Today's Top Stories Bell Canada (NYSE: BCE) and its fellow telco subsidiary Bell Aliant (Toronto: BA-UN.TO) have asked Canadian regulators to charge more to recoup their investments on their payphone businesses. The two telcos asked the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) for permission to increase payphone usage rates up to 100 percent, meaning consumers who still use payphones would have to now pay CAD 1 (USD 1.02) instead of the current CAD 50 cents (USD 51 cents) rate. And if the CRTC does not give them flexibility to increase payphone rates, the service providers said in a Globe and Mail article that they will begin taking "unprofitable payphones from service."
They added that the "proactive removal" of these payphones could amount to about 25 percent of their overall payphone base in Ontario and Quebec—two of their key operating cities. This comes at a time when wireless communications continues to grow. As of the end of last year, there were 27.4 million wireless subscribers. In a regulatory filing with the CRTC, Bell Canada and Bell Aliant said "if they do not get approval for the opportunity to experiment with alternative rate levels that could be as high as the maximum levels requested in their application, then they plan to change their practice and will proactively start removing their most unprofitable pay telephones." However, the Public Interest Advocacy Centre argues that any upping the prices of payphone calls will cause harm to low-income Canadian residents, a number of whom can't afford to purchase a cell phone or have POTS at their homes. Battles between regulators and incumbent telcos that want to get out of the payphone business as more customers adopt cell phones exclusively for their voice service is not relegated to Canada alone. The drive to get rid of payphones is just as strong in the United States, where a number of major service providers—including AT&T (NYSE: T), CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL), FairPoint (Nasdaq: FRP) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ)—have already sold off a majority of their payphone holdings. Like Verizon, FairPoint has also sold off its New England payphone business in May to Pacific Telemanagement Services (PTS). At the time, the service provider said the sale would enable it to "divert its capital spending for other projects like expanding residential broadband and deploying new business services like Ethernet." While there's been a lot of emphasis on the larger service providers selling off their payphone business, rural telcos are facing a similar dilemma of what to do with their pay phone operations, which produce little, if any, revenue. Nebraska-based K&M Telephone Co. has asked the state's Public Service Commission to take down the two payphones it operates in Chambers, Neb. and Inman, Neb., which collected a total of $19.58 in 2011. For more:
- Total Telecom via Globe and Mail has this article Related articles:
FairPoint to sell off its Northern New England payphone operations
Verizon takes another step out of the pay phone business Read more about: Bell Canada, Payphones, Bell Aliant
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XO Communications on Tuesday announced it has been tapped to provide Dickstein Shapiro LLP, a major law firm, with a set of WAN voice and data services to serve its national footprint of offices. By working with XO, Dickstein Shapiro can consolidate all of its voice and data services onto one managed IP network that will support the firm's VoIP and core legal applications. The service provider said it will provide the law firm its host of MPLS IP-VPN, XO Enterprise SIP Trunking and XO Applications Performance Management services. Given the mobile nature of the legal industry, the MPLS-based IP VPN service will enable the firm's attorneys to access critical applications and documents regardless of location. With SIP Trunking, which is connected by the IP-VPN service, they will have a centralized IP-PBX architecture versus having to manage PBXs at each respective office site. Sharon O'Meara, Dickstein Shapiro's Chief Administrative Officer and Interim Chief Information Officer, said employing XO's service package will "simplify the management of voice and data services while also reinforcing the performance and reliability of our network." To provide greater network redundancy, the service provider is also providing dual fiber connections to each of the firm's six office locations. Winning a large multisite business customer like Dickstein Shapiro is an important milestone for the competitive service provider as it continues to expand its optical and copper-based networks. For more:
- see this release Download our eBook: Finding New Gold in Copper Related articles:
XO incorporates Ciena into its 100G metro, regional network plans
XO Communications goes live with nationwide 100G network
Infonetics: OTN poised for growth, while P-OTS vendors battle for top spot
XO employs Transmode's P-OTS platform for its US metro network expansion effort Read more about: Xo Communications
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GoDaddy is moving its Domain Name Service control into the care of VeriSign, the website hosting provider announced Monday, after suffering a major DNS server outage that took scores of websites offline yesterday. Although VeriSign is a GoDaddy competitor that sells domain registration services, it provides protection services to prevent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The website hosting provider, which hosts 5 million websites mostly for small businesses, said that an outage began at around 1:25 p.m. EDT Monday. It did not reveal what caused the outage. "We are experiencing intermittent outages. This is impacting our site and some customers' sites," GoDaddy said in a note sent to customers Monday. "The issue started shortly after 10am PDT." Once services were restored to most of its customers at 5:43 p.m. EDT, GoDaddy said it essentially handed VeriSign the keys to make their servers GoDaddy's servers. Neither GoDaddy nor VeriSign would comment on their new relationship. GoDaddy isn't the only service provider to face a DDoS attack. Last month, AT&T reported a DDoS attack on its DNS servers, resulting in service disruptions for a number of its enterprise customers. And from the looks of it, GoDaddy and AT&T are not likely to be the only victims of a major DDoS attack. Rob Fleischman, CTO of Xerocole and a noted expert on DNS, told FierceTelecom in a previous interview that all carriers are at risk. For more:
- Wired has this article Related articles:
AT&T reports DDoS attack on its DNS servers
DDoS: AT&T isn't the only carrier at risk of attack Read more about: AT&T
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SFR Business Team, the France-based business arm of SFR, has formed a new business service initiative called Network Team that includes Verizon Business (NYSE: VZ), Vodafone (Nasdaq: VOD), Etisalat, Maroc Telecom and Tata Communications (NYSE: TCL). This new alliance builds on an initial pact SFR established with Verizon in June where the U.S. telco would deliver global connectivity while SFR will provide services inside France. Joel Stradling, Research Director, Business Network and IT Services for Current Analysis, wrote in a report in July that the Verizon/SFR alliance had benefits to both SFR and Verizon. He wrote that that by partnering with SFR, "Verizon can leverage SFR Business's strong domestic infrastructure in France" while "SFR Business expands its global services portfolio by reselling Verizon's range." With the newly expanded relationship with Verizon and the other set of partners, Network Team will serve up VPN services with interoperability between sites on each carrier's network, prioritized flows between each customer's sites, and QoS guarantees for data services. SFR said it plans to establish similar arrangements with other international service providers in the next few months. In addition to VPN services, the group will offer wireline voice, Internet and wireless services and later cloud services. Of course, SFR faces a number of competitive challenges in serving France-based multinational service segment. They have to face off with strong incumbent carriers like BT France (NYSE: BT) and Orange Business Services that have well-established presence in France serving both multinational and France-based enterprise customers with VPN and Ethernet services.
Besides SFR's lack of global service brand recognition, Stradling added that "Partnering complicates account management, potentially giving multiple points of contact." The ability to deliver a broad set of global Ethernet and IP services will be a big factor in SFR and their partners to compete on a global scale. Orange Business and BT, for instance, which rank number one and four respectively on Vertical Systems Group's mid-2012 global provider Ethernet Leaderboard, have continually expanded their Ethernet presence not only in France, but a host of other key international countries including Asia Pacific, EMEA and Latin America. For more:
- Telecompaper has this article
- here's the Current Analysis report Related articles:
Level 3, Verizon focus on serving France-based MNCs
Verizon to deploy Juniper's PTX for its converged MPLS core network
Level 3 extends data center capabilities into Omaha
Verizon takes 100G optical into its metro networks Read more about: Verizon
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Frontier Communications (Nasdaq: FTR) on Monday said it plans to start delivering up to 25 Mbps DSL services to 405,000 West Virginia residential and business customers. Dana Waldo, senior VP and general manager for Frontier West Virginia, said in a Charleston Daily Mail article that the new 25 Mbps services will be offered under the "Broadband Ultra" and "Ultimate" brands. Waldo added that eligible business customers will be able to get up to 40 Mbps. The "Broadband Ultra" and "Ultimate" services are currently available in segments of Kanawha and Putnam counties with plans to extend the service to other parts of each county at the end of year. Dan Page, a Frontier spokesman, said that the residential 25 Mbps service, which includes a WiFi modem, will be priced at $54.99 month. Of course, the service provider will offer discounts to those customers who bundle their DSL service with voice and TV. Current residential subscribers can get up to 6 Mbps, a speed that is far lower than what a cable operator can deliver over their DOCSIS 2.0 or 3.0 networks. While 40 Mbps of DSL capacity will certainly be enticing to some business customers, the service provider is being just as aggressive with its copper and fiber-based Ethernet service sets. In West Virginia's business market, Frontier offers up to 10G Metro Ethernet services over its 2,600-route mile "Fiber 7.0" network. Like other service providers, the telco is using the fiber network to deliver wholesale services, including wireless backhaul, to area wireless operators. West Virginia is a key state for Frontier, being one of its largest states it entered when it acquired Verizon's (NYSE: VZ) rural lines. Part of the new speed drive is likely being fueled by the $71.9 million Connect America Fund (CAF) grant it got from the FCC. For more:
- Charleston Daily Mail has this article Related articles:
Frontier's Q2 revenue declines to $1.26B
Frontier expands broadband reach via Hughes' satellite service
Frontier secures $72M Connect America loan to expand broadband reach
Frontier launches local campaign to lure former SureWest business customers
FCC debates whether DSL or FTTP is best fit for the Connect America fund Read more about: Frontier Communications
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