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incentive (aka buyout) to about 1,500 of its qualifying employees. Bell Canada stresses that this is not an early retirement program, but rather applies only to certain employees that meet specific criteria. "This initiative supports Bell's strategic imperative to achieve a competitive cost structure," said George Cope, President and CEO of BCE and Bell Canada. "It also thanks many of Bell's longest-serving team members for their service by allowing them to take a financially secure retirement even earlier than they may have planned." The company’s official release doesn’t provide specific details about the plan.

In other, more pleasant news, Telcordia has officially turned twenty-five years old! "As we look to the next 25 years we are excited about what the world has yet to experience," said Adam Drobot, CTO & President, Advanced Technology Solutions, Telcordia. "Over the last 25 years the industry has made explosive progress in delivering ubiquitous access for a vast array of content. Going forward, this progress will further accelerate and amplify, particularly in providing highly personalized and predictive machine-to-machine information that anticipates, prepares and responds to a person's specific needs." That does, indeed, sound exciting. Happy Birthday, Telcordia!

Tribold announced that it received US$11 million in a new round of funding led by Intel Capital and joined by existing investors DFJ Esrit and Eden Ventures. Said funding will be used by Tribold to grow its existing North American operations, add key members to its management team, build on Tribold’s existing sales and marketing resources and allow the company to continue to invest in significant research and development to expand its’ product footprint. In today’s economy, it isn’t often that we’re seeing funding and growth of this magnitude. Tribold’s CEO John Rainger had this to say on the topic: “In an uncertain economic climate, we believe this round of

Management in the CSP market has been validated, and Tribold is in a key position to take advantage of a significant market,” said Farmer.

Openet seems to have come up with a charging solution for service providers that are looking to regulate bandwidth consumption. Their “Fair Usage” solution, based upon Openet’s FusionWorks™ Policy Manager and Convergent Charging products, enables service providers to enforce limits on subscriber usage volume, while allowing subscribers to purchase additional volume when limits are reached. This definitely sounds like a good idea for service providers that are seeking additional revenue sources, but customers haven’t taken kindly to such an idea in the past (you may recall some of the flak Comcast received when it tried to enforce usage limits on some of its subscribers) and may not be quite ready to accept such a solution now. While the idea is to reduce customer churn, service providers may want to consider if such an action may lead to additional churn when current high-usage customers seek out service providers who don’t impose such restrictions. Perhaps even average customers might be rubbed the wrong way and may expect a reduction in monthly charges. Only trial and error can tell…