FCC Chair Advocates Hands-Off Approach to VoIP
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US Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell says that after the presidential election he will try to wrest regulatory control of voice over IP from the states because to thrive as a business, the technology needs a single, easy-handed
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The Federal Communications Commission voted to bar state regulators from exercising key jurisdiction over VoIP. By W. David Gardner.
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Citing a need to nurture the emerging, "revolutionary" voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) industry, FCC chairman Michael Powell is calling for regulations that would grant the federal government greater control.
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AMERICA&#39;s chief communications regulator will seek broad regulatory authority for the US federal government over internet-based telephone services to avoid stifling the emerging market.
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Major mobile voice and data carriers in the United States have pledged to open their networks to outside handsets and applications, but regulators and customers need to be vigilant to make sure those promises are fulfilled, one member of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said.
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The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has ruled that incumbent local exchange carriers must connect to VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) services, overruling two state public service commission opinions.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco's highly publicized cooperation with Microsoft on unified communications will focus on sharing presence information as well as on voice mail, Web conferencing, and other areas, a Cisco executive said Tuesday. Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer pledged last month to make their companies' technologies work together even as they compete in areas like voice call control. Details of the effort have been scarce, and some critics have called the Webcast promise a mere show of peace between two companies struggling over the lucrative communications and collaboration business. Unified communications is a buzzword for combining all forms of IP communications, making them accessible on a single client or from within applications. Because voice calls, text messaging, videoconferences, and online collaboration can all be controlled by software now, Microsoft is pitted against Cisco and longtime telecommunications vendors in the battle for this market. Rick McConnell, Cisco's executive sponsor of the partnership in the unified communications area, outlined one key objective of the effort in a meeting with reporters on Tuesday. Currently, Cisco federates all the presence and availability information from its unified communications systems and publishes that data to Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS), which can then push it to Microsoft clients. Microsoft doesn't reciprocate. The companies are working on making the same kinds of information go from Microsoft's software into Cisco's, said McConnell, who is vice president and general manager of Cisco's Unified Communications Business Unit. The way it is now, if an enterprise uses Cisco's Unified Communications Manager call control software and an employee picks up the phone, a colleague's Microsoft Office Communicator messaging client will show that employee as being on the phone. But if an employee indicated in Office Communicator that she was away from her desk, that information wouldn't show up on a colleague's Cisco IP phone. Making federated presence work both ways will make that possible, McConnell said. Cries for cooperation are rampant among Cisco's customers, according to McConnell. "I'm on the phone with at least one customer per day ... that's asking us about our Microsoft integration roadmap," McConnell said. Cisco's network domination and Microsoft's software role make that inevitable. "We're going to interoperate, frankly, in almost every account that we participate in," he said. "We have a deep interoperability roadmap, we'll deliver against that roadmap, and then the customer gets to pick," McConnell said. Most customers so far have chosen Microsoft for client software and Cisco for call control processing and multimedia conferencing, and he expects that to continue. Senior Cisco and Microsoft leaders in unified communications meet at least quarterly and typically more often, he said. But McConnell didn't mince words when discussing Microsoft as a competitor. The software giant has taken limited steps to share users' presence and availability information because doing so would let users adopt any kind of unified communications client, and Microsoft wants to own all the clients, he said. And Microsoft's forays into call management are weak compared with Cisco's more seasoned offerings, he said. "I think it's going to be some time before Microsoft really gets call control right," McConnell said.
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Democrat says he'll take wait-and-see approach to pursuing new rules requiring wireless carriers to let consumers use whatever applications and devices they desire.
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The Federal Communications  Commission chairman said on Friday he wants to make it possible  for small and independently owned businesses to lease  television spectrum from broadcasters, to promote diversity in  the industry.
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FCC Chairman Michael Powell said Tuesday that he would seek broad regulatory authority for the federal government over Internet-based telephone services to avoid stifling the emerging market.
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Broadband service may get a little broader in the next few years, now that the Federal Communications Commission is graciously stepping out of the way.
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Comcast's response yesterday to its public thrashing by the FCC may have had a second, more important, purpose: A prominent Congressman has introduced legislation paving the way for a ban on Internet throttling.
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NEW YORK  - Are cellphone companies using their sway over handset makers to unfairly limit consumers&#39; choices? Skype, a pioneer in PC-to-PC calling, thinks so, and it wants the Federal Communications Commission to do something about it.  In a blistering filing with the FCC, Skype basically accused Verizon Wireless and other big carriers of holding their customers hostage because most cellphones sold in the USA are &quot;locked,&quot; meaning you can only use applications and features sold by your carrier.
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MANHASSET, NY The Federal Communication Commission&#39;s decision Tuesday (Nov. 9) to classify voice-over-IP (VoIP) as an interstate, federally regulated service could go
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In a ruling that could have implications for increasingly popular VoIP services, the FCC ruled today that a VoIP service from Vonage Holdings is not subject to the public utility regulations of individual states.
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WASHINGTON - The head of the Federal Communications Commission has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that generally forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city.
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The Republican chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is disputing Democratic assertions that a new rule loosening restrictions on media ownership is full of loopholes and will lead to more mergers and fewer choices for consumers.