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Verizon Business is currently upgrading its VoIP service to include voice e-mail, synchronized contacts and calendars, and text messaging services. The new services are available to customers who subscribe to Verizon’s Hosted IP Centrex package and will be available in this fall in the US and at the end of the year internationally.
Verizon Communications is giving customers the option to lock in rates for life. If the customers are willing to commit to a two-year contrat, they’ll be eligible to get their DSL service for either $14.99 or $27.99 a month for life on Verizon’s 768 kbps and 3 Mbps plans, respectively.
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Comcast’s “unlimited” service apparently has a limit, although Comcast seems to be loath to disclose what those limitations are. |
On a brighter note for T-Mobile, the European Commission has approved T-Mobile’s takeover of Orange Nederlands, a subsidiary of France Telecom. The take-over will make T-Mobile the second largest mobile network in The Netherlands.
Korean mobile phone producer SK Telecom has announced that it will be taking a $1 billion stake in China Unicom, giving it a 6.6% stake in the company and making it China Unicom’s second largest stake-holder.
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Google’s phone number for life service called GrandCentral Communications has hit some bumps recently. The service allows customers to have a central number that controls all of their phone lines and gives them the ability to filter their incoming calls. One of Google’s carrier partners (who has so far been unnamed) stopped service, causing Google to have to relocate 400 numbers, thereby negating their original idea of one number for life. Currently, Google provides the service for free.
Also in the realm of free stuff, Skype has given its paying customers a free week of service to makeup for the outage, which was caused by a major Windows update. It seems to have occurred, oddly enough, when a large number of users rebooted their computers at the same time in order to implement the Windows patches.
It would appear that Comcast slapped a few wrists by cutting off services to people who were using too much bandwidth, thereby slowing down the connection rates for other users. Comcast’s “unlimited” service apparently has a limit, although Comcast seems to be loath to disclose what those limitations are. Charlie Douglas, spokesman for Comcast, said that the cut-offs happen very rarely while ConsumerAffairs.com reports that hundreds of people in fifteen states have had their services cut off in the last five months.
Qwest has welcomed Stephanie G. Comfort as its new Senior VP of Corporate Strategy. Comfort previously led Qwest’s investor relations program.
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Xfone has acquired NTS Communications, Inc for $42 million. NTS is a Texas company that provides integrated voice, data, and video solutions. Xfone hopes that the acquisition will substantially increase their U.S. presence.
Chicago, Illinois has cancelled its plans to offer a municipal Wi-Fi network. Officials announced that Chicago would rethink its approach at getting the Wi-Fi access to the whole of the city because the current plan would use up far too much of the city’s financial resources. Back to Starbucks, everyone.
Clarity has won a contract with Sri Lanka Telecom to install its new unified OSS solution, Clarity 10 (C10). “C10, the first carrier grade OSS to offer a tightly integrated provisioning, inventory, service assurance and workforce management solution on a single unified platform, will be deployed to support SLT’s transition to Next Generation Networks.”
A recent poll by Comptel Corporation shows that a large percentage of operators are unsure of whether or not they want to adopt an IMS architecture within the next two years. Only 32% of those polled said that they had decided on the move, while another 32% had no plans to go ahead with the move and the remainder of those polled were looking toward a two to four year or longer possibility for the move.
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