Colin C. Haley

More than 2 million Cox Communications broadband customers lost their connections Friday after the cable operator’s Internet backbone went down, a spokesman for the Atlanta company confirmed. “We’re still investigating the root cause of the problem,” Bobby Amirshahi, a Cox spokesman, told internetnews.com. Amirshahi said the outage affected all of Cox’s broadband customers — both […]

The U.S. mobile market is changing. With third-generation networks and feature-packed phones, companies that once sold annual contracts or re-styled handsets are now in the applications and content business. The possibilities for increasing sales and customer loyalty are enormous, but picking a winner is more art than science (raise your hand if you predicted ringtones […]

To comply with new regulations and reassure concerned customers, Vonage has struck deals to gain access to SBC’s and BellSouth’s enhanced 911 (E911) systems, the VoIP leader said today. The announcements came just hours before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mandated that broadband telephony providers offer E911, which provides emergency dispatchers with a caller’s location […]

BOSTON — MCI CEO Michael Capellas has set an ambitious goal for completing his company’s $8.4 billion merger with Verizon . “There’s a good chance it’ll close before year-end,” Capellas said Wednesday during a keynote speech at SAP’s annual customer conference here. He quickly added that he couldn’t make a guarantee, but maintained that “the […]

BOSTON — Home Depot , which until recently ran on a “stack ’em high and let ’em fly” mentality, will reshape its IT operations with the help of SAP . The pact between the world’s third-largest retailer and third-largest software vendor was announced here this morning at SAP’s annual customer conference. Home Depot will use […]

Lucent Technologies has a won a contract from repeat customer Saudi Telecom Co. (STC) for network management software, the Murray Hill, N.J. The deal involves Lucent’s VitalSuite Network Fault Management software, which identifies, manages and correlates critical problems to their root causes. Lucent’s services arm will also provide system integration, training and support. “Saudi Telecom […]

Angling for enterprise customers, Verizon Wireless today introduced a new service to keep workers up to date on important projects. Wireless Sync, produced with data-sharing software specialist Intellisync , provides groupware-based e-mail, calendars, contacts and tasks, the company said. The software is installed on a standard PC to monitor e-mail in Microsoft Exchange or Lotus […]

Network operator Level 3 Communications will spin off its software and services group as a public company called Technology Spectrum. Technology Spectrum will trade on the NASDAQ under the “TSPE” ticker symbol. Neither the offering date nor share price has been set. Level 3 Financing, another Level 3 subsidiary, is the sole seller of the […]

Michael E. Marks, CEO of IT manufacturing giant Flextronics , will step down Jan. 31, 2006, the company announced at its annual analyst and investor meeting in San Francisco. He will be succeeded by COO Michael McNamara, who has held senior posts at Flextronics for 11 years. Marks “has been the visionary for a company […]

Nearly every day I interview an entrepreneur, engineer or investor working to make VoIP a mass market reality. Clearly they’re making great strides. Broadband telephony has rocketed from a few U.S. households in 2003 to a few hundred thousand last year, and is poised to top 12 million by 2009. But recent stumbles could delay […]

Verizon is a step closer to owning a 13.4 percent stake in MCI after the Department of Justice approved the $1.1 billion purchase. Under the deal’s structure, Verizon has established a trust for the 43.4 million MCI shares controlled by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu. When the purchase closes next week, the stock will transfer […]

America Online (AOL) today began testing a free Webmail service with 2GB of storage, a message search tool and spam and virus filters in its continued battle with search and portal giants for the loyalty of Internet users. The AIM.com domain, called AIM Mail, is available at AIM.com as part of the beta version of […]