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Free DSL service opens its doors Free DSL service opens its doors Source: Cnet After a year filled with strong gains by free dial-up Internet service providers, a Southern California company is raising the ante with an offer of free high-speed Net access. The Broadband Digital Group, led by the same entrepreneur that started Net ad companies AdForce and AdSmart, plans to give consumers Net connections that are nearly seven times faster than dial-up alternatives. The Orange County, Calif., company will offer a digital subscriber line (DSL) service supported entirely by advertisements, according to executives. If successful, the service has the potential to light a stick of dynamite beneath the fast-growing high-speed Net market. Telephone and cable companies already are hard-pressed to keep up with demand for speedy Internet access even when charging $30 to $50 per month. Offering the service for free will likely boost demand still more. "This is the opportune time [to gain market share], before the tidal wave breaks for the massive deployment of DSL," said Ryan Steelberg, the founder of the free DSL service and chief executive of the Broadband Digital Group. Steelberg's venture has started taking registrations for customers in many major metropolitan areas in the United States. The connections won't actually be activated until April 1, he said. Domain hack hits wireless modem company Source: Cnet Metricom's Ricochet.net domain name was allegedly commandeered by hackers Tuesday, causing emails sent to users of the company's wireless modems to bounce back to their senders for about 48 hours, the company confirmed. Visitors to the Ricochet.net Web site also were redirected to a pornographic site for nearly two days and some incoming emails continued to bounce back until early yesterday, according to Metricom executives. Service returned to normal by yesterday afternoon, executives said. The culprits, who have not been determined, allegedly forged a fake email address and fooled Net domain name registrar Network Solutions into redirecting Ricochet.net traffic to another site. Metricom, which used the least secure of three security features offered by Network Solutions, has since upgraded to a stronger security service. The method used in the Metricom hack, often referred to as a "DNS spoof," is fairly common, while the hack itself caps a difficult week for the domain name system (DNS), the technology that directs Internet domain names to their corresponding Internet Protocol address. Metricom executives could not say how many of its 20,000 ISP customers were affected, but said Web surfing and outbound email functions were not affected. "They didn't hack into the Ricochet service or into any of our servers," said John Wernke, senior vice president of marketing and sales at Metricom. "The hack was really into the general Internet domain name system." Metricom, a wireless communications company based in Los Gatos, Calif., makes the Ricochet wireless modem, which allows mobile users to connect to the Internet at speeds of up to 28.8. Microsoft-Commtouch deal endorses online messagingSource: Cnet With its investment in email and messaging software firm Commtouch Software, Microsoft is hedging its bets against Web offerings that could eat into the giant's core software business. Microsoft will offer the Silicon Valley firm's email services to its Microsoft Network business customers and affiliates in the United States and overseas. If a company with its own co-branded MSN page wants to offer its own free email services, it can do so using Commtouch's technology. These products compete with existing Microsoft services like Hotmail and the company's Outlook and Exchange email software suites. But according to analysts, the software company needs to cover its bets online now that other Web-based applications services--such as Critical Path and Mail.com--have begun making inroads into the business market. Commtouch's stock jumped more than 30 percent by the close of trading on news of the Microsoft investment, climbing to 49.12. The outsourced email and messaging business has taken off in the past several years, as Internet service providers, telephone companies, computer companies and others have begun offering their customers free email. But analysts say this is just the beginning; other applications, ranging from calendar services to full-blown office software suites, also will be available for rental or free use online. This budding applications service provider (ASP) market has yet to make strong inroads to the corporate world, although free email and basic scheduling and address book functions have been a core part of consumer portals like Yahoo for more than a year. With one foot in the Web outsourcing market with today's 4.7 percent stake in Commtouch, as well as an in-house component running through Hotmail and MSN, Microsoft will be able to track the market without committing itself too early. Analysts also noted that Microsoft has another, more parochial interest in endorsing Commtouch: It's one of the only application hosting companies that uses the software company's Windows NT products, bucking an industry perception that the operating system isn't solid enough for huge Web tasks.
Net phone calls could soon catch on Technological innovations and public offerings sparked heavy interest in Internet telephony this year. But even as its popularity begins to grow, making phone calls over the Net is still a novelty for most people. Phone calls routed over the Internet jumped from 200 million total minutes in 1998 to 2.5 billion minutes this year, according to analysts. Although that number is small compared with the 7 trillion total minutes people spent on traditional phone networks in 1999, it's a sign that consumers and businesses are starting to warm up to Web-based phone calls, said Probe Research analyst Hilary Mine. "It's still a tiny drip in the bucket, but the market is absolutely exploding," she said. Like data on Internet-based networks, voice-over-Internet protocol (IP) takes a voice call, breaks it into "packets" of information, then reassembles those packets at its final destination. The technology allows for cheaper rates than those charged for traditional long-distance calls; it also allows for telephony services that combine voice and data. New communications companies like Deltathree.com, Net2Phone and ITXC already are offering voice services over the Net. On the network side, telecommunications carriers--from established players like AT&T and Sprint to upstarts like Level 3 Communications--are diving into the emerging market. They're all in various stages of offering the technology, but many are in trial mode. Mergers: How big is big enough? Source: Cnet The face of communications changed radically in 1999, driven by an unprecedented stream of multibillion-dollar mergers. AT&T is now the nation's biggest cable firm. Sprint and MCI have plans to combine their operations. Upstart long-distance company Qwest Communications International is buying US West, one of the country's biggest local phone providers. In a rapidly changing industry, executives claim that their companies need to expand to survive. New technology has blurred the lines between phones, the Internet and cable TV, and revised regulations allow firms once limited to a certain sector to compete in other niches. The best example of this trend is telecommunications giant AT&T. Known for its long-distance empire, the firm now plans to offer local phone service and high-speed Net access over cable networks. Other telecom firms are following suit by planning packages of phone, TV and Net access at low costs. But in the wake of cutthroat deal making, policy makers and consumer advocates are struggling to sort out whether companies can deliver services without abusing their new market power. Analysts say it's too early to tell what "too big" means in today's communications market, however. Deregulation and the explosion of new data technologies means that nearly all of the once-protected monopolies are facing new competition from giants and fast-moving Internet-based newcomers. Dozens of new players like Qwest are building new high-speed networks that are capable of handling data and voice transmissions. Internet service providers (ISPs) like America Online are rapidly encroaching on telephone company territory, offering phone service over the Internet. Companies from AT&T to Bell Atlantic to Cox Communications all are moving toward offering bundles of local and long distance phone, high-speed Internet and TV services. Several versions of these bundles will ultimately be available in most urban and suburban areas, driving overall prices lower, analysts say. "It's too early to worry," said Roger Wery, executive vice president of Renaissance Capital, a telecommunications consulting firm. "Because you have a significant number of deep-pocketed newcomers, there will be an expensive fight for consumers. From a consumer point of view, that will be an immediate benefit."
Analogic to offer free online technical seminars on VoIP Analogic Corp has launched VoIPonline, a series of free online technical seminars discussing the VoIP trends and technical issues facing the industry today. The first live online seminar, "New VoIP Architectures-Solving the Scalability Problem," will take place on January 25, 2000 at 1:30 pm EST. The seminar will focus on system design issues and give tips for scaling VoIP gateways from 24 to 10,000+ ports. New distributed gateway architectures, such as H.323 and MGCP, will be discussed. Attendees can sign up at www.analogic.com/voiponline. "As the market for Voice over IP grows at over 80% per year, the demand for low cost, high port count systems is increasing exponentially. An upward migration path is essential - traditional VoIP gateways are not up to the task. New hardware and software architectures are necessary to meet the demands of the explosive growth in VoIP," said an Analogic executive. Analogic claims to have designed the first commercially available DSP resource card for VoIP in 1995.
Convergence culture shock Mutual respect has emerged between Dow Jones' datacom and telecom
departments now that they have been integrated. But one obstacle to this
convergence is the need for a link between the PBXs and data routers, said Jack
Gelman, Dow Jones' director of enterprise network services. The city of
Oceanside, Calif., took a different approach by totally getting rid of its
telecom department. Its telecom technicians have been retrained to become
members of the IT staff. VoIP leaders adopt TimesTen
Next Generation
Internet: now on West Coast "Our purpose is to provide
very high bandwidth research activities that [organizations] can't get from any
other source," Daspit says. NTONC's network allows organizations to study
next-generation issues involving protocols and devices, Daspit says. Currently,
researchers are using the network to try out high-speed applications such as
remote medical diagnosis and real-time distance editing of motion pictures. GST
Communications, Sprint, and the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit contributed
the fiber part of the network, while Nortel provided its 10 Gbps optical
equipment and Avici Systems offered its terabit switch/router.
Eighteen months in the making, the strategy is aimed at providing such appliances to large service providers -- such as telecommunications firms and Internet companies -- who will then sell, rent, or give away the devices to consumers, some as early as this summer. If successful, the company could be guaranteeing its place as a leader in the information-technology marketplace, said Rob Enderle, vice president of desktop and mobile technology for Giga Information Group. "In this case, it is not a case of trying to expand, it's more that they want to make sure that they are not frozen out of the market," he said. "Appliances are coming home. This is a way for Intel to make sure that the manufacturers are not using other companies' processors." Intel's advantage may be its traditional hands-on approach
with its corporate customers: The company will be offering manufacturers of
appliances and service providers a bevy of building blocks to help them create
devices and applications for consumers. Already,
Intel has signed a deal with Telcordia Technologies Inc. (formerly Bellcore) to
provide the telecommunications technology for the new appliances. "(Our customers) want to make sure that the appliance is always working," said Leglise. "We are talking about appliances that can handle the Internet. We have given them the ability to upgrade the appliances remotely. And they want to be able to offer a variety of services to fit every consumer." Other partners include NEC's BiGlobe in Japan and LaSer-Galeries Lafayette Group in France, both of which plan to deploy Intel information terminals in homes starting this summer. Moreover, while the PC chip giant eschews Larry Ellison's phraseology, Intel even believes the network-computer-like appliances could be big. With at least one appliance that uses a monitor and another that uses a flat-panel display. "We want to go into homes that don't have a computer," said Leglise. "Overseas is certainly a huge opportunity for us in that respect." In the end, however, the shift towards an information appliance manufacturer could be short-lived, said Ederle. "The issue for them is that they have a fixed set of resources. If they can get the Sonys and the RCAs to pick up their products, they will do better -- and sell more -- than just producing their own." |
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