Articles

Sirius Telecom announced today that it has significantly upgraded its switching facilities in Los Angeles, CA. by purchasing a substantial amount of ports from Veraz Networks (www.VerazNet.com). The upgrade will handle newly signed business from one of the largest Tier One carriers in the USA that wishes to connect with another Sirius Telecom Tier One PTT located overseas.

Copper thievery continues to become an increasing problem in the U.S., with outages now being reported on at least a weekly basis. It seems that the problem has now spread to the plumbing industry as well. 

AT&T introduces new international calling plan for its residential wireline customers. AT&T Worldwide Calling 3000 gives subscribers 3,000 minutes of international long distance calls to 164 countries for $20 a month. 

AT&T is still unsure of what caused a nationwide meltdown of its digital television service for several hours on Sunday. The outage affected an estimated 100,000 customers across 33 markets. 

For the fourth time in less than a year, TheDigest.Com goes dark due to fiber cut. Over 100,000 Northern California residents suffer total Internet outage as well as disruption to most local and long distance telephone calls. AT&T has thus far refused to offer any redundancy to their fiber network, leaving a large portion of the state vulnerable to frequent blackouts. ATM machines, cellphones, credit card terminals, landlines, VoIP and most other telecommunications services rendered largely inoperable for nearly 12 hours. Thanks, AT&T!!! 

Vonage has reportedly settled their legal dispute with Sprint out of court over VoIP patents for a hefty $80 million. 

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann labels AT&T and two individuals as "The Worst Person in the World" on his nightly broadcast. The company has recently been taken to task for a new addition to their broadband Terms of Service that allows them to shut off the Internet access of anyone who publicly criticizes the company (fortunately for us, we don't use AT&T, or we'd have been shut-off a LONG time ago!). 

CBS MarketWatch reports that the Federal Communications Commission plans on investigating the possibility of re-regulating pricing on dedicated access lines provided by AT&T, Verizon and other ILECs. The issue is set to be addressed at the FCC's regular meeting this month. 

Ebay writes down the value of its Skype subsidiary by nearly 46% or $1.3 billion due to poor performance. CEO of Skype resigns, or is pushed out, depending upon the source.