Daily Archives: June 27, 2008

Verizon’s fiber guru talks strategy

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Marguerite Reardon:

Fios also has helped future-proof Verizon’s network. While its cable competitors buckle under the pressure of peer-to-peer traffic on their networks, Verizon has enough capacity in its network, thanks to its fiber upgrades, to weather the storm unscathed and work on its own timetable to find more efficient ways to handle peer-to-peer traffic.
Mark Wegleitner, Verizon’s senior vice president of technology in charge of broadband and consumer services, has helped develop and drive Verizon’s fiber strategy. I sat down with him at the Nxtcomm trade show in Las Vegas last week to talk about a wide variety of topics, including the controversy over Comcast’s treatment of BitTorrent traffic, faster speeds for Fios, and what the company plans to do next when it reaches its 2010 goal of passing 18 million homes with fiber.

The Madison area is stuck with an aging telco infrastructure. Neither AT&T, nor TDS have any plans to upgrade their networks to the home. Not good…. Verizon FIOS Deployment Map.

Midwest Airlines Employees – Between A Rock And A Hard Place

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Benet Wilson:

I had to sigh when I read this article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on the draconian pay cuts Midwest Airlines is asking its employees to take in order to survive. Having worked at two airlines during turbulent times, I too faced the decision on what to do when management imposed pay cuts.
In the first case, I took a temporary cut at Mesa Air Group after the horror of 9/11, when airlines didn’t know how long it would take to recover from the week-long shutdown of the air system and travelers deciding to fly again. The second time found me swallowing hard as I took a pay cut at Delta Air Lines after the carrier filed for Ch. 11.
But these cuts were nothing compared to what Midwest is asking of its employees — pay cuts of up to 65% for union pilots and flight attendants to avoid filing for bankruptcy. And this is on top of grounding its MD80s — almost half the fleet — and laying off hundreds of workers.

I suspect the days of Midwest’s extraordinary service are over.

Cisco TelePresence Coming to a Living Room Near You

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Jennifer Hagendorf:

co Systems (NSDQ:CSCO) is set to deliver its TelePresence high-definition videoconferencing technology to the home market within the next 12 months, said the company’s top executive this week.
The technology will be available via the channel, including via retailers the likes of Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) and Wal-Mart and service providers such as AT&T (NYSE:T), said Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers at the Cisco Live conference in Orlando, Fla.
“It will probably evolve. At first we’ll do it … where we’re very careful on how the channel sells TelePresence and very careful that the rooms are set up right and the cameras are set up right,” Chambers said. “Having said that, I think that you will see a combination of distribution points.”
Chambers expects pricing of Cisco’s home-use TelePresence units to come in below $10,000 depending on what functionality the user wants.

Promising, particularly as the air travel experience continues to deteriorate.