David Rohde

The folks at DSL equipment start-up Catena Networks Inc. all carry the company slogan,

The vexing problem of access by multiple carriers to multi-tenant office buildings is the telecom regulatory issue that won't die. Now the plot is thickening: The U.S. federal government itself turns out to have a vested interest in the issue

I've always been amused by the ability of marketing executives for telecom-oriented vendors to promote benefits that only appeal to people exactly like themselves, or even to nobody at all.

Convinced that large carriers are waiting for even more IP service-creation scalability than offered by recent startups, a new company recently announced a service switch supporting up to six million simultaneous users.

Moving to secure a place in larger carriers' optical metro and long-haul networks, access aggregation vendor Advanced Switching Communications Inc. has introduced a new high-speed card along with new flexibility for its frame relay user interfaces.

Have you ever noticed how almost every carrier calls itself "facilities-based"?

Many local exchange carriers, from giant Bells to small-town independent telcos, are coming under pressure to do something about their remote neighborhood terminals that extend ordinary voice lines but block DSL signals.

Quick: What's the point of spinning off a business unit into a separate company?