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AOL drops lobbying push
on cable open access AOL drops lobbying push on cable open access America Online has ended its lobbying push in various states for legislation requiring cable firms to share high-speed Internet lines with competitors, officials at the No. 1 online service confirmed on Monday, February 7th. The move was expected after chairman Steve Case said last month that AOL no longer favored government-mandated open access to high-speed cable lines in light of its $120 billion acquisition of cable giant Time Warner Inc. Nationwide, the battle over open access, which had pitted AOL, other Internet service providers and consumer groups against the cable industry, could write the ground rules for fast-growing cable high-speed Internet services. Cable companies currently offer the most popular high-speed Internet services, but the companies have forced their customers to sign up with Internet service providers also owned by cable companies, like Excite AtHome Corp. Consumers using other broadband services, or old-fashioned telephone connections, can choose from among many ISPs. Until its Time Warner deal, No. 1 online service AOL and most other ISPs had pushed for government rules banning the exclusive practice and requiring cable companies to allow other, unaffiliated companies to offer service. But now, instead of state or federal rules requiring open access, the AOL is working with Time Warner to craft a set of voluntary principles allowing multiple Internet providers on cable systems. The principles could be announced as soon as later this month. TV through the phone line Phone companies may be on the brink of matching the cable companies with a powerful new competitive weapon: a system to transmit television signals over plain old copper phone lines. Developed by mPhase and manufactured at Flextronics in Westford, such a system is being tested in a North Georgia town by the local independent phone company. A handful of homes, soon to be several hundred, are getting TV signals over existing phone lines. Using sophisticated filtering technology developed by Georgia Tech researchers to keep phone calls, Internet traffic, and TV signals separate, the mPhase "Traverser" system could radically shift the balance of power in the epic battle under way between traditional phone and cable giants. With 182 million copper phone lines in service across the United States, it's easy to imagine the potential for a system that could turn them into a cost-effective alternative for the nation's 30 million cable TV households and 10 million dish TV homes. Ronald A. Durando, mPhase chief executive, said he is confident the Georgia trial - set to expand from 20 users to more than 1,000 within two months - will show that the company has found a solution that cheaply delivers TV signals up to 21/2 miles from a phone company's "central offices," ultimately for well under $1,000 per home.
Deliver e-mail right into your
hands For the first time, Intel will reveal details of two new chips and provide new information on a third new chip, the Itanium, at this week's Intel Developer Forum. Along with the Itanium, Intel plans to ship a new low-cost processor, code-named Timna, and a new high-end desktop processor, code-named Willamette, in the second half of this year. Information disclosed at the event will be relevant to consumers, Intel said, because the new chips should make possible a new class of lower-cost desktop PCs and at the same time push high-end desktops to new levels of performance. Timna will be aimed at the value-PC market. PCs using it could cost as little at $399. Willamette, on the other hand, is designed for speed. It will appear in high-end PCs by the end of the year, and it will be paired with a new chip set, code-named Tehama, which should offer a faster system bus and support for Rambus memory, known as RDRAM. Offering a faster bus and utilizing Rambus memory, which is said to be faster than today's synchronous dynamic RAM, will help the chip set deliver an overall system performance increase compared with the Pentium III and its 440BX or 820 chip sets. Intel will also highlight its Itanium processor. The 64-bit processor for high-end workstations and servers will be the subject of many discussions on software. Software developers need to port their applications to gain maximum performance with the new chip.
Nortel
expands booming fiber-optic business Nortel Networks Corp. said Monday that it will invest $260 million and hire 3,400 people to expand its booming fiber-optics equipment business to meet the explosive demands of the Internet. This spending announcement follows Nortel's $400 million investment in optical networking announced in November 1999. Together with an expected tripling of production capacity this year, the investments will accelerate the company's ability to meet explosive customer demand for its optical Internet systems and components, Nortel said. The networking giant said it plans to invest $186 million in Canada, including $102 million in Ottawa and $84 million in Montreal. An additional $64 million will be invested in Paignton and Monkstown in the United Kingdom, with another $10 million to be dispersed among Nortel's other global operations facilities. Globally, 3,400 high-tech positions will be created in the areas of manufacturing, engineering, supply chain management and customer service.
DoubleClick's new privacy policy bashed Consumer groups bashed Internet advertiser DoubleClick's new privacy policy education campaign, calling the plan "disingenuous" and an affront to online consumers everywhere. DoubleClick made the announcement after coming under fire for reversing its long-held consumer privacy policy of not matching aggregate consumer data with personally identifiable information. Consumer groups say DoubleClick's merger with Abacus Direct Corp., a data-warehousing company that records consumers' catalog purchases, has given the banner-ad giant the tools it needs to begin tracking the surfing and buying habits of consumers. They claim that the company's plan to require consumers to "opt out" of its data collection activities is unfair and deceptive. DoubleClick has announced that it had taken out full-page ads in a number of major metropolitan newspapers and had created 50 million banner ads that would direct consumers to a Web site on privacy rights, Privacy Choices. The site also allows consumers "opt out" of DoubleClick's data collection activities, and contains links to a number of privacy watchdog groups, some of the company's fiercest critics. DoubleClick officials also said they will contract with accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to audit their privacy policies, and to make sure their practices are in accordance with them. In addition, company officials said they would only do business with online publishing companies that have a stated privacy policy, though they did not make clear what that standard would be. Finally, DoubleClick will create a privacy board and a "chief privacy officer" to act as an ombudsman to field customer complaints and oversee the company's privacy activities.
Washington D.C. motorists can now renew registration online
Motorists in Washington, D.C., are now able to renew and pay for their motor vehicle registrations online via a system set up by Link2Gov.com, Inc. The developer of online government-to-citizen access is also putting the finishing touches on a system giving District of Columbia motorists the ability to track traffic ticket status and pay fines online with a credit card. "E-commerce is rapidly becoming the medium of choice for commercial transactions in every sector, and government transactions are no exception," said Link2Gov.com President Larry Wine. The system is a money-saver for the District of Columbia and a way for motorists to save time, Wine said. The new online vehicle registration process takes only a few minutes and motorists can pay renewal fees by credit card - a quicker, more appealing way to accomplish a chore that often required missing work. "The momentum behind becoming Web-ified or automating electronic processes follows (the desires of) the constituency," Wine told Newsbytes. "Certainly saving people time, getting them out of line and online is incredibly important." Wine said Link2Gov developed an online driver's license renewal program which is about to be introduced in Florida, where the company's telephone registration system has renewed 700,000 operator's licenses in two and a half years. Last month, the state of Virginia launched an online driver's license renewal system, and California began development of vehicle registration on the Internet. Since November, the government online index, has been directing computer users to federal, state and local government agencies offering online services. Microsoft finds good news for Windows 2000 Source: Newsbytes Days away from the launch of Windows 2000 for the business crowd, Microsoft Corp. drummed up some good news for the platform with the release of a study it commissioned, showing that a number of high-profile customers are expecting to save big bucks and operate more efficiently using the new software. The findings, summed up in a press release issued by the Redmond, Wash., company, follow a week of so-so news that helped knock nearly $10 off the price of Microsoft's shares - even though the official launch of Windows 2000 is Feb. 17. On Thursday, Feb. 10th, Michael Dell, Dell Computer Corp.'s chief executive officer, mused during a press conference that his company was seeing healthy demand for the low-cost Linux operating system and predicted businesses would migrate to Windows 2000 slowly. The analysts at consulting firm Gartner Group followed up with a report suggesting corporations might do well to wait until the first round of bug fixes are incorporated in the new platform before rushing to install Windows 2000 servers. Then technology publication SmartReseller ran a story quoting what it said was a Microsoft "internal memo," in which a Windows 2000 development team leader states there were "63,000 potential known defects" still logged in the squad's bug-tracking databases. A Microsoft spokesperson told Newsbytes today that any article suggesting that the Windows 2000 platform is rife with bugs "is completely inaccurate." "We have had over 750,000 beta testers and hundreds of customers rolling out Windows 2000 in production environments, even before general availability," the spokesperson said. "We believe Windows 2000 is the most reliable operating system we have ever shipped." Sosinc announces its first 20m minute contract Source: iLocus Within two weeks of SOSINC Communications announcing completion of Phase1 for their nationwide VoIP network, the company has begun to carry voice traffic. Sosinc has signed their first agreement to carry twenty million minutes of voice traffic per month with a large CLEC. The company plans to be running 30 million minutes by the end of the month. Sosinc designs and manufactures its own gateways. The current Sovereign Voice product line features computer based VoIP, with computer based PBX and router functionality. The gateway efficiently integrates voice, fax, and data traffic over a single carrier facility, along with added services such as caller ID, speed dial, call waiting and more. 8X8 unveils IP Phone architecture Source: iLocus 8x8 has unveiled the architectural details of 8x8's Audacity-T2 IP Telephone Processor in a presentation at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco. The T2 Processor is ideal for use in IP feature phones for business applications on corporate LANs and consumer IP telephones for use on cable modem and DSL networks. In addition to the processor itself, 8x8 provides all of the software required for IP voice communication, including the H.323 v2, Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) control protocol stacks, and the most popular G.7xx audio compression algorithms (codecs). The Audacity-T2 Processor also incorporates dual Ethernet Media Access Controllers (MACs), one for connecting to a network and one for connecting to a computer. The inclusion of MAC functionality allows an IP telephone to serve as a two-channel layer-2 Ethernet switch, eliminating the need for two Ethernet connections to the desktop. This switch facility can be programmed to give priority to audio packets, buffering data packets to and from the attached PC, thus controlling quality of service (QoS).
Lightwave raises
$49 million for optical chips Similar to technology 3Com recently released, Intel and Symbol plan to build wireless networking kits. Technology will include PC networking cards that have radio transmitters and receivers built-in, and a wireless hub--affixed to a ceiling or wall--that connects the wireless technology to a regular wired network. The technology will support a wireless standard called 802.11B, which is being supported by Lucent, 3Com, Cisco and others. Intel has a separate, but similar wireless effort for consumers. Intel is building a wireless kit for home networks that will support a different wireless standard called HomeRF. For Symbol, executives said the agreement today will allow the company to expand its current wireless business. Symbol makes wireless bar-code scanners and mobile devices used by warehouse employees, health care workers and teachers. For example, some hospitals use Symbol's wireless handheld devices so doctors and nurses can have instant access to patient information. With its $100 million investment, Intel executives said it will own a 1.5 percent stake in Symbol.
Sendmail
introduces advanced solution for internet mail routing
Vancouver cancels Telus R.O.W. agreements The City of Vancouver has informed Telus it is canceling existing right-of-way and access agreements with the telco as of December 31, 2000, and expects to renegotiate on new terms. Telus says that Vancouver cannot legally place conditions on its operations. |
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