Weekly Erlang: A Digest of Telephony News Traffic

HBO revisited Our colleagues at CableFAX Daily reported on a tech panel during last week’s WICT Forum that had Time Warner Cable CTO Mike LaJoie comparing his company’s voice offering today to “the early days of HBO, when people chased cable trucks down the street.” Time Warner has hit an impressive stride, with 15,000 new lines being installed a week. And such numbers appear to correlate with other positive indicators. (See this week’s ‘Proxy Server.’) MVNO chatter A few weeks ago, we addressed cable’s mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) option. This entails purchasing and re-branding blocks of minutes from a mobile network operator (MNO). This week, Wall Street chattered about Comcast teaming up with a wireless company, such as T-Mobile or Sprint-Nextel. CRTC rules on VoIP The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) ruled that VoIP is a telephone service, but will be subject to regulation when provided and used as a local service. Peer-to-peer VoIP services are exempt. Bell Canada and Telus plan to appeal the ruling. SBC and 911 SBC Communications announced a new commercial 911 service available to VoIP providers for their stationary customers throughout SBC’s 13-state region. This commercial offering allows customers of VoIP providers to have the safety and security of traditional 911 service at their home locations. The service will establish VoIP providers’ access to the E (enhanced) 911 database and connectivity to the 105 “911” selective routers in SBC’s 13-state service territory that connect to emergency response centers. The new SBC commercial offering is the latest option for VoIP providers to establish E-911 emergency services to their stationary VoIP customers. The offering will enable VoIP providers to offer customers who use their service at a fixed location, such as their home, the ability to dial 911 and have accurate call-back and address information displayed at the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP)’s emergency dispatcher’s workstation—rather than having their call sent to a PSAP’s 10-digit “administrative” telephone number. VoIP Consolidation Global service provider VoIP Inc. intends to acquire Caerus Inc., whose three subsidiaries are Volo Communications, Caerus Networks and Caerus Billing. The reported deal involves about $750,000 and 15 million commons shares of VoIP Inc. MCI/Tellabs, FTTx Tellabs announced that MCI has selected its MultiservicePLuS solution for MCI’s Converged Packet Access (CPA) network. The Tellabs solution will be deployed in cities across the United States as part of MCI’s CPA network. Wave7 Optics and Road 9 Inc. announced the initiation of a triple-play fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) infrastructure that will ultimately connect 5000 homes and 2000 hotel rooms in The Villages of Loreto Bay, a $2.2 billion development near the Mexican town of Loreto on the Baja peninsula. Road 9 designs, builds and operates private systems in master planned communities and municipalities.