World VoIP Database

Rural telcos and cable TV firms (often the very same company) should continue to have an influential friend in Washington, D.C., for the next five years. Federal Communications Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein was nominated by President Bush for a new five-year term with the FCC, a nomination celebrated by the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association, the rural telecom lobbying group that sees Adelstein as a protector and campaigner for rural issues and companies. Adelstein has been a proponent of improving rural broadband and an ardent critic of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s cable reform plans, which would have harshly affected small town cable companies.

Verizon Business continues to enhance its VoIP services and network capabilities with the needs of business customers in mind. Yesterday it announced expanded IP trunking that will allow large enterprise customers to deploy a wider range of IP PBXes and take advantage of shared trunking and other capabilities. The carrier also announced that Ethernet now can be used as a transition path to VoIP. Just in the last several months Verizon has made major enhancements to its business and enterprise VoIP offerings.

MVNO Virgin Mobile USA has introduced a new over-the-air self-service activation application that automates the carrier’s mobile handset programming process. Telspree Communications is powering the MVNO’s new and improved customer service solution. Virgin began incorporating the solution during the third quarter of this year on new subscribers’ handsets as well as those of existing subscribers who upgraded their phones. The service programs the phones and delivers secure authentication to any non-active, wireless device without the need for customer care of inputs.

AT&T Mobility agreed to pay up to $76 million in back taxes and legal fees to put an end to a six-year-old cell phone tax lawsuit in Missouri. Verizon Wireless settled an identical suit against it in September, while Sprint has settled with some of the Missouri municipalities involved but is still in negotiations with others. The basis of the municipalities’ lawsuit is whether they can levy a tax normally applied to utilities and landline phones to cell phone services, too. The suit originally sought $500 million in back taxes and fees, but the total looks like it will be far less. Verizon Wireless settled for $31.5 million.

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iPhone buyers in the U.S. and U.K. are now able to buy five iPhones at once, instead of only two at a time. An Apple representative confirmed the change to Wired, but gave no reason for the sudden lift on the rule of two, which the company put in place in October. Analysts say the original cap aimed to preserve stock of the phones and focus sales of the iPhone on customers who were likely to begin generating carrier revenue (part of which goes to Apple) right away.

Till recently America was considered a laggard in IPTV deployment, but a new report by Research and Markets suggests things might be changing. According to their latest report on the Global IPTV outlook to 2011 the U.S. market is expected to emerge as the most competitive IPTV market in the world, largely due to high existing pay-TV penetration, stiff prices and service competition.

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While most focus on the IPTV space has been around the delivery of residential media a number of enterprises are now deploying a IP video solutions for internal communications and training.

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Datacasting has long been promoted by engineers as a solution to a bandwidth deprived world. Using the digital terrestrial spectrum various countries have sought to use datacasting as a policy driver to create alternative media distribution channels. So far it has been a monumental flop, with another datacaster last week calling it quits, when former Disney spin off, MovieBeam told customers the service would be turned off Dec. 15.

Cisco announced AT&T had selected its CRS-1 router to upgrade the telco’s global IP backbone. The super routers are more than seven feet high and manage huge volumes of traffic at network junction points and are part of AT&T’s announced upgrade to 40gbs for its core network.

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Japanese electronics company Fujitsu is expected to announce today a partnership with the Taiwanese government to jointly develop WiMAX chips in Taiwan, according to the Financial Times. The two will create a joint venture research facility in Taiwan, which Fujitsu and the Institute for Information Industry will fund. The institute is a technology research body jointly funded by government and industry in Taiwan. Taiwan has become the hotbed for WiMAX as electronics companies jump on the opportunity early and companies like Sprint, Nortel and Alcatel-Lucent have worked to foster the WiMAX ecosystem there.