Around The Industry:
BT conceded yesterday that it had made mistakes with a flagship mobile service, as it emerged that the product has amassed just 40,000 customers in two years. BT Fusion – a combined fixed and mobile phone – was supposed to reinvigorate BT’s mobile offering and contribute to BT’s growth. It promised to cut consumers’ bills by offering the features of a mobile phone with cheaper landline prices. Steve Andrews, head of BT Mobility, admitted that take-up of the product, which uses wi-fi technology, had been set back by the timing of the launch. “There was a lack of wi-fi devices as early as we would have liked them,” he said.
Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to woo Silicon Valley campaign contributors and voters with an ambitious plan to create more high-paying jobs and maintain U.S. dominance as an “innovation superpower” in the technology sector. “I believe that we ought to hit the restart button on the 21st Century,” Clinton said. Among other things, Clinton said would provide tax incentives to increase the number of U.S. homes with broadband Internet connections.
Streaming video across a household wireless network is something that’s generally not recommended. D-Link is trying to change that by putting 802.11n technology to work. As you may know, 802.11n is the new longer-range, high-speed Wi-Fi specification, a significant upgrade from traditional 802.11b/g devices. D-Link’s Xtreme Duo MediaBridge device, called the DAP-1555, connects to existing routers, enabling them to stream multimedia content over 5 GHz, a channel that is freer and clearer than the crowded 2.4 Ghz, that traditional Wi-Fi devices share with cordless phones. D-Link has only just announced the device and it’s not expected to ship until fall so we’ve not had a chance to try it out. The price has not been determined as yet.
The city of Toledo set the record straight after The Toledo Blade misleadingly reported that “Toledo taxpayers could pay up to $2.16 million over five years” if the city council approves a license agreement with MetroFi and a city councilman jumped on the story to make political hay. Councilman Frank Szollosi, longtime opponent of Mayor Carty Finkbeiner, used the claim to attack the project in general (one of the mayor’s key initiatives) and its choice of MetroFi, in particular, to do the job, saying “If they’re (MetroFi) going to be asking council to approve money out of the city budget, why not go with a local union firm that is already doing it?” By doing so, Szollosi no doubt curried favor with Block Communications which not only owns Buckeye Communications, the company that lost the bid to MetroFi, it also owns The Blade. MetroFi has not asked the council to budget a cent of new money toward the network.
UK regulator Ofcom introduced new regulations to extend wireless broadband access across the country, including in rural areas. The regulations cover the 5.8 GHz band, currently used by a number of operators to provide fixed wireless broadband services in the UK. Under the new regulations, which come into effect today, the operators will be able to increase power levels, potentially extending the range and variety of services into parts of the country that were previously not covered. This is likely to have its most marked effect in rural areas.
Ofcom has announced that rules protecting consumers from the mis-selling of fixed-line voice call services will now also cover providers that offer voice and broadband services using full Local Loop Unbundling technology. Mis-selling refers to inappropriate sales and marketing activities including ‘slamming’, where customers can be switched from one company to another without their express knowledge and consent. Ed Richards, Chief Executive of Ofcom, commented “Mis-selling causes problems for consumers. We want competition and choice to continue to grow, and we want consumers to benefit from these changes. Consumers need to be able to shop around with confidence. Extending these rules and our enforcement activity will protect consumers from inappropriate sales and marketing techniques.”
Once upon a time, voice services delivered to cable subscribers using voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology were considered possible add-ons to standard cable offerings. Fast-forward to 2007, and these services have survived the proving ground of the top cable providers. Voice, video and data service bundles have emerged as a powerful triple-play that has been effective in gaining customers. Comcast alone added 571,000 digital voice subscribers in the first quarter of 2007. The presence of voice in the bundle has also served to stem the turnover of video and broadband data subscribers. While it is true that traditional voice carriers are beginning to roll out video, it is also true that their reach is still limited – a fact that is putting cable operators in an ideal position to seize the strategic advantage of VoIP and establish an early foothold in the growing market for bundled voice, video and data services. Now the question is: how can an operator with limited resources add VoIP technology to its existing set of services?
The virtual workplace is becoming a reality. A recent Nemertes Research survey of 120 IT executives found that 62 percent plan to increase the number of their branch-office locations. The research firm says branch offices will grow 11 percent in 2007, up 8.9 percent from 2006. Survey respondents also said close to 20 percent of their employees telecommute. And respondents said that some 80 percent of companies are virtual workplaces, which means some of the employees work at a different location than their supervisors or workgroups. “On average, organizations classify 27 percent of their employees as virtual,” said Robin Gareiss, executive vice president of Nemertes Research.
National Public Radio is teaming up with online radio broadcasters to appeal new music royalties that they say would put smaller operators out of business and force others to sharply scale back their online music offerings. NPR filed a notice with the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington Wednesday signaling that it would challenge the ruling by a panel of copyright judges that would sharply raise the amount of royalties that NPR stations and others have to pay record companies for streaming music over the Internet. NPR also said it was filing a request with the same court on Thursday along with other Webcasters for an emergency stay blocking the adoption of the new rates, which are set to go into effect July 15. Separately, a bill seeking to block the new royalties and implement a different payment system is gathering steam in Congress. The Internet Radio Equality Act has 100 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives and has also been introduced in the Senate, says Kurt Hanson, who operates a small online radio company called AccuRadio.
SecurityBits:
Symantec’s DeepSight Threat Analyst Team recently discovered that Mac OS X includes Samba 3.0.10. Samba hasn’t been updated on the Mac platform since that version, according to a May 26 team journal entry. On the same day, the team managed to exploit the heap-corruption vulnerability on a fully patched Mac OS X 10.4.9 system that was running the default Samba 3.0.10 program. The team is advising Mac OS X users to upgrade to the latest Samba version, 3.0.25, from Samba’s official site. Otherwise, users can disable the Windows Sharing service until Apple has an official update available via its Software Update service. The team also advised users to select the lock function to avoid inadvertent re-enabling of the service.
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