The bad news for mobile VoIP startups keeps coming. EQO, which had cut nearly 65 percent of its workforce about two months ago, might have finally hit the deck and be down for the count, according to Canadian technology news site, Techvibes.

In response to my previous post, EQO CEO Bill Tam said that cuts would allow the company to operate near profitability. He also claimed that the company had 2 million users, was doubling every eight weeks and growing its revenues. Apparently, that wasn’t enough.

EQO had raised about $13 million and was trying to sell itself, but apparently it didn’t find any buyers, according to the report. Some of my sources are confirming this shutdown. There has been chatter about VCs trying to claw back unspent cash, though I have not been able to confirm it. Some senior executives, including CFO Laura Colwill, have been job hunting. A sure sign that the party is over: information about the management team has been removed from EQO’s About Us page.

Regardless of however you spin it, if you are firing 20 percent of your work force and have no real business model to speak of, you are in trouble. That certainly is true of Fring, an Israeli Mobile VoIP startup, which has cut 10 of its 50 employees. CEO Avi Shechter told TechCrunch that his company is doing well. In addition to $13 million it raised in the past, Avi says the company has raised an undisclosed amount of money in its Series C financing.

By doing well, I guess he means Fring’s deal with Mobilkom Austria and an increase in the number of monthly downloads from 100,000 a year ago to 400,000. Mobile advertising is one way it hopes to make money, but it seems like a long shot. Like many of its peers, Fring is going to have a tough time in the future. Jangl and TalkPlus have already shut down, while EQO recently fired 65 percent of its workforce. Jaxtr, another VoIP startup, recently had a management shakeup and has its own set of issues. Other Fring competitors would include iSkoot and Nimbuzz.

Related Post: 7 Ways To VoIP From Your Mobile Phone

Pocket Communications Northeast, a subsidiary of San Antonio-based cellular operator Pocket Communications, has raised a first round of $100 million to build out a five-city CDMA network in the Northeast that will join an existing network and customer base in South Texas. The Northeast expansion is the first one outside of Texas for the two-year-old PCS operator. Pocket Northeast raised the money from Battery Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Pocket’s CEO, Paul Posner.

Posner, an entrepreneur who has done several things, from selling billboard space to operating a paging company, created Pocket in 2006 using AWS spectrum purchased at auction. Posner started the Pocket network build-out in San Antonio, the former home turf of AT&T, offering a $25 per month unlimited local calling, text and picture mail service on an advance pay basis. Pocket’s 300,000 customers pay between $25 and $40 at the beginning of the month with no contract. If they don’t pay, they don’t get service.

The company broke even in its first nine months, and Posner says it makes about $140 million a year based on its annual revenue per user of $35. The service has more in common with low-cost wireless carriers competitors such as, MetroPCS, which was also backed by Battery Ventures, and Leap Wireless. Posner says he can undercut them on pricing (Metro PCS plans start at $30 per month and Leap’s Cricket plans start at $35) and still make similar net margins.

Posner is clearly keeping his costs in line by operating a no-frills network. The CDMA 1xRTT network isn’t set up for wireless data and Posner doesn’t plan to add that offering as Leap did earlier this year, saying, “I don’t think it’s a profitable proposition for us. The bigger carriers have scooped up a large portion of that market.”

Pocket is a private company, so it’s hard to know if its net margins are similar to those of MetroPCS and Leap, but Matt Niehaus, a partner at Battery Ventures, says Posner keeps a close eye on costs, noting that at small companies that’s easier to do. However, that level of scrutiny could get more difficult as Pocket begins its expansion into Hartford and New Haven, Conn., Springfield and Pittsfield, Mass., and Poughkeepsie, N.Y. But if it can keep up the growth and profits, Pocket might make it an eventual target for the regional consolidation that periodically grips the communications market.

If you are like me, then you’re one of the many millions who have cut the cord with their landline and gone all wireless. However, that doesn’t mean people don’t want phones for their homes. Of course, for them, there are many options — some that use traditional telephony like AT&T and others like Vonage, which provide broadband-based voice service. It’s hard for folks to pick the one that is the best and most reliable.

Keynote Systems recently conducted a study (link to PDF) of some of the more popular services — AT&T VoIP, AT&T Landline, Comcast Digital, Time Warner Digital, Verizon VoiceWing (VoIP), Packet8, Vonage, Lingo and Truevoice. According to their study, AT&T’s landline service was the most reliable service, while in terms of voice quality, Comcast’s Digital Voice came out on top.

I wish Keynote had not been stingy and shared complete rankings instead of these teaser results. Nevertheless, even the very limited data they made available show that pure-play VoIP services ranked pretty low, hinting at poor quality and less reliability.

More importantly, not a single service measures up to being both reliable and exhibiting good quality; and though Verizon VoiceWing is a good enough compromise, it’s not clear if you can actually sign up for the service. I tried on their web site and failed — only existing customers can seemingly log into the site.

These results align closely to my own findings — while AT&T used to work, the quality of the calls was just horrible. I could not make a single call to India without redialing. So I gave up that service and then opted for Comcast. I very quickly realized that spending $40 a month for a voice service when I could easily get nearly unlimited minutes from my mobile phone just didn’t make much sense. Good-bye, Comcast.

I would love to know which service you use and what your real-world experience is.

Over the years we have seen the gradual separation of phone numbers from geographical location. To date, Skype’s SkypeIn service has been the best demonstration of this trend; even though I live and work just outside Toronto, Canada, I have a Palo Alto, Calif., SkypeIn number for historical family reasons, and I recently acquired a San Francisco number for Truphone. The same separation can apply to most VoIP-based voice services.

Over the past couple of years Belgian-based Voxbone has also developed an international numbering service which offers its clients a “local” phone numbers in any of 5,000 cities in 45 countries. OnState has used Voxbone’s “local” numbers as access points to its virtual call center service; its clients’ businesses can offer customer service and support centers with worldwide “local” access. However, it would be even more convenient for businesses selling into multiple countries if they could simply offer one universal number worldwide. Now, they can.

Yesterday, three months after the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) made available the +883 “global” country code, Voxbone announced the launch of its country-agnostic iNum service. I first learned of Voxbone at last spring’s eComm 2008 where Voxbone CEO Rod Ullens first mentioned the iNum concept. This announcement starts to realize his vision of enabling low cost conversations with worldwide access by taking advantage of the technology around IP-based communications:

“iNum is a new kind of phone number for a new kind of world — a world with a new geography that’s about local presence and global relationships, not about distance or national borders,” said Rodrigue Ullens, CEO and co-founder of Voxbone. “We believe the new geography is defined by the markets, customers and vendors that businesses need to connect with most. We need ‘local’ communication with these people — whether calls originate on public-switched or VoIP networks, whether they are truly local or ‘virtually’ local.”

In practice, that means a Voxbone iNum Service Provider Partner will supply a customer, whether an individual or a business, with a number that has an 883 country code. Once the service is fully rolled out to Voxbone’s 5,000 local points of presence worldwide, that iNum number will be accessible for, at most, the cost of a “local” phone call from any PSTN or VoIP service.

“At most,” because fundamental to Voxbone’s services is that they are IP-based and therefore calls amongst iNum Partners’ services are free. Currently Voxbone has 10 iNum Service Provider Partners, including Truphone, Mobivox and Voxeo, who either have made iNum numbers available today or will do so in the next few weeks. (For those callers who don’t use an iNum partner’s service, iNum numbers can be called through 55 “local” access points in 45 countries for the cost of a call to these access points.) Ullens, in a SquawkBox conference call yesterday, said that Voxbone will be negotiating with carriers and service providers worldwide to build out their service to become universally available.

Voxeo has set up a demonstration iNum service example; call +883 510 001 800 028 024, give their virtual operator a U.S. postal code and you will get local weather reports. This call can be made via the iNum Partners’ services today; it will become available via the local access points as they are set up over the next week. Another example: iotum’s Callflower Conference Call service will be using iNum numbers in a few days.

Jim Courtney is an Associate Editor of Skype Journal.

IntelePeer is one of those startups that has little buzz but a lot of traction. Formerly known as VoEx, the San Mateo, Calif.-based company lacks the hype around, say, Ribbit, but it has been delivering on the Voice 2.0 promise of integrating voice with web and enterprise applications for a long time. And doing well — IntelePeer turned EBITDA positive in June and is on its way to revenues that will exceed $50 million in 2009.

That is one of the reasons the company was able to snag $18 million in Series C funding from Vantage Point Partners and previous investors including Kennet Venture Partners, NorthCap Partners and EDF Ventures. The new round is incredible because of its timing — though I am betting that the new investors are looking at the $105 million Ribbit exit and letting their imagination run wild. But then there aren’t many suckers like BT around anymore! The company has raised (including this round) a total of $35.5 million since its inception in 2003.

Thanks to its own voice peering fabric, IntelePeer is on its way to doing close to 7 billion minutes of voice traffic this year, Chairman and CEO Frank Fawzi told me yesterday. “We are a lot larger than Ribbit and Jajah by multiple times,” Fawzi quipped. Jajah is heading down the same path at IntelePeer and the two companies are poised to become fierce competitors — that is if Jajah makes it out on the other end of this downturn.

So why does IntelePeer need the money? “We only just turned EBDITA positive and we need to support our expansion,” Fawzi claimed. Of course, I never expected him to say that he was buying insurance — his investors wouldn’t like that. Plus, it’s prudent to take this money right now. As we all know, downturns are as unpredictable as the tornadoes in the Midwest — and leave just as much destruction in their wake.

The credit crunch and the slowing economy is beginning to impact everyone, from mobile phone makers to phone companies. The economic woes are now spreading to other parts of the telecom food chain, taking down everyone from equipment makers to chip companies. And this is just the start…trouble has once again returned to the world of telecom. Earlier this month, Cisco Systems came out with an unusually downbeat forecast. The company, whose sales have traditionally seemed to defy gravity, admitted its numbers were going to fall for the first time in five years. Meanwhile its book-to-bill ratio — a key metric of future sales strength — has already dipped below 1.0.

“We are seeing customers, not just in the financial, automotive or retail sectors, but across most of our enterprise industries, facing what they view as a very challenging business environment,” Frank Calderoni, Cisco’s chief financial officer, told Wall Street analysts on a conference call. The problems, he said, have spread worldwide.

Cisco is widely considered to be a bellwether of the telecom and infrastructure sector. Its gloomy outlook, therefore, proves just how negatively affected the industry at large will be by the vise-like grip of the economic downturn.

AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega, CEO of that company’s mobility and consumer markets division, told me that anything related to the housing market was going to be in trouble. What that means is that the demand for broadband connections, voice lines and video services is going to slow drastically. Why? Because the growing number of new homes translated into strong demand for new communications services such as cable and broadband.

Now that the housing market has ground to a halt, sales of such services are going to decline, which in turn means that the service providers — from AT&T to Time Warner Cable — are going to have a tough time spending more dollars on their infrastructure. And that is going to impact sales at equipment makers.

After all, if there are fewer broadband connections, the number of modems needed will decline, and so will the demand for back-end gear to support those modems in broadband providers’ central offices. Similarly, if the demand for pay-per-view movies remains flat or declines, then the service providers won’t need to spend money on buying, say, video servers.

This is not a hypothetical situation. During a conference call to discuss its most recent quarterly results, Time Warner Cable said it was seeing lower gross additions and an increased churn in the number of customers. More importantly, those customers were buying fewer pay-per-view movies, premium channels and other add-ons, such as digital video recorders. This means its average revenue per user is going to decline. Since cable companies depend on their ability to generate gobs of cash from their customers to finance the buildout of their networks, cash constraints will mean fewer dollars to spend on gear.

U.S. phone companies, especially the ones with exposure to formerly hot housing markets in Arizona, California, Texas and Florida, are getting hit the hardest. AT&T and Qwest are both seeing steep declines in their wireline connections and a slowdown in demand for Internet connections. This isn’t going to get better anytime soon.

As a result, analysts expect carriers will spend a lot less money next year. UBS estimates that carrier spending will decline 4 percent in 2009 after growing 1 percent in 2008.

Similarly, a slowdown in the economy means that corporations will have fewer dollars to spend on their infrastructure, which is bad news for switch and router makers. Cisco’s gloomy outlook confirms that. So buckle up, guys. Trouble has returned to telecom land.

This article also appeared on Businesweek.com.

“VoIP is dead,” Skype General Manager of Voice and Video Jonathan Christensen declared at an industry conference a few weeks ago. He spoke figuratively, of course, but he may well have been right. While Voice-Over-Internet Protocol proponents had long promised a decade of creative destruction, they themselves appear to have become the victims.

The full potential of a technology is not always realized once it converges with market forces. In this case, the gravitational pull of the incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) has always proven difficult to resist. Most of the VoIP industry, while loudly proclaiming the SIP era as the beginning of the end for monopoly communications, secretly courted the incumbents in hopes of profiting from replacing their long-amortized investments in the fixed-line business. By tying their fortunes to the whimsy of the ILECs, many of the upstarts suffered, destroying billions of dollars in shareholder value in the process.

Recently PulverMedia, which spurred the VoIP crowd and rode its financial crest, shut its doors amid a swirl of controversy. As of this writing, Sonus Networks, once a high flier at $95 per share in 2000, trades at about $2.29. Even Cisco has thrown in the towel, discontinuing its BTS series of softswitches (which provide the routing logic for VoIP networks). These dismal stories perfectly mirror the ride of the VoIP industry in general.

The outlook was once a lot better.  In 1999, with the ratification of the SIP protocol specification by the IETF, advocates who wanted to tear apart the monopolies that dominated telecom started to beat their war drums.  Following conventional wisdom that the Internet democratizes and deleverages any market into which it enters, it was easy to convince investors to pour billions into VoIP products and companies.  Regulators seemed to support that theory, too, sealing the deal with the FCC’s so-called “Pulver Order,” which defended the VoIP industry from over-reaching regulation and tarifing.

The anticipated period of “creative destruction” came, all right. It began in 2001 with the smiting of the competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) and long-distance competitors, who had not yet even had time to embrace VoIP, by predatory pricing from the incumbents.  It continued with the shift from fixed voice lines to wireless phones, as evidenced by the drop in landlines . More recently, the guns have been turned toward the VoIP equipment vendors that begat the revolution in the first place.

So what happened? What clipped the wings of so many VoIP hopefuls can be boiled down to five things:

VoIP technology has clearly been successful in making inroads into traditional telecom networks, but in doing so, the revolution that SIP in particular, and VoIP in general, enables has been largely cast aside and the entire industry has coalesced in a race to the bottom. With this revolution went the volume of equipment and software sales that could have revitalized the supplier business and stimulated more innovation.

Of course, while the telecom industry was eating itself alive, a plucky little company from Luxembourg called Skype delivered on VoIP’s promise by almost completely ignoring the Public Switched Telephone Network, not to mention the pundits and experts that cling desperately to SIP’s potential. The point of Christensen’s superpoke at what’s left of the telecom business is that Skype has been successful because it threw away the playbook, ignoring the obsessions of so-called telecom experts and focusing instead on solving the practical needs of everyday users.

Tens of millions of people use Skype’s network today for text messaging, file-sharing, videoconferencing — and, yes, voice calling. All of these services are made decidedly more convenient because of presence — you can see who’s there before you contact them and use that information to choose what the most appropriate means of communication should be. And with less than a $40 million investment (prior to eBay’s rather more substantial buy-in), Skype’s user growth has outpaced the entire rest of the consumer VoIP business combined.

The bottleneck for innovation appears to have been Alexander Graham Bell’s (no relation) PTSN — the plain old telephone system. By going after low-hanging fruit and forcing their innovations to be defined within the walls of the PSTN, the vast majority of VoIP companies voluntarily muzzled their own revolution and ultimately cost their investors billions.

Ian Andrew Bell is a reformed telecom executive, and creator of the team management service rosterbot.com

This article also appeared on Businessweek.com.

Kevin Kennedy, who yesterday resigned his position as CEO and president of telecom equipment maker JDSU (formerly JDS Uniphase), was named CEO and president of Avaya Inc. this morning. Kennedy will replace Avaya Interim CEO Charles Giancarlo, who will become chairman of the telephone equipment maker. Kennedy helped revive JDSU, though with telcos tightening their capital spending, the firm will still have some choppy waters to navigate. At privately held Avaya, Kennedy will trade the harsh scrutiny of Wall Street for the pressure of running a leveraged private equity-backed company during a downturn. He will take on the role in January 2009.

Over the past few years, I have been saying that for telecom companies, losing access lines while trying to grow the number of subscribers to their triple-play services was like walking a tightrope wearing skates. Of course, none of the telecom executives would admit that losing millions of access lines every quarter was a problem. Until this week, when Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg towards the end of his conference call with Wall Street analysts acknowledged the problems caused by customers giving up their landlines.

The unspoken thing on this call is this whole issue of access line loss, and just very quickly what I’d like to say on that is that we’re not surprised at the access line loss…The issue for us is, that this issue of wireline margins and access line losses, trying to balance this issue on the head of a pin has been difficult.

If that is indeed the case, then why was it so hard to find the total line losses for the quarter in the company’s news release and accompanying documents? Check out the third-quarter line losses for all three Bell companies:

Telcos are once again underestimating the speed with which folks are jettisoning their landlines — and will continue to do so, especially as the current downturn deepens. According to a new study from comScore, folks are foregoing broadband connections in favor of the iPhone, yet another bad omen for the wireline business. The study claims that households that make between $25,000 and $49,999 a year were the fastest-growing segment of iPhone purchasers for the June through August time period.

“These data indicate that lower-income mobile subscribers are increasingly turning to their mobile devices to access the Internet, e-mail and their music collections,” said Mark Donovan, senior analyst at comScore in a statement. If folks drop their broadband and landline connections for an iPhone or other smartphone, then AT&T and Verizon can at least tap their wireless data revenue, but carriers without a wireless business are going to feel the squeeze.

Comcast, the largest cable provider in the U.S. reported earnings today as did Qwest, the No. 3 telco provider. Comcast watched its earnings rise by 33 percent.  Qwest saw sales drop and announced it will layoff 1,200 people. Between these two earnings releases, there are large differences that show how bundles help boost communications services and how landline voice access is waning.

Comcast saw its sales rise 10 percent to $8.55 billion for the third quarter of the year, which led to adjusted earnings of $691 million. It also had an average revenue per user (ARPU) of $110.71, up 9 percent from the same quarter last year, driven by bundling and the fact that video service is generally more expensive than voice and broadband. Comcast has more video subscribers than voice and data combined, but 22 percent of its customers take a voice, data and video bundle. Its broadband subscribers grew by 11 percent and its voice subscribers by 9 percent. But voice is slowing, and Comcast only added 483,000 subscribers, who are paying a lower monthly rate than during previous quarters.

Qwest, on the other hand, reported revenue of $3.4 billion, down 2 percent from the third quarter the year prior, and earnings of $151 million, compared with $2.1 billion the year prior. However, in 2007 it reported a loss before taxes of $84 million, but saw a $2.15 billion benefit that pushed its earnings so high. Consumer ARPU grew 6 percent to $56, up from $53 for the same period last year, but that figure obviously lags behind the cable giant. Qwest saw its video subscribers increase by 25 percent, but from a small base number. Broadband growth was 11 percent to 2.8 million customers and landlines dropped 10 percent to 8 million from 8.9 million. What we are seeing between these two communications companies is the power of bundles and the slow decline of landlines.

Having followed activity in the BlackBerry ecosystem over the past few weeks, I have come to the conclusion that BlackBerry Storm should be called BlackBerry Stealth. Why? With little media coverage, its forthcoming launch is the sleeper play in the smartphone market; it is poised to make major market penetration on its launch later this fall. Let’s look at the reasons:

The carriers: BlackBerry Storm was designed for two major carriers, with proven 3G network performance, who aren’t able to carry the iPhone: Verizon and Vodafone (also coming to Canada on Telus and Bell). This opens up access to several large existing customer bases (70 million at Verizon) with strong presence in both consumer and enterprise markets. For roaming outside North America, the Storm for Verizon/Bell/Telus includes the appropriate European/Asian-supported GSM bands.

A smarter touch screen: It employs new “haptic” touch keyboard technology with three keyboard options: QWERTY in landscape mode, SureType and Traditional 12-key in Portrait mode. Kevin Michaluk’s “First Impressions” review talks about his user experience with the keyboard and its unique features. One example: Hover on a letter and you’ll get other language options for the letter such as “é”. This YouTube video demonstrates the dynamic nature of the Storm’s keyboard.

Enterprise ready: IT managers already supporting BlackBerry within their IT infrastructure will readily accept the Storm as simply one more BlackBerry device. There is a legion of stories building about IT managers’ refusal of employee requests for iPhone support. With its multimedia features, including syncing to iTunes, Storm presents an opportunity to have a touchscreen smartphone that easily meets both business and personal needs.

A BlackBerry App Store is coming: Last week, RIM held its first BlackBerry Developer Conference, at which the 700 attendees learned about the BlackBerry App Store opening March 2009. Unlike Android Market, struggling to get to 100 applications, there currently exist more than 4,000 applications available via various web-based stores. The BlackBerry App Store makes it much easier to purchase applications directly off the device, both existing apps, as well as new ones that will appear as a result of developer support announced during the conference. Some developers will be backed by the $150 million BlackBerry Partners Fund.

Major general-purpose applications appearing for BlackBerry: Several applications I have been using on a Nokia N95 are now becoming available for the BlackBerry. Last week, I saw a demonstration of SlingPlayer for BlackBerry (still in pre-alpha, not yet released) on a Bold. Yesterday, there were two announcements: an alpha release of the popular “live-to-Internet” video recording application Qik became available and Truphone Anywhere for BlackBerry became available.

Background processing: While the Storm brings a different user interface, its underlying operating system is still the traditional BlackBerry O/S. I have been using a Bold for the past eight weeks and an iPhone for about three months. One key differentiator is BlackBerry’s ability to handle true background processing of data-based applications. For instance, you can run IM applications, such as Skype IM, via iSkoot, in the background, keeping you up-to-date on IM messages in real time while performing other data applications such as web browsing or checking your email concurrently. On the iPhone, you can make voice calls and play iTunes while looking at an application; otherwise, applications stop running until you return to it. Full background processing on the Storm, as on all recent Blackberry models, not only brings a significant productivity benefit to users but also allows notification and delivery of time sensitive information in real time.

What does it lack? Wi-Fi support. Probably because Verizon does not support UMA/GAN. Yet Wi-Fi is becoming important for creating additional access points in places such as warehouses or high rise buildings, where cell phone signals can become too weak.

Bottom line: Combining the Storm’s feature set and its carrier customer base, along with AT&T’s forthcoming Nov. 4 launch of Bold, BlackBerry Storm is lining up to be the “stealth” contributor to sustaining BlackBerry in its smartphone market leadership position, with a low-key, performance-based approach to the market.

Disclosure: The author has held a minuscule number of RIM shares since 1998.

Logitech, a Swiss maker of computer peripherals, has acquired video conferencing software maker SightSpeed of Berkeley, Calif., for approximately $30 million in cash. The deal is expected to close sometime in November and will have no material impact on Logitech’s business. SightSpeed was started in 2001 and has about 25 employees. Video conferencing is becoming a larger part of business for peripheral makers such as Logitech, who are seeing an increase in the sales of computer-attached video cameras. Logitech, I suspect, is trying to distinguish itself by tightly marrying its hardware to software from SightSpeed.

The acquisition of SightSpeed will provide Logitech with video calling technology and a software and services development team that can be focused on future video calling initiatives that can enable cross-platform video communications with an intuitive, lifelike experience, for people sitting in front of a personal computer or with their family in a living room. (Press Release)

Truphone, the service that allows you to make cheap long distance phone calls using VoIP technology on a mobile phone, is now available to users of BlackBerry devices as a beta offering. This product is called Truphone Anywhere for Blackberry.

London-based Truphone’s service, which typically uses Wi-Fi connections for VoIP calls, has so far been available on the Symbian OS-based Nokia devices and Apple’s iPhone. The service doesn’t support Windows Mobile for now.

I downloaded early versions of the software on two WiFi-enabled BlackBerry devices — the 8801 and T-Mobile Curve — and it worked fine on both the devices. It was fairly easy to download the Truphone software using Blackberry’s built-in browser, and I installed it without many problems. Upon installation, it asked me if my device had Wi-Fi or not. (In case of non WiFi-enabled devices, Truphone behaves like any other callback service. )

As part of the sign-up process, I tried to use my existing Truphone account, but I ran into trouble, since it was tied to my Nokia device. So rather than jumping through hoops, I opted for a new account. The lack of seamless switching between devices and accounts is Truphone’s Achilles heel, in my opinion. When I tried the service on iPhone I had to sign up fora new account, as well. I think, as a company, Truphone needs to make an effort to reduce the number of steps between the download and setting up the service.

If you get past the minor setup hurdles, Truphone works as advertised. I am not sure what it says about the cell phone networks, but Truphone calls sounded clearer. The tight integration of the service with my Blackberry address book makes it dead simple to use, especially when making those international long distance calls. The service is smart enough to route your calls to whatever network is cheaper - GSM or Truphone’s service. This is what makes the BlackBerry version better than the Truphone version for the iPhone, which is not as intuitive.

For Truphone, the BlackBerry client could be the final push the company needs to become a major player in the U.S., where RIM’s devices are more popular than in Europe where Nokia is the market leader. Now, if it could figure local numbers that folks here in the U.S. could actually remember, it might become almost invaluable.

P.S.: 100 GigaOM Readers can get the early beta version of Truphone for BlackBerry by visiting this web site.

Times are tough in the landline business, and when times get tough, the tough go shopping. After a few weeks of seeking a suitor, Embarq, the landline unit spun off from Sprint in 2006, has enticed CenturyTel into paying $5.8 billion in stock and assuming $5.8 billion in debt for the nation’s fourth largest local exchange carrier.

CenturyTel is the seventh largest local exchange carrier (LEC) in the U.S., based on access lines in service (2.1 million ) and high-speed Internet connections deployed (more than 600,000). The combined Embarq-CenturyTel would operate in 33 states and have about 8 million telephone access lines, 2 million high-speed Internet customers and about 400,000 video subscribers.

As competition with cable companies and new wireless broadband products increases, smaller, rural telcos are seeking to buy scale in order to compete. In February, the nation’s fifth largest LEC, Windstream, purchased a tiny North Carolina carrier and had been a suspected suitor for Embarq. Given the erosion of their core business and the grim credit markets, it’s likely that buyers with strong stock or a little cash could pay less of a premium on assets that give them the ability to expand without building out their own infrastrucutre. TDS Telecom and Frontier Communications are probably eyeing their own balance sheets and opportunities.

BroadSoft, a Gaithersburg, Md.,-based VoIP application platform maker, has cut about a dozen positions, according to a source familiar with the company. The cuts are said to have taken place in its sales, product management and engineering divisions, in both the Americas and the EMEA region. BroadSoft had about 300 employees, so a dozen cuts represents a fairly small percentage. What’s significant is the reasons behind them — sales have started to slow, not just for BroadSoft but for other vendors as well.

Updated: Leslie Ferry, Vice President of Marketing at BroadSoft did confirm that the company had some cuts though she didn’t reveal the exact numbers. She indicated that the company was on track to grow both revenues and margins going forward. Meanwhile, other reports have come in saying that the cuts might be deeper than reported earlier. 

Nearly 10 years old, privately held BroadSoft counts some of world’s largest telecom operators among its customers. The company is estimated to have logged around $60 million in revenues last year and was said to have broken even. It recently acquired the M6 application server business from GENBAND, expressing high hopes for the future. It seems the economy has stopped BroadSoft in its tracks. Notably, Cisco Systems just last week said it planned to shut down its broadband telephony business in Texas, a sign that the demand for VoIP-related hardware might be maturing, too.