Michael Martin

DSL provider NorthPoint Communications Friday filed a lawsuit against Verizon, just over one week after Verizon terminated an agreement that would have merged the two companies' DSL businesses.

For decades, voice and data have coexisted peacefully in similar yet separate worlds...

EasyVista.com next week is launching a hosted PC inventory service for companies that...

San Francisco-based start-up SilverTech Inc. is targeting an offering it calls a private...

Several equipment vendors and service providers last week launched a program aimed at achieving full interoperability among...

Wide area bandwidth is hot. Carriers, enterprises and even residential customers can

Bundling, the practice of packaging one telecommunications service with one or more other telco services and charging less for the resulting bundle than the total cost of the individual services combined, is widespread in the Canadian service provider market. Generally, bundling is thought to be a good thing for all parties. It lets service providers sell more services than they might normally be able to sell, because they're selling combined services at a reduced rate. For enterprises, bundling gives them access to services they might not normally be able to afford.

In a society that depends on a free market to drive economic growth, government regulation tends to be frowned upon. Occassionally though, unusual circumstances force government to step in and steer companies in a particular direction to maintain a competitive marketplace, a la Microsoft. Two recent government moves in the telecommunications space, one in Canada, the other in the U.S., are examples of interventions that benefit the market economy.