline, wireless, TVs, computers, mobile phones and more. The telco rolled put more than 25 demonstrations of speech recognition technology on various [...]

Powering the outside plant of next-generation networks (NGN) presents multiple challenges. Add a Hurricane and watch things break. Service providers have to deal with problems with improperly grounded electronics at the customer premises and worry about pending state and federal regulatory requirements for backup power. Broadband fiber networks have different power [...]

Landline abandonment is spreading from the consumer realm to businesses, with more people opting for a cell phone-only approach. Most people are moving away from dedicated phones to save $30 or more per month, says Business New Haven. When a person moves, the bills get reviewed for savings and the [...]

AT&T has brought in an additional 600 technicians to help the 1,400 or so already in place to respond to Hurricane Ike in storm-ravaged parts of Texas, according to a company statement. Some wireless sites on Galveston Island and elsewhere were damaged, but the telco said that the majority were operational, and [...]

Disaster contingency plans are getting a heavy-duty work out this month, as service providers finish responding to Hurricane Gustav's fury and prepare for the landfall of Hurricane Ike. Gustav's impact was much milder than Katrina's, though parts of Louisiana experienced cellular and Internet service interruptions due to power outages from the [...]

BT plans to test customer response to a broadband network combination of fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC) and VDSL technology. The initial rollout will involve about 15,000 customers, but there are no guarantees that the network plan will guide BT's broadband future. The telco announced a $3 billion fiber strategy earlier this year, but [...]

Mergers and acquisitions among operational support system vendors have been frequent in the last few years, and, for the most part, these deals have involved very large firms buying somewhat smaller ones. But this week, Synchronoss, a somewhat smaller electronic order management specialist that played a key role in activating [...]

DOCSIS 3.0 has been seen as the cable TV industry's answer to big-bandwidth fiber networks, with speed potential from 50 Mbps to well beyond 100 Mbps. Comcast, Charter Communications, Time Warner Cable and other cable TV operators have been testing the technology and have committed to deploy it. This week, TWC [...]

The Connecticut State Attorney General and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) took AT&T to task yesterday, saying the company is neglecting its wired customers. In a Monday news conference, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal called on AT&T to meet state regulations and fix up to 90 percent of out-of-service phones within [...]

Cindy Christy, the president of Alcatel-Lucent's Americas Region, has become the latest executive of the Paris-based company to depart the firm. However, she is leaving for personal reasons and not business-related reasons, according to a story at Light Reading. Alcatel-Lucent recently hired a new CEO and a new chairman, after the former [...]

Network World conducted a Q&A with Edward Amoroso, the chief security officer of AT&T, after Amoroso delivered a keynote speech at the Forrester's Security Forum last week in Boston. In that keynote, Amoroso talked about the threat AT&T's network increasingly faces from botnets and large-scale denial-of-service attacks, and what the carrier [...]

The Federal Communications Commission may loosen the requirements for the types of information that telcos must provide as part of the agency's annual report program. The annual reports track information related to service outages, including outage durations and customer complaints, as well as capital expense information. The action could come [...]

The Federal Communications Commission is expected today to approve a significant reduction in the amount of information AT&T, Verizon and Qwest must report to the regulator about customer complaints, service quality and infrastructure investment.The move has raised the antennae of consumer groups that worry that everything from repair times to customer service will be [...]

Verizon Communications, AT&T, Comcast and other network operators have become very interested in 100 Gbps network transport capabilities within the last year or so. At the upcoming European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communications, Verizon reportedly will discuss how its much-publicized 100G trials have demonstrated new levels of speed and reach with [...]