By Alana Grelyak

Happy New Year! At this point, dear reader, you’re probably settling back into your desk after a nice holiday respite (or perhaps you are the industrious type who worked right on through) and are getting ready for a whole new year of developments, deployments, and other exciting things in the telecom world. In this month’s NewsWatch, we’ll sum up the most interesting news bits from the end of last year. We’re happy to know that you chose to read Pipeline so early in the year and hope you continue to do so for the rest of what we all hope is a fabulous twelve months to come. Enjoy!

Many of America’s technology companies, manufacturers, communications providers, and other groups have banded together and made a call to action to President-elect Barack Obama and the new Congressional members to bring broadband access to Americans on a

national level. Panel members at the event included representatives from AT&T and Google, while Dr. Diane Duffy, Executive Director, Advanced Technology Solutions, at Telcordia, acted as moderator. "We believe that an affordable and robust broadband infrastructure, reaching every citizen, business and institution is both a competitive necessity and an achievable goal," Duffy said. But why is it such a competitive necessity against other countries? Will citizens defect if they can get better broadband access elsewhere? That seems unlikely, but Dr. Adam Drobot, CTO and President of Advanced Technologies Solutions at Telcordia, had this to say: "Moving forward aggressively with the deployment of a high-speed infrastructure at this time will create jobs and position our country for significant economic growth in the future.” That sounds like something just about everyone in America can stand behind in the present economic circumstances.

Alcatel-Lucent is cutting 1,000 managerial jobs in the hopes of regaining some of its

statement is focusing more on a “realignment of operations” and a “major strategic transformation,” both of which sound a bit more pleasant than “lay-offs, lay-offs, and more lay-offs.” The company also plans to reduce its number of contractors by about 5,000 and to enhance efficiency in various key areas and to rationalize spending. Good luck…

In similar news, Sonus is cutting back its workforce by about 50 people, which is 5% of their employees, in order to refocus initiatives into more profitable areas. ”We are right-sizing the business to align with market opportunities and improve speed and agility while managing our costs to position the Company for profitable growth,” commented Richard Nottenburg, President and CEO of Sonus Networks.

And in more bad economy news, Nortel was recently notified by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) that its shares have fallen below the average closing price of US $1 per