Weekly Erlang: A Digest of Telephony News Traffic

The Ol’ College Try It must be time to go back to school. IPcelerate wants to make that experience a happy one for students who show up with laptops and cell phones and a profitable one for universities that are looking for ways to sell services to those students who are no longer interested in paying for in-room telephones and voice mail. IPcelerate is weaving AOL’s Instant Messenger (AIM) service into its MyNORA Virtual Student Union offering to make it easy for students to connect with friends and family using the college’s broadband network and "the first step in terms of a series of things you’re going to be seeing between AOL and IPcelerate," promised IPC’s President-CEO Kevin Brown. "This product is a desktop application that runs on the desktop of college students, faculty, staff, boosters, alumni to enhance how they communicate with one another, how they access various information sources and how they reach out to other entities. AIM and AOL’s presence environment is now integrated into this application." IPcelerate sells the service to universities for $99 per client. The university then resells it to students and others to use the college network for access to both the wider Internet and information about the school. "The student is coming onto the campus with two tools; a cell phone and a laptop, and when they plug that laptop into the university’s network, they start browsing the Internet, downloading music and watching streaming video, all of which are very bandwidth-intensive for the university," Brown says. Now, rather than shutting off those students and alienating paying customers, the universities can move them to the MyNORA digital dashboard and soft phone to bring together voice, video and data collaboration capabilities. Cox OKs Axerra Cox Business Services, the commercial arm of the Cox Communications the MSO, has given a thumbs-up to Axerra Networks pseudo-wire solutions for use in its network. CBS offers a full range of business grade voice services and data services for small-medium sized business (SMB) customers and will use the pseudo-wire gateways and access devices to furnish full service capabilities over the cable plant HFC and fiber infrastructure, the companies say. Going Beyond the FCC VoIP Inc. has released what it calls "the industry’s first private network 911 service for broadband and packet communications" that it provides via its wholly owned subsidiary VoiceOne Communications. The company maintains that, in the rush to meet FCC deadlines for broadband 911 connections, service providers are using unsecured, best-effort transport-which kind of defeats the purpose of making a reliable 911 call. VoiceOne is using private multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) and its proprietary softswitch to ensure 911 voice quality and reliability. Moving Fast BroadLogic has introduced a wideband receiver that enables cable modems to deliver broadband at ultra high speeds beyond 600 Mbps by bonding multiple QAM channels into one "virtual" channel. The wideband design uses existing physical cable plant to process multiple standard 6 or 8 MHz channels that each support standard QAM to deliver gigabit Ethernet (GigE) downstream capacity to individual subscriber premises. The company envisions a wideband data stream that enables multiple DVRs within a premises on top of voice and other video offerings.