From the category archives:

Telecom

Google to Launch Internet Telephony Service

January 24, 2005

Times Online reports in a somewhat speculative article that Google is gearing up to deliver Internet telephony services. The move certainly makes sense as an intriguing marriage between search capabilities and direct connections to the people and organizations that you are searching for. It will be interesting to see who they are partnering with and [...]

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Statistics and More Statistics (Broadband, VoIP, Mobile Phones)

January 9, 2005

Browsing around on EuroTelcoBlog, I found a nice compilation of global broadband and Internet telephony statistics.
Point Topic has released forecasts for global DSL lines (85m in Q3) and voice-over-broadband users (now over 5m). This 5m figure includes only subscribers to the estimated 1,000 commercial services operating worldwide, and excludes Skype. Four million of these users [...]

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Cerritos Completes Citywide Wi-Fi Launch

March 22, 2004

Back in December I noted that Cerritos, California, had announced plans to become the first city in the country to roll-out city-wide, ubiquitous Wi-Fi service. Today, Tropos Networks, a vendor who sells equipment used to build metro-scale Wi-Fi networks, announced that Woodland Hills-based Aiirmesh Communications has gone live in Cerritos to create the first city [...]

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Owning the Customer

March 21, 2004

David Dean writes in Telephony about The Wireless Future sessions at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin and has some strong reactions to comments by one of the panelists, a Verizon Wireless executive who said his company must “own the customer” in response to audience questions about why U.S. carriers ignore smaller independent software and [...]

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Separating Telephony from the Telephone

March 20, 2004

Martin Geddes makes one of his usual wonderfully observations about the impact of the Internet on telephony as he describes how Skype has changed communications among members of his globally-distributed family. He notes, for example, that they have become used to not interrupting someone unless there is a presence indicator and that they don’t use [...]

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Hotspot Revenues Fail to Materialize

March 19, 2004

According to research firm In-Stat/MDR, service providers worldwide will only generate $80-million this year from Wi-Fi access. In the United States, reports the Wall Street Journal, In-Stat estimates that Wi-Fi providers will take in about $28 million – roughly as much revenue as Verizon Wireless, the nation’s largest cell phone company, generates in 12 hours. [...]

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More Than 200-Million Americans Online

March 18, 2004

Some of the optimistic forecasts of the late 1990s do actually seem to have been pretty much on target (or even a little low). Case in point: today, Nielsen/NetRatings, reported that its survey from February showed 204.3-million people or 74.9 percent of the over-two population of 272.8 million now have Internet access from home. This [...]

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SBC’s Aggressive Wi-Fi Plan

August 6, 2003

SBC unveiled FreedomLink, the telecom industry’s most ambitious wireless Internet initiative to date. Over three years, SBC will deploy 20,000 hotspots in 6,000 venues, including hotels, airports, convention centers in 13 states. Through a roaming deal with Wayport, subscribers can tap 650 more access points nationwide. Agreements with other Wi-Fi providers are expected. SBC will [...]

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Dan Gillmor on the Virtues of Voice over IP

August 3, 2003

Dan Gillmor’s column this weekend is a stirring appreciation of Internet telephony:
Previously, I had two phone lines into my house, each costing almost $20 a month for the dial tone plus local calls. One of those lines was split to also handle digital subscriber line (DSL) broadband data access. In addition, I paid a long-distance [...]

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