WASHINGTON (Reuters)—U.S. high-speed Internet subscriptions soared 33 percent last year to 50.2 million lines, according to the latest data released by the Federal Communications Commission Wednesday.

More consumers signed up for digital subscriber line (DSL) service from telephone companies like AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. than cable modem service from companies like Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Inc.

DSL subscriptions jumped 5.7 million lines versus cable companies adding 4.2 million subscribers in 2005, according to the FCC. The cable industry’s market share dropped 3.5 percentage points to 57.5 percent while DSL gained 3.3 percentage points to reach 40.5, the agency said.

DSL is typically less expensive than cable Internet service but offers slower download speeds.

The United States is ranked 12th in the world for broadband subscribers behind countries including Iceland, South Korea and Japan, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s most recent rankings.

U.S. officials have attributed the low ranking to other countries subsidizing the cost and because some of those nations have concentrated population centers that are easier to serve.

An estimated 42 percent of Americans had high-speed Internet access at home in March 2006, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. That was up from 30 percent of Americans with high-speed access one year earlier, it said.

U.S. cable and telephone companies are engaged in a fierce battle to offer customers a package of communications services, including voice, data, wireless and subscription television.

Related Articles

WASHINGTON (Reuters)—U.S. high-speed Internet subscriptions soared 33 percent last year to 50.2 million lines, according to the latest data released by the Federal Communications Commission Wednesday.

More consumers signed up for digital subscriber line (DSL) service from telephone companies like AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. than cable modem service from companies like Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Inc.

DSL subscriptions jumped 5.7 million lines versus cable companies adding 4.2 million subscribers in 2005, according to the FCC. The cable industry’s market share dropped 3.5 percentage points to 57.5 percent while DSL gained 3.3 percentage points to reach 40.5, the agency said.

DSL is typically less expensive than cable Internet service but offers slower download speeds.

The United States is ranked 12th in the world for broadband subscribers behind countries including Iceland, South Korea and Japan, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s most recent rankings.

U.S. officials have attributed the low ranking to other countries subsidizing the cost and because some of those nations have concentrated population centers that are easier to serve.

An estimated 42 percent of Americans had high-speed Internet access at home in March 2006, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. That was up from 30 percent of Americans with high-speed access one year earlier, it said.

U.S. cable and telephone companies are engaged in a fierce battle to offer customers a package of communications services, including voice, data, wireless and subscription television.

Related Articles

Red Hat has launched a Telecommunications Partner program for NEPs (network equipment providers), OEMs, telecom ISVs (independent software vendors), and carriers/operators. The program will package existing and new Red Hat capabilities into an integrated platform aimed at giving Red Hat a bigger role in the build-out of next-generation telecom services.

Red Hat’s embedded strategy has long been to extend its standard distribution into embedded markets such as telecom, rather than create separate vertical-market products. The company launched a “Red Hat Runtime” initiative about two years ago, in order to support customers embedding Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and today claims that RHEL ships pre-installed on equipment from eight top NEPs, and is supported by about 100 telecom-industry ISVs.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1990598,00.asp?kc=EWRSS04069TX1K0000701

Related Articles

WASHINGTON (Reuters)—A U.S. judge Wednesday said he had doubts about government settlements reached last year that permitted SBC Communications to buy AT&T, and Verizon Communications to acquire MCI Inc. to proceed.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said at a hearing that the Justice Department would have to demonstrate that the antitrust settlements reached with the companies went far enough to resolve concerns about competition.

“I have doubts about that,” he said at the beginning of a hearing. “So I need to have the parties address that.”

The hearing was convened under a federal law that requires antitrust settlements be reviewed and endorsed by a judge.

Those reviews traditionally have been perfunctory, however Congress modified the antitrust laws in 2004 giving judges more leeway to examine settlements more closely.

Sullivan questioned a lawyer for the Justice Department about exactly what the court’s role should be in the review process. He also indicated he intends to have experts testify independently about the effectiveness of the settlements.

“I have a great deal of discretion,” the judge said.

The government’s lawyer told Sullivan that the department had painstakingly reviewed the transactions, spent eight months and 24,000 hours of staff time while conducting 300 interviews to investigate any possible competition concerns.

An attorney representing the Justice Department, Claude Scott, told Sullivan that the government’s consent decrees leave “a vibrant market where there are a lot of competitors out there.”

The Justice Department’s antitrust division in October 2005 agreed to allow the two large deals to go forward on the condition that they lease competitors’ access to telecommunications lines in more than 350 buildings located in each of the companies’ territories.

SBC renamed the company AT&T Inc. and is the largest U.S. telephone company. Verizon as the second-largest telecommunications company.

Related Articles

Rolls-Royce has signed a seven-year, $20 million deal with Nortel Networks to build a new worldwide enterprise voice-over-IP network.

The network is to encompass telephony, unified voice, fax and e-mail messaging, and a platform for advanced mobile collaboration.

“Nortel’s … ability to build large, reliable networks designed for delivery of new services convinced us to select it as our preferred communications provider,” Jim Reed, IT purchasing director for Rolls-Royce, in London, said in a statement.

This division of Rolls-Royce, which has $12 billion in annual sales and makes industrial power systems, is separate from the Rolls-Royce automobile brand.

Nortel will begin by taking over Rolls-Royce’s TDM network, which is built primarily of Mitel Networks equipment, along with some gear from Nortel and Siemens.

The new network will serve 26,500 users in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Norway, Germany and France.

“We will be managing their TDM network immediately and will convert it to VOIP. We’re taking a legacy network of multiple vendors and will transition it to a converged network,” said Curt Hopkins, vice president for services, sales and marketing at Nortel, also in London.

Hopkins said competing bidders for the contract included Siemens, Avaya and Cisco Systems.

Equipment in the new network will include the Nortel Communication Server 1000, Nortel CallPilot for unified voice, fax and e-mail communications, and Nortel mobility services.

Network management will include remote fault monitoring with proactive network surveillance, and customer-defined SLAs (service-level agreements) for response and resolution, according to Hopkins.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1986920,00.asp?kc=EWRSS04069TX1K0000701

Related Articles