Telecom problems put to good use
301255
THE Hungarian telecommunications sector is lagging four years behind its Western European peers, according to Elek Straub, President-CEO of the national telecommunications company MATAV Tavkozlesi Rt (MATAV). ...
634308
More than a thousand people who phoned in for assistance too often -- at least in the company's eyes -- find themselves suddenly cut off from wireless service.
628299
A broadband provider prevented customers from using its service, company says.
11705
The Internet phone service providers try to win over consumers who now have a host of options when it comes to making calls.
592847
British telecom firm appears to be getting serious about the mobile space again, including rolling out a network of sorts.
35238
Having ISP choices is a good thing, particularly if yours  is engaging in filtering or traffic shaping or in any way throttling back your bandwidth.
460231
Online-payment service PayPal on Tuesday sought to reassure customers that outages that had plagued the service since Friday finally had been resolved.
611120
Life expectancy is no longer a business concern merely for insurance companies and undertakers. A telecommunications company has more than a passing interest now that it offers a lifetime of unlimited calls over the Internet for &#36;999.
684313
Intervoice gives companies a cost-effective way to deal with customer calls.
536279
The world didn't end and most calls and messages got through, but the high volume of texting and cellphone calls resulted in a lot of bounce-backs. In a real crisis, this could mean real trouble.
431353
(InfoWorld) - On Monday evening, my wife reached me on my mobile phone. She was spending a long weekend with her family in Maine. "I've called our home phone several times," she said. "And I keep getting a busy signal." That night, I didn't think twice about the phone problem. We have been VoIP customers for more than a year, and flaky service has been standard operating procedure. I reset my VoIP converter box and crossed my fingers. Then, on Tuesday, when the problems persisted, I called my VoIP provider, SunRocket, and got the message that the company was no longer taking tech support and sales calls. That's not good. Many free-market analysts and large telecom providers have hailed this as a new era of competition. It's a wonderful new world where your VoIP provider can cut off your home phone service without warning. This week, SunRocket went belly up without any communication to its 200,000 customers. SunRocket had been providing both my home and my home office phone service. I could charitably say that phone service since Monday evening has been intermittent. In reality, phone service has been mostly dead with occasional spurts of dial tone. Now, when business associates try to call my home office, they get either a busy signal, or they get one ring and a hang-up. I'm trying to switch my home and office numbers to Vonage, but they say it could take up to 10 days for the switch to happen. When I first heard about SunRocket more than a year ago, it seemed like a good solution to large monthly telephone bills. The local incumbent phone service was charging about $60 a month for unlimited local and long distance. SunRocket offered unlimited local andÂ long distance and even some international calling for $199 a year. The company also offered a second out-of-area-code phone number at no cost. That feature caught my eye because my home office is in suburban Maryland, but most of the people who call me are located in Washington, D.C. My wife and I looked at a savings of more than $500 a year and decided it was time to check out VoIP. The switch was not without problems. Voice quality was spotty at best, particularly when we were talking to someone on a mobile phone. For months, we had problems with frequently dropped calls. We soon became quite familiar with the "not-my-fault" phenomenon. SunRocket blamed the problems on Comcast, our broadband provider. Comcast, of course, blamed SunRocket. (Comcast: We can't guarantee quality of service for third-party applications. By the way, why don't you switch to our voice over IP service -- it only costs double what you're paying now.) After months of experimenting with equipment configuration, we finally got most of the problems ironed out. When it came time to renew our annual subscription, we had mixed feelings, but SunRocket was still significantly cheaper that most alternatives. We paid $199 for a year of service in March. In late June, in a sign of things to come, SunRocket laid off about a quarter of its workforce. The way I look at it, someone owes us about nine months of phone service, but we're not holding our breath. Now, in some ways, this is just a story about a couple hundred thousand VoIP customers who saw their phone service go dead without warning. But there's a larger context here. During the last couple of years, some telecom analysts, free-market think tanks, and telecom carriers have trumpeted a new era of competition. Their argument: Old, monopoly-style regulations aren't needed any more because there's all kinds of competition out there. They say that telecom carriers shouldn't have to share their networks with competitors and broadband providers shouldn't be prohibited from blocking or slowing Web content from competitors because there's all kinds of competition out there. Meanwhile, SunRocket, the second largest independent VoIP provider, has shut down. Vonage, the largest independent VoIP provider, has faced a patent infringement lawsuit from giant competitor Verizon, and its future is uncertain. Verizon contends it owns the patent to the technology that translates VoIP calls and allows them to connect to traditional telephone networks. Wireless phone carriers provide some competition, but the largest two wireless carriers are owned by the two giant telecom carriers. I'm not sure that counts as competition. In the broadband space, there are some indications that one or two new competitors are on the way, but it could take years. Right now, well over 90 percent of the U.S. has at most two broadband providers, the cable company or the telecom carrier. The telecom carriers are fighting against auction rules that would encourage a new broadband provider when a chunk of television spectrum is freed up in early 2009. Elsewhere, broadband customers in other countries, such as Japan and South Korea, pay less for faster service. Japanese customers pay about one-seventh what U.S. customers do per megabit of bandwidth. But few people in D.C. want to talk about the real reasons for this. It's not free-market competition; instead, telecom services in many other countries are highly regulated and subsidized by the government. For some of us, the promise of telecom competition seems a long way off. And, by the way, if you want to find me during the next week, your best bet is probably e-mail.
403577
If using your cell phone in your house is an exercise in frustration, one of these three growing technologies could fix the problem.
324904
For consumers, the benefit of VoIP has been found in the lower costs VoIP companies charge. Such service is usually cheaper because providers don&#39;t have to build huge networks of lines
44887
Internet service providers have to walk a fine line between fairness and profitability. Users want maximum service, and are entitled to honest contracts. Maybe there's a way to help everyone at once.
207702
Telecoms regulator Ofcom has welcomed the arrival of Voice over IP (VoIP), aka &quot;Voice over Broadband&quot; down at the telecoms regulator, and promised to stay well out of the way as services develop.
717800
InfoWorld - NTT DoCoMo&#39;s 3G network in part of central Tokyo was hit by trouble on Saturday resulting in problems for tens of thousands of users.
449731
Should investors connect with this troubled telecom?