GigaOM

Another day, and another chip cancellation at Intel Corp., the company which once defined corporate efficiency. Anyway they are canceling the liquid-crystal-on-silicon chips (LCOS) project because guess what, they can’t get it done. Oh no… isn’t this the chip which was going to kill DLP technology from Texas Instruments? Intel president Paul Otellini first promised to takethe company into the LCOS market at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, when he promised that LCOS would help deliver 50-inch TVs selling for less than $1,800 in 2005. Continue »

My former boss at Forbes.com David Churbuck as joined the blog world, with his new offering, D.C. Churbuck Reports. As a former reporter – 13 years at Forbes, four at PC Week, four at daily newspapers, he still has the writing bug, and boy it is going to be fun having him in the blog world. He is using WordPress. Welcome David, and stop gloating please!

Juvenal wrote that an incurable itch for scribbling [cacoethes scribendi] takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breast. Oliver Wendell Homes wrote: “So many foolish persons are rushing into print, that it requires a kind of literary police to hold them back and keep them in order.” It is said that 12,000 so-called blogs are launched every day. Here’s yet another. So what’s my point in greasing the ways, knocking out the chocks, and swinging the champagne bottle against the prow of my ship? Boredom, a cluttered mind, and a terminal case of cacoethes scribendi. I still have a verbal itch to scratch, and this is the leg of the couch I choose to do it on. Continue »

First it was Project Pronto, then it was Project LightSpeed. Now after publicly dissing FTTH for years, SBC is dreaming of 18 million fiber homes within three years. I am not sure, what changed their mind. Maybe, the FCC gave them the cake, the bakery and the silver as well.

Karl Bode: While the triennial review paved the way in keeping competitors from new fiber builds, the FCC last week went even further, declaring fiber to the node builds within 500 feet of customer premises didn’t need to be shared. After the ruling, SBC proclaimed they’d cut the deployment schedule for project lightspeed from five years to three. The bells had been complaining for years that there was no incentive to build fiber networks with regulation in place. No incentive, despite the fact cable dominates North American broadband, and the bells need television services tied to DSL bundles to better compete. No incentive, despite the fact the local and long distance business is stagnant, and the bells are morphing into pure, bandwidth hungry data companies that need fiber to survive. Continue »

Everyone wants a WiFi, but even that is not enough to staunch the bleeding at Emeryville-based Netopia, which seems to be unravelling. The company which makes all sort of assorted broadband and WiFi gear, and has a nice little software portfolio of products like Timbuktu Pro, is swirling down the toilet. Mac-heads should know about this company, it was called Farallon Communications back in the day. This morning, company’s CFO William Baker resigned. This comes closely on the heels of a delisting by Nasdaq, which has followed a restatement of earnings etc. It now trades on the Pink Sheets. Apparently there were some shenanigans that involved “software revenue recognition.” According to some class action suits filed against the company, Netopia, “concealed that it was experiencing weaker than stated gross margins due to higher component costs, that the Company was selling its products at lower prices to key carrier customers, that certain key customers were failing to participate in its 802.11g product launch, that its largest customers were altering their product mixes, and that several of the Company’s European customers changed their delivery standards, pushing out revenues.” What I am surprised about is that the story has gone completely unnoticed, even though the company is right under our nose. I have not seen WiFiNetNews cover this development either, unless of course I have missed it. Oakland Tribune had about 100 words on this whole mess. Continue »

The noise and fury around broadband over powerline has started to resemble hype around WiMAX and VoIP. However, there seems to be some serious problems with this technology, which we have often talked about. Even those who are in the business are saying that it is years before BPL becomes a viable option for sending bits down to consumer homes. Here is something from a New York Times article this morning, about broadband in Manhattan.

Consolidated Edison plans to begin testing the technology in a high-rise apartment building on the Upper West Side in the next several months. The utility decided to expand its use of the technology after a successful pilot program in Westchester County that began in July 2002 and cost $480,000, Con Ed officials said. While the technology is several years from being ready for widespread use, experts and regulators say it has potential. Continue »

European bandwidth provider, Colt Telecom, after getting its clocked cleaned in the most recent quarter, where losses totaled to about $57.8 million is now looking to accelerate its growth by getting into the WiMAX game, reports Unstrung.

In a presentation to analysts and investors in London today, new CEO Jean-Yves Charlier outlined the company’s strategy to hit profitability, focused on its ability to “accelerate revenue growth” and “deliver positive cash flow and profits.” Central to this strategy, it seems, is a deployment of nascent 802.16 wireless MAN technology. “There is still a lot of headroom in our business to drive down costs,” explains Charlier. “We will be in Q1 of next year one of the first companies in Europe to trial WiMax, looking at using WiMax technology to connect multiple customers in a given building to our fibre backbone. These are opportunities we believe exist to help drive down the cost of connecting a customer to our network.” Continue »

SBC Communications, finally, is getting its FTTP groove on. The company has started to formalize and pick vendors for its mega-billion dollar rollout. The big winner of this bonanza is Alcatel, which has built a sizeable portfolio of FTTP/C products.

To drive fiber deeper into the SBC network, Alcatel will provide SBC with its remote 7330 IP DSLAM solution, which is capable of supporting wire speed triple play services and multiple variations of DSL for SBC’s Fiber to the Neighborhood architecture. In addition, Alcatel provides its 7340 Fiber to the Premise (FTTP) solutions. Alcatel is the world’s leading supplier of broadband access solutions, with more than 50 million lines of DSL shipped. SBC has selected Alcatel’s 7750 Service Router and 7450 Ethernet Services Switch Continue »

Outsourcing: The Real Picture: See what outsourcing is really all about in this hard-hitting documentary. (It’s short and completely office appropriate.) Plus it is funny as all hell. [Via business2blog.] Continue »