Denise Pappalardo

The freeware movement is not the end of software. It has been three or four years where our most significant competition has been free. We have learned customers care about total value, not cost of actual software, but total cost, says Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

IP Multimedia Subsystem, more commonly known as IMS, is not a slam-dunk, according to a group of industry analysts who gathered in Washington, D.C., this month to discuss the advanced carrier services architecture.

Wi-Max technology received a major boost last month when Sprint Nextel announced plans to roll out a wireless network across the U.S. based on the mobile Wi-Max specification.

A U.S. Court of Appeals upheld Bernard Ebbers' fraud conviction and 25-year sentence. Ebbers was convicted of nine counts of conspiracy and fraud in March, 2005 and sentenced in July of last year. He filed an appeal in September and has been free since. The court has yet to set a date as to when Ebbers will report to prison.

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AT&T is promising a host of new collaboration services based on a five-year agreement it announced on Monday with Microsoft at Supercomm 2005 in Chicago. Based on the deal AT&T will deploy Microsoft's Connected Services Framework (CSF) designed to allow service providers to aggregate, provision and manage converged services.

As a mobile device user, do you have desktop phone envy? Sure, going mobile spells freedom, but it also often means giving up traditional PBX-based phone system features such as abbreviated dialing, call transferring and multiparty teleconferencing. Ford, for example, is ditching 8,000 landline, desktop phones in favor of wireless devices, but has no plan yet to integrate those devices with the company's PBX or new IP PBX.

Arbor Networks Inc. says it is attempting to make it easier for service providers to share information about Internet threats through a new program called the Fingerprint Sharing Initiative. The program, being introduced this week, uses Arbor's PeakFlow SP platform, which is used by service providers to sniff out distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks, worms and other security threats on their own networks.