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The 500-channel interactive universe that was proclaimed to be right around the comer in the early 1990s has collapsed under the weight of the couch potato. Ironically, its demise had […]

Byline: Vince Vittore Maybe it's the recent political conventions or maybe it's the lasting effect of our jaunt into acceptable jingoism via the Olympics, but a lot has been written [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore Perhaps it all started with Brian Roberts. On a balmy Las Vegas morning, Roberts stood on stage and wowed the bleary-eyed crowd by downloading a 4 gigabyte [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore Forget what you know about network engineering because it's worthless. That may be a bit extreme, but it's not a bad thought when looking at the new [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore When Atlantic Central Bankers Bank, or ACBB for short, launched its own telecom division early this year, it did so more out of desperation than anything else. [...]

Have you TiVo'd lately? Chances are that you or someone you know recently has used a digital video recorder to record TV shows that otherwise would have been missed. Or [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore SPRINT IS TAKING what could logically be thought of as the next step in its voice-over-IP evolution with the launch of a new service that allows enterprise [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore Entrisphere this week will unveil its entry in the Gigabit passive optical network market with a platform targeted directly at the North American market. Based on the [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore This week's TelecomNext show will feature plenty of talk about the ongoing tri-company request for proposals for Gigabit passive optical network access networks with an emphasis on [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore and Carol Wilson Consolidation within the telecom industry has become SOP - standard operating procedure. With rare exception - Bell Atlantic/TCI and Sprint/WorldCom come to mind - [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore In the entire rancor over the future of the Universal Service Fund, most of the attention has been focused on the contribution side of the equation, with [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore Though they have generally escaped the vitriol directed at telcos by free speech advocates and others, cable TV operators are quietly moving toward what can best be [...]

Byline: [ BY VINCE VITTORE ] vvittore@prismb2b.com One day prior to this issue of The Independent shipping to the printer, AT&T announced its colossal acquisition of BellSouth, an event that [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore The first week of February, by most measurable factors, was pretty good for independent rural telcos. Not only did Senator Conrad Burn (R-Mont.) introduce what he's calling [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore For an industry that has proclaimed its end customers don't care about the technology, telecommunications has a long history of taking the simplest service and making it [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore Tandberg Television's $80 million acquisition of SkyStream consolidates two headend players that fit well together geographically as well as from a product perspective. However, in a market [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore At the heart of the battle over whether telcos should be required to obtain local video franchises lies one almost inescapable fact: Virtually every video customer a [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore Sometime in the spring, U.S. consumers should be a significant step closer to losing one of the last places of refuge from wireless connectivity - at 32,000 [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore The IP set-top box market was once considered a sector where start-up vendors could make a mark, but the ability of the market to support a multitude [...]

Byline: [ BY VINCE VITTORE ] Despite the preponderance of unlit fiber, the reality is that often glass isn't located anywhere close to areas where network capacity is required. So [...]

Byline: [ BY VINCE VITTORE ] It's amazing how often the person who plans the most tends to have the best luck. Nsight Teleservices has managed to survive as both [...]

Byline: [ BY VINCE VITTORE ] vvittore@prismb2b.com Although there are some in the industry who believe independent telcos exist in a vacuum, free from the harsh realities of the market, [...]

Byline: [ BY VINCE VITTORE ] To say that the area Matanuska Telephone Association serves is not your typical independent territory is an understatement. With almost 10,000 square miles of [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore Unless you've been living under a rock for the last year, it shouldn't come as a surprise that telcos are rushing into the IP video market. But [...]

Byline: [ BY VINCE VITTORE ] When Hurricane Rita roared out of the Gulf of Mexico in late September, it missed a direct hit on Houston, which was a worst-case [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore It's time the telco world faces some hard facts. Despite all the feel-good advertising of the past decade and the blitz that's about to come from the [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore Note to proponents of any particular home networking technology: Don't get too comfortable, and prepare for battle. Handicapping the race between various home networking technologies vis-a-vis the [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore Though not typically a 'telco show,' the International CES is quickly becoming a hot venue for carriers launching new services. At this year's event, Verizon and AT&T [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore CopperCom will announce this week that it has donated $100,000 to the Coalition to Keep America Connected, a group dedicated to reforming universal service and inter-carrier compensation. [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore Several recent announcements from traditional video outlets, Internet portals and the consumer electronics world have the potential to reshape a telco TV landscape in which plans seemed [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore Texas Instruments, which holds a dominant share of the ADSL chipset market, this week will announce the launch of a residential gateway architecture aimed at telcos offering [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore In the continuing skirmish over the future of the Universal Service Fund, Reps. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and Lee Terry (R-Neb.) have proposed what amounts to a forehead [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore In the near term, Cisco System's $6.9 billion acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta gives the routing kingpin an instant and significantly larger footprint in the cable TV market. Longer [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore When the first paying subscriber flips on his or her U-verse TV service from SBC Communications early next year, it's unlikely to look all that different from [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore The roster of vendors auditioning for a lead role in the IPTV market got decidedly more crowded last week, as suppliers of all sizes announced acquisitions and [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore With all the expected hype, the video iPod was officially launched earlier this month. Using a combination of Hollywood (or at least MTV) and techno-geek, Apple joined [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore Of all the challenges faced by Mike Zafirovski as the new CEO of Nortel, one of the biggest will be deciding exactly which markets the company wants [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore SureWest Communications this week is announcing that it will become the first company in the U.S to offer high-definition TV over an IP-based fiber-to-the-premises network. The Roseville, [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore There's a segment of the industry that is facing increased competition for its core revenue stream and is desperately searching for new markets to tap. Sound familiar? [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore When cable operators get their hands on DOCSIS 3.0-compliant equipment, which could happen within a year if you are to believe some, telcos suddenly will be faced [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore Among the early, big 'gotcha' issues to creep up among service providers offering video over IP was figuring out how to get the IP stream from the [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore You've got to hand it to Congress. Nobody knows how to work the system as well as the representatives and senators on Capitol Hill. Currently, there is [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore Just how far the IPTV market has progressed from searching for the application that would differentiate telco offerings from cable TV came into full view last week [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore Seeking to separate itself from the usual cacophony of political debates, a group of four associations representing rural telcos last week choose to use a series of [...]

Byline: [ BY VINCE VITTORE ] When SBC Communications Chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre announced the details of the company's U-verse brand of services, which will include IPTV, at the [...]

Byline: [ BY VINCE VITTORE ] His business card says he's an 'associate,' of Columbus Telephone in Columbus, Kan., but Jim Dahmen is effectively the general manager as well as [...]

Byline: [ BY VINCE VITTORE ] vvittore@primediabusiness.com I have a confession: The first time I met Jim Dahmen, I thought he might have been celebrating happy hour on some European [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore Like many independents, NDTel is deploying fiber-to-the-premises. Based in Devils Lake, N.D., the company has launched a two-phase buildout using Allied Telesyn's access gear. Unlike most telcos, [...]

Byline: Vince Vittore After several years of talking vaguely about plans to help rural telcos migrate their existing DMS switch to a voice-over-IP environment, Nortel Networks has finally unveiled some [...]

Byline: [ BY VINCE VITTORE ] On July 4 around 4 a.m., an alarm call went out to all on-call personnel for Pioneer Telephone in Oklahoma. Initially interpreted as a [...]