Connecticut state officials publicly slapped AT&T again, this time for planning to relocate 60 customer service jobs to Michigan. Both the state and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) are not happy about the closure of a customer service office in Meriden. The Conn. Attorney General held a press conference [...]

Cable-provider Comcast has decided to ride the coattails of the digital TV transition by offering free basic cable for 12 months for customers who sign up for at least one other Comcast service. New users can get basic cable (20 to 30 channels) without other services for $10 a month. [...]

Could it be? Corporate users and consumer VoIP services like Vonage and Comcast have been able to manage their phones via the web for years, but now Quest has broken ranks with AT&T and Verizon to offer a - dare we say - modern way to manage a home phone. [...]

Connecticut state officials publicly slapped AT&T again, this time for planning to relocate 60 customer service jobs to Michigan. Both the state and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) are not happy about the closure of a customer service office in Meriden. The Conn. Attorney General held a press conference [...]

A new class of mobile workers is emerging, says Forrester Research. Employees will insist upon mobile support from employers, and already nearly a third of smart phone users expense all or some of their monthly wireless bills. Currently, the mobile "wannabes" represent 6 percent of the present work force, but Forrester [...]

Last month, a group representing retirees from Qwest Communications and its predecessor US West lost a court case the group had pursued in an attempt to force Qwest to continue honoring a death benefit for retirees. Now, the group is citing Qwest's pettiness as the telco recently made a court filing seeking [...]

Throughout 2008, the increasingly harsh economic climate has had telecom industry observers wondering how soon and how badly the crisis would impact telco earnings. This year's second quarter earnings reports included numbers from both AT&T and Verizon Communications that were probably better than some people had expected. But their financial reports also provided reasons [...]

Both Verizon and Level 3 say they need 100 Gigabit optical networks, and the sooner, the better. Speaking at Optical Expo 2008 in Dallas, Verizon's backbone network design director said the company is currently meeting traffic needs with multiple 10G wavelengths, but managing multiple wavelengths across fiber is a pain; [...]

Already down this quarter, Nortel got another kick in the gut from fellow Canadian company RBC Capital. "Public equity investors have mostly given up on the company," said RBC Capital analyst Mark Sue. RBC has downgraded Nortel's stock from "sector perform" to "under-perform" and has cut the price target for [...]

Verizon Business says security solutions need to be specifically tailored to a particular sector, due to the characteristics of how and why data breeches happen, according to the results of a four-year security study it conducted across four industry sectors. In financial services there's a greater risk from insiders, whereas other industries [...]

Word out of Broadband World Forum Europe is that France Telecom is planning a "significant upgrade" to its fixed broadband backhaul capabilities, which will include the purchase of a significant number of network edge boxes. An extensive equipment tender process involving 20 vendors has taken place, says Light Reading, and FT is doing the deal [...]

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed a pair of bills designed to preserve phone services to people in rural and high-cost areas of California. Under the new laws, funding will continue to flow into subsidy programs for basic phone services in rural areas. The California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has deregulated [...]

Most Comcast customers in the Houston area have their service back after Hurricane Ike, but those who don't can't get an answer out of the cable provider as to when they'll be up again. About 93 percent of Comcast's 750,000 customers in the Houston area are back on line, but [...]

With Wall Street credit gridlocked, potential deals to consolidate rural telephony companies are slim. It's a buyer's market - assuming the buyer can find the capital. Leveraged buyouts are unlikely to happen in the current macroeconomic environment because of a strong allergy to issuing debt and the short-term demands for [...]

Independent telco FairPoint Communications, which is still in the process of taking over the former Verizon Communications network properties it acquired earlier this year, announced that it will expand broadband capabilities into 51 communities in Vermont using different technologies. The primary technology will most likely be DSL, but FairPoint also [...]

Sprint's Xohm WiMAX network launched this week in Baltimore, but the lesser-known Xohm-related story out of WiMAX World in Chicago is that Samsung has replaced Nokia Siemens Networks as the vendor for the Xohm network in Dallas. Telephony reports that Sprint chose to move forward with Samsung--its vendor for East [...]

The Wall Street Journal reports that Embarq, the largest of the independent telcos, is looking into a potential sale or merger, but that its progress toward doing so has stalled in recent days with the dramatic ups and downs on Wall Street. The story quotes unnamed sources, but it wouldn't necessarily [...]

Telepresence continues to be one of the hottest technologies of 2008, as BT this week announced its launch of inter-company telepresence communication capabilities, and Tandberg separately expanded and upgraded its telepresence product family. Both moves come not long after Cisco Systems announced an upgrade for its telepresence system. BT's launch [...]

In a rare move, Communications Workers of America members rejected a tentative contract negotiated with Qwest Communications in late August. The contract was put to a vote in recent weeks by the 20,000 or so members of the union, and the rejection sends CWA and Qwest officials back to the bargaining [...]

AT&T made some structural and management changes to re-align the company for a future in which wireless increasingly replaces landline, and fixed-mobile convergence capabilities and multi-screen strategies become key. The company is moving to a structure of four divisions -- consumer, business, infrastructure and diversified businesses. AT&T Wireless chief Ralph de la [...]

The first phase of the Trans-Pacific Express (TPE) submarine cable system has been activated. The new 18,000 kilometer (over 11,000 mile) fiber optic undersea cable directly connects Mainland China, the U.S., South Korea and Taiwan. Currently, the system runs at 5.12 terabits. When phase two is completed, TPE will be [...]

Research firm the CFI Group, which sprang forth from the University of Michigan to study customer satisfaction issues across multiple industries, has announced the results of its annual Telecom-Cable Industry Satisfaction Study. The survey, which consulted more than 1,200 consumer households, found that consumers interested in bundled services are more interested [...]