DSL Prime News Briefs

DSL technology news, including the Senate's latest gift to AT&T's failure to deploy.

by Dave Burstein of DSL Prime and Future of TV [July 24, 2006]

Correction

• I wrote "13 percent of TV customers will sign up for Project Lightspeed because they hate their cable company so much, a Microsoft survey predicts." Many of those customers will come from satellite video, not cable. On Long Island, Verizon is suggesting they are adding considerably more TV customers than Cablevision reports losing. Most likely, they are former satellite customers. I also should be clear that the reason for the switch (they hate their current provider) is my reporting, not Microsoft's survey. Microsoft hopes people will choose to switch because of the features of Microsoft software. If that's so, the number switching may be much more than 13 percent. As one telco CTO jokes, "We assume we're going to get 20 percent of the video customers because they hate the cable guy, and the cable guys will take 20 percent of our voice customers in turn."

Briefs

• Credible but absolutely unconfirmed sources report Skype has been cracked by a Chinese group. "Free" is a great price, and people love Skype for the service and voice quality, but it's always been a closed system. Free World Dialup and one hundred other networks interconnect without charge.
  
  
• While it seems everyone is moving manufacturing to China, in fact sourcing is global. Zhone just assigned some products to CTDI to produce in Hungary.
  
  
• For job ads, see the DSL Prime website.

Press

• Mark Sullivan of Light Reading broke the story that Lucent's IMS product, crucial to the company's future, is having operational problems at AT&T, including difficulties managing dual-mode phones.

People

• Kevin Mitchell has moved from Infonetics, a top research house, to a marketing position at Acme Packet. He writes, "People say I joined the dark side, but I prefer to see myself moving from the objective world to the agenda world. After tracking and writing about VoIP and the vendorscape for many years, I wanted to be more deeply involved with VoIP deployment."
  
  
• Al Gharakhanian, who helped build Centillium's DSL business, has just landed at mixed signal company Exar.
  
  
• Hamadoun Touré of Mali, a candidate for the ITU Secretary-General, visited Washington this week and joined a State Department meeting at AT&T. The ITU maintains the standards, supervises the spectrum, and is taking an increasing role in internet governance. Wish I could have been down there to meet him.
  
  
• Bruce Gordon rose to Division President at Verizon before taking over civil rights group NAACP. For forty years, the phone companies have been known as a better opportunity for blacks than most of American business. The result: many highly effective executives choose to work at telcos, such as AT&T's Group President Ray Wilkins. The NAACP just rated BellSouth above all other American companies.

Politics

• The Senate Finance Committee has proposed an enormous giveaway in the form of accelerated depreciation for broadband. While of course DSL Prime is strongly in favor of near-universal broadband, little or none of this money will actually go to increased deployment. Instead of directly funding folks who would otherwise be unserved, the money will primarily flow to the bottom line of the companies building anyway, especially the Bells.
  
  What particularly smells is a loophole to include buildouts of less than 5 Mbps down, even over short distances. Japan went to 10 Mbps+ in 2002, all of Europe is following, and 5 Mbps is not enough for a single channel of today's HD video. That provision could be worth hundreds of millions to AT&T, although I haven't been able to confirm AT&T lobbyists are the source. AT&T is building Lightspeed to 20 to 25 Mbps, but currently blocking off everything above 6 Mbps to prevent competitive HD TV. I hope one of the D.C. reporters finds the story and embarrasses them into killing the giveaway.

Copyright 2006 Dave Burstein.
The DSL Prime Newsletter is reprinted with permission.

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