Jim Wagner

DALLAS — Ask an Internet service provider (ISP) owner whether he or she has picked an easy business to get into, and if they don’t laugh you out of the room, the most you can expect is a rueful, ‘Yeah, right’ response. ISP leaders from throughout the U.S. at the ISP Business Expo Tuesday afternoon […]

DALLAS — Robert Pepper, the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) chief of plans and policy, has seen it all in the past 19 years. He’s seen the Internet grow from a fledgling academic exercise in the early 1980s, connecting eight supercomputers to transport data between military installations and universities around the U.S., to today’s World Wide […]

Ever since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened up the telecommunications market to the competition, a horde of Internet service providers (ISPs) have set up virtual shop around the nation in the late ’90s. While the spirit of the law hasn’t changed since that landmark act, neither has the reality of the law — many […]

Officials at IBM’s global services division say they are flying through the upgrade of United Airline’s conversion to DB2 and outsourcing services, transferring one terrabyte (TB) to Big Blue’s eServer Cluster 1600 servers in the past six months. According to John Charlson, IBM spokesperson, the time it’s taken to reach the 1TB milestone airline is […]

Midwest-based competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) McLeodUSA Thursday announced a major restructuring deal to get out of bankruptcy court, putting 58 percent of the carrier in the hands of an investor. Forstmann, Little & Co., out of New York, now finds itself in the driver’s seat with two telecommunications businesses as a result of sinking […]

It’s been a busy, but fruitful, week for Solectron Corp. , a company that provides electronic components and supply-chain management services to networking manufacturers. Thursday’s announcement of a $2 billion, three-year deal with Lucent Technologies is just icing on the cake, proving more and more manufacturers are willing to outsource its component needs rather than […]

According to a plea agreement arranged by attorneys and the U.S. District Court of California Tuesday evening, EarthLink, Inc. co-founder Reed Slatkin could be in jail for more than a century. Oh, and he’ll have to pay fines — and give back the money he bilked from investors in a Ponzi scheme — that total […]

A new study released Wednesday shows Internet Explorer (IE) continues to top the browser charts, and what’s more, is taking the Netscape faithful with them. The report, from WebSideStory, Inc.’s StatMarket, shows IE 5 and IE 6 hold the number one and two spots for browser acceptance worldwide, with Netscape users dropping off “precipitously” to […]

Officials at Afilias Ltd. Tuesday put in a bid for LibertyRMS, Inc., a back-end registry support subsidiary of Tucows, Inc., giving the .info owners more control over their service and the potential for profit down the road. The bid, approved by the board of directors on both sides for an unannounced number of shares and […]

In a move that came as no surprise to anyone in the telecommunications industry, the Media Access Project (MAP) filed a lawsuit Monday afternoon against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over its decision to keep America’s cable networks closed. Nearly two weeks ago, the FCC took a major step towards deregulating the telecommunications industry by […]

Sun Microsystems officials announced their “unified” wireless Web services platform Monday morning to a crowd of eager attendees. Sun developed the Java 2 platform, micro edition (J2ME), last year as a boiled down version of its J2EE framework for enterprise networks, putting real-time Web services in the hands of corporations and online firms. The wireless […]

Nortel Networks continue to strengthen its ties to China, announcing Friday a contract to provide voice over IP (VOIP) equipment to China Telecommunications Corp. Nortel, in the middle of merger talks with wireless phone maker Motorola Inc. , continues to make progress in closing wireline and wireless deals around the world. Nortel already has packet-handling […]