Cable Telephony on the March Comcast, no doubt following through with its plans to concentrate on cable telephony this year, has launched Comcast Digital Voice in 52 Bay Area communities-that’s San Francisco Bay, not Delaware Bay, where Comcast Voice should arrive some time in 2525 or thereabouts. The voice service is currently available in more than 20 markets nationwide covering more than 15 million homes. On a Smaller Scale Troy Cable, Elijay Telephone Company and Panhandle Telephone Cooperative will be adding voice services to their existing video and high-speed data products using Nuera Communications PacketCable-qualified cable telephony gateways. Elijay serves North Georgia; Troy has branches in Troy and Luverne, AL; and Panhandle is in Guymon, OK. For the record, these sites sound even more remote than the Delaware Bay (see preceding item’s aside). Meanwhile, this from Cable’s Friends Sprint has finished fingering the abacus to reveal that it now serves more than 1 million VoIP subscribers for the cable industry-a fourfold growth in the past year. Sprint has signed VoIP agreements with several new cable companies including WEHCO Video, NPG Cable and Shrewsbury Electric and Cable Operations. Don’t think those are the reason the telco has reached a million subs. From Cable’s Competition Clearwire Communications, in an announcement that included the phrase "less than two years after Clearwire revolutionized the way people access the Internet" (and we thought it was Al Gore who did that), said it was offering wireless broadband VoIP in Stockton, CA. A Vendor Sampling MetaSwitch said it has partnered with Dash911 to simplify the implementation of 9-1-1 emergency calling by VoIP providers …. Acme Packets said it now supports an ENUM (Electronic Numbering Management) server interface and has "proven interoperability in field deployments" with Nominum‘s Navitas, an ENUM-based IP-application routing service directory and was expanding its hosted NAT (network address translation) mechanisms with support for the emerging IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standard STUN (Simple Traversal of UDP through NATs) STUN-Relay/TURN (Traversal Using Relay NAT) and ICE (Interactive Connectivity Establishment). Not sure what that means, but everybody needs an acronym fix every once in a while, and you can always depend on a telco vendor to provide it …. Comverse Technology signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Netcentrex for $164 million in cash-give or take a million or so-and a contingent earnout of up to an additional $16 million …. Juniper Networks announced a solution that lets cable MSOs protect VoIP and SIP-based services-and cable’s doing SIP when?-against network security attacks by increasing the security of existing services, reducing costs of network downtime and enabling new, value-added managed security services. Driving Cable Choice In one of those "it’s just business" type of announcements, the Southeast Operating Division of Charter Business-the commercial business unit of Charter Communications-and Nortel announced "the deployment and implementation of an optical solution providing highly reliable, secure network services for enhanced business continuity between the U.S. corporate office (in Greer, SC) of automaker BMW and its new state-of-the-art research facilities (in Greenville, SC)." As part of the deal, Charter is providing BMW with private, redundant connectivity for replicated data storage transport as well as converging corporate data communications over redundant 10 gigabit connections using Nortel’s optical technology. Nothing in the news release about whether BMW was providing Bluetooth-enabled 325i sedans to shuttle executives back and forth between the facilities.

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