IP Based Telecoms

Customers of BT Business have been venting their frustrations on an online BT forum after an IP address used by BT has been blacklisted.

Customer reports of being unable to email certain contacts have been compounded by fury over BT’s failure to rectify the problem.

According to BT, certain IP addresses provided to BT customers have been blacklisted by a security firm named MessageLabs after they claimed certain computers on the IP address list were being used to create spam.

Cable & Wireless Worldwide PLC has announced the signing of a five year contract with popular clothes retailer Next. The company has not disclosed the value of the contract however, it will be around several million pounds undoubtedly. Next requires Cable & Wireless Worldwide to connect its offices and distribution sites within the UK and Hong Kong.

Cable & Wireless Worldwide is a specialist in telecoms, particularly in voice, data and IP hosting. The network that Cable & Wireless Worldwide will implement will be used to link the UK-based sites and connect the communications to improve the efficiency and capacity of the sites.

United Utilities, largest water company in the UK, has signed a five year deal with Cable & Wireless Worldwide, a newly demerged arm of Cable & Wireless.

Cable & Wireless Worldwide is to provide IP telephone system services and voice communication systems for United Utilities. The contract includes providing services for data centres, call centres, contact centres and water plants.

The new systems will allow United Utilities to cut costs and also to access additional data applications such as video conferencing.

Ericsson has just struck a $1.8 billion (approx. £1.18 billion) deal with China Mobile and China Unicom. It will provide China Mobile with a radio access network and evolve its current network into an IP network. This framework for China Mobile is a $1 billion contract and should be completed by the end of the year.

The contract with China Unicom will see Ericsson provide the company with HSPA Evolution technology and an improved 3G network. Ericsson will also expand China Unicom’s IP and broadband capabilities. What a good deal for Ericsson!

Signalling a new era in communication systems, IPTV is starting to get ahold of people. As well as the creation of Project Canvas, Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) is getting in on the act as well. At the IPTV World Forum in London held earlier this week, NSN showcased a new IPTV platform.

The IPTV platform supports catch-up TV, video on demand and live TV amongst other things. These services are available on mobile devices and computers as well as TV sets. TV will never be the same again.

Project Canvas welcomed a new member this week – Arqiva, an infrastructure company. Project Canvas has plans to create the ultimate in connected TV which is known as IPTV (Internet Protocol TV). Arqiva is the second member of Project Canvas joining TalkTalk, BT, BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5.

Although the Project hasn’t yet received regulatory approval, the director of the project Richard Halton, has predicted a market growth of 70% by 2015. Despite opposition from rival companies such as Sky and Virgin Media, Halton is optimistic that Project Canvas will be a huge success.

Telecommunications companies and networking companies have come together to form the Network Test Automation Forum, also known as N TAF. The primary purpose of NTAF is to advocate interoperability between test tools as well as the simplification of lab automation efforts.

NTAF has quite a few core members which are prominent companies in the telecoms and networking sectors, such as BT, Cisco, Ericsson, Spirent and Verizon. NTAF, according to its members, promotes a customer-collaborative device-agnostic framework that will decrease the effort, time and price of product tests.

Speech recognition company Promptu Systems, which excels in mobile applications, has just announced that its popular speech to text technology is now available for Facebook and Twitter. Rather than type on the virtual keyboard of the iPhone for example, users can now update their Facebook and Twitter statuses by using speech. The Promptu technology then converts the speech into text and updates the social networking sites. The technology can also send speech-to-text messages. Social networking just got even easier.