Free Republic

Paris, France (AHN) - France's largest telecommunications firm is setting aside $1.48 billion to fund a stress-reduction program for staff aimed at ending a spate of suicides among its workers. France Telecom SA revealed the plan Wednesday in the face of lower third quarter profits. Under the planned program, staff aged over 57 or those who feel full time work is adversely affecting their health will be offered part-time jobs. Last year, 28 staff of the firm committed suicide. The suicides were blamed on poor working conditions at the company, which is trying to cut cost to meet profit targets.

Cell Phone Service Interruption

Telecom firms face net-neutrality defeat LOBBYING BLITZ MAY FALL SHORT FCC expected to approve plan to develop Web access rules By Cecilia Kang Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, October 22, 2009 Facing a major regulatory issue that could be worth a fortune in future business, AT&T has unleashed the kind of lobbying blitz that makes it one of the grand corporate players of the great Washington game. And yet, for all the money AT&T and other old-line telecom and cable companies have spent pushing their cause, they are poised to lose a key vote to a bunch of younger technology...

A France Telecom employee committed suicide on Thursday, becoming the 25th staff member to kill himself over the past 20 months, a company official said. The 48-year-old engineer hung himself in his Brittany home, one month after he had taken medical leave following a recommendation from the company doctor. The latest death brought to 25 the number of employees who have taken their lives since February last year at France Telecom, a former state monopoly that has been under major restructuring. Many of the employees have left notes blaming management decisions or stress at work. The 25th death came just...

Homeland Security: Provisions of the law that spared New York another 9/11 are set to expire Dec. 31. So why do Democrats want to gut this law and remove the immunity telecom companies have for helping protect America? To borrow a British expression from World War II, it was a very near thing. The capture, arrest and indictment of 24-year-old Afghan immigrant Najubullah Zazi before he could set off bombs made from store-bought chemicals prevented a tragedy of potentially devastating proportions. It wouldn't have happened if the critics of Patriot Act had their way. The capture of Zazi was made...

Now, it can't deny there is a problem. France Telecom, the once proud and efficient French public company, is in trouble, big trouble. Twenty-two of the company's employees have killed themselves in the last 20 months and all have left letters or testimonies incriminating their work conditions. This week, another employee tried but failed to take his own life. Some have even committed the desperate act in their own office. For months, France Telecom denied these "accidents" had anything to do with the company's work ethics. Now, the problem is staring it in the face. For the first time this...

They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency. The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that...

"APPLE HAS CHANGED THE WAY THE GAME IS PLAYED", says MSFT Win Mob chief Thu, 08/20/2009 - 01:21 by Jonny Evans "Apple has changed the way the game is played," Loke Uei, senior technical product manager for mobile developer experience at Microsoft said at the company’s first Windows Mobile Developers Camp (WinMoDevCamp) yesterday. His comments came during the developer meeting at which Redmond hopes to inspire/attract application developers to its platform. Attendees also got to see a preview of Windows Mobile at the event. The company hopes to take on Apple when it launches its Marketplace for Mobile later this...

Ever greater numbers of Americans are disconnecting their home telephones, with momentous consequences MUCH has been made of the precipitous decline of America’s newspapers. According to one much-cited calculation, the country’s last printed newspaper will land on a doorstep sometime in the first quarter of 2043. That is a positively healthy outlook, however, compared with another staple of American life: the home telephone. Telecoms operators are seeing customers abandon landlines at a rate of 700,000 per month. Some analysts now estimate that 25% of households in America rely entirely on mobile phones (or cellphones, as Americans call them)—a share that...

The federal government is spending $7.2 billion over the next year to bring better broadband to the masses, a lofty goal by any measure. But the feds are making it loftier than it needs ...

Communications firms warn of unprecedented extension of state powers Wednesday, August 5, 2009 A group of over 300 internet service providers and telecommunications firms is fighting back against the British government’s plans to monitor all emails, phone calls and internet activity nationwide. The London Internet Exchange (LINX), which represents some 330 companies, including BT, Virgin and Carphone Warehouse, says that the government is misleading the public about the extent to which it plans to monitor their communications and internet activity. LINX has described the Government’s surveillance proposals as an “unwarranted” invasion of people’s privacy. A statement from the group to...

TORONTO - Swedish telecom giant Ericsson won the auction for Nortel's wireless division, with a bid of US$1.13 billion, the Canadian-based company announced late Friday. Nortel will seek Canadian and U.S. court approvals of the proposed sale agreement at a joint hearing on July 28, 2009, the financially troubled company said in a statement.

Wireless Market, Generic Drugs Reviewed as Justice Department Steps Up Enforcement The Department of Justice has begun looking into whether large U.S. telecommunications companies such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. are abusing the market power they have amassed in recent years, according to people familiar with the matter. The review, while in its early stages, is an indication of the Obama administration's aggressive stance on antitrust enforcement. The Justice Department's antitrust chief, Christine Varney, has said she wants to reassert the government's role in policing monopolistic and anticompetitive practices by powerful companies.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the German firm's shady dealings with the Iranian regime, which included helping the country develop "one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale." This story was even more shocking the first time I read it in the Washington Times.

Two European companies — a major contractor to the U.S. government and a top cell-phone equipment maker — last year installed an electronic surveillance system for Iran that human rights advocates and intelligence experts say can help Iran target dissidents. Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), a joint venture between the Finnish cell-phone giant Nokia and German powerhouse Siemens, delivered what is known as a monitoring center to Irantelecom, Iran's state-owned telephone company.

The concept of a home phone may soon be going the way of the corner pay phone. Government research shows that more and more households are getting rid of their land line. And for the first time, cell-phone-only homes outnumber those with just land lines. Kelly Fitzsimmons did not give up her phone without a fight. The instrument of gossip and grand plans, and the bearer of bad news and good, the land line to her was a lifeline. "I just had in my head you gotta have a land line. You gotta have a land line," she says. "That's...

Let’s say you’re one of millions of Americans with a Verizon contract. Let’s say you really want an iPhone. And let’s say you don’t have hundreds of dollars necessary to break your contract, ditch your BlackBerry, and hop on board with AT&T. Right now, the whole furor over the 3G S is probably pretty frustrating, right? Well, now you’ve got someone on your side. Yesterday, Sen. John Kerry and three others on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation fired off a note to Michael J. Copps, the acting chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, asking Copps to look...

WASHINGTON -- Do exclusive relationships between handset makers and cell phone carriers, like AT&T has with Apple's iPhone, help or hurt consumers? Senators grilled AT&T executive Paul Roth about the issue on Wednesday after hearing constituents' complaints about lack of competition. Roth said the exclusive deal drives innovation and his company's subsidies make the iPhone more affordable.

The long-awaited switch from analog to digital TV took place last Friday, and if you're like most people, you weren't aware of it. But if you are poor and/or stupid, you've probably had a rough weekend. "Nearly 700,000 calls were received by a federal hot line this week from people confused about the nationwide switch from analog to digital TV broadcasts that occurred Friday. About a third of the calls were about federal coupons to pay for digital converter boxes." Does that really say, "federal coupons for digital converter boxes?" "The largest volume of calls came from the Chicago area..."...

A federal judge on Wednesday threw out more than three dozen lawsuits claiming that the nation’s major telecommunications companies had illegally assisted in the wiretapping without warrants program approved by President George W. Bush after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker of Federal District Court in Northern California said that although consumer and privacy groups raised important constitutional issues in their claims, Congress had left no doubt about its “unequivocal intention” when it passed a measure last summer giving immunity to phone carriers in the wiretapping program. The ruling represents a major victory not only for AT&T...

In a high-tech shift accelerated by the recession, the number of U.S. households opting for only cell phones has for the first time surpassed those that just have traditional landlines. It is the freshest evidence of the growing appeal of wireless phones. Twenty percent of households had only cells during the last half of 2008, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey released Wednesday. That was an increase of nearly 3 percentage points over the first half of the year, the largest six-month increase since the government started gathering such data in 2003.

Is the world finally ready for the mobile minitablet? It's become quite clear over the last several months that Apple is ready to bridge the mobile computing gap, with plans to develop a device that fits somewhere in between the iPhone and the MacBook. A recent Wall Street Journal article proclaimed that during his medical leave, CEO Steve Jobs has been working on that midsized mobile device, bigger than an iPhone but smaller than a MacBook. And just this week, BusinessWeek reported that Apple is developing a "media pad" that would let users watch videos on a larger screen than...

Calling card calls to Mexico are not functioning very well at all right now. Looks like some 20+ million people are trying to call relatives in Mexico at the same time tonight. It is overwhelming the calling card system. Very interesting. The government could monitor the phone system and get an idea of how many illegals are here with the call volume, if it wanted to.

Original in German; here's a Babelfish translation: T-mobile had today a country wide loss in the portable radio net. Speaking and SMS services were concerned. The cause of the today's disturbance in the portable radio enterprise of T-mobile is recognized. Reason was a software fault in the so-called Home location register (HLR). The HLR is responsible to make a connection between portable radio station and the associated portable radio number. After putting the system back the first parts of the net are again available since approx. 19:00 clock. That can lead isolated to an overload in the net. We assume...

Charter Communications Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Friday in an effort to reduce its debt by $8 billion. The cable giant is working toward getting its restructuring plan confirmed in August so it can emerge from bankruptcy later that month or early September, according to sources close to the process. Charter appointed attorney Gregory Doody as its chief restructuring officer to oversee the financial restructuring process and minimize the impact on day-to-day operations. Charter had recently hired Doody as a turnaround specialist and adviser. Doody previously led successful in-court and out-of-court restructurings, including at Calpine Corp., a San Jose,...

Obama's $8B Broadband Plan Launches Tuesday Next Tuesday, the White House will launch its high-speed Internet plan using more than $8 billion in stimulus funds. Leaders from the Department of Commerce, Department of Agriculture and Federal Communications Commission will meet to discuss how the different agencies will use the funds to rural and other areas that don't currently have high-speed, or broadband, access to the Web. There are separate programs at the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications & Information Administration and the USDA's Rural Utilities Service that fund construction of new high-speed Internet networks. They are mostly focused on rural areas...

DOVER — AT&T Call Center workers knew they were walking into a dreary employment scene when they walked out the doors of the Cochecho Millworks, clutching the last of their belongings in a small, plastic box. But rather than dwelling on the bad news that has been the topic of conversation since AT&T announced the closure of the National Passport Information Center nearly three months ago, many employees decided to approach the final hours at the job a different way.

Anyone who recently moved to another cell-phone carrier from Verizon Wireless might want to check their closing bill from Verizon. To make a long story short, it appears to be Verizon policy to fail to pro-rate the last month when a phone number is ported to another carrier and to charge to the normal end of the billing cycle. Many people probably don't notice this and just pay their last bill without questioning this over-charge. Since Verizon bills for the coming month, in some cases the closing bill should indicate a refund. Without getting into my personal tale of woe...

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Nortel Networks plans to cut its work force by 3,200 jobs worldwide. The Canada-based telecom equipment maker said the new round of job cuts will be made over the next several months. The reduction is on top of 1,800 job cuts already announced...

(02-23) 17:32 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal judge in San Francisco is raising questions about the constitutionality of a law designed to dismiss suits against telecommunications companies accused of cooperating with government wiretapping. Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker has asked President Obama's Justice Department to present its views by Wednesday on whether the law gives the attorney general too much power to decide whether a company is immune from lawsuits. Obama supported the measure as a senator when Congress approved it last year. Department spokesman Charles Miller declined to discuss the administration's response before Wednesday's filing. But Obama's...

The House Democrats' $825 billion legislation released on Thursday was supposedly intended to "stimulate" the economy. Backers claimed that speedy approval was vital because the nation is in "a crisis not seen since the Great Depression" and "the economy is shutting down." That's the rhetoric. But in reality, Democrats are using the 258-page legislation to sneak Net neutrality rules in through the back door. The so-called stimulus package hands out billions of dollars in grants for broadband and wireless development, primarily in what are called "unserved" and "underserved" areas. The U.S. Department of Commerce is charged with writing checks-with-many-zeros-on-them to...

I used to have Verizon Wireless years ago, but literally had to fight them every month because my bill was always wrong. The would always fight me with some idiot who could not do simple math … just like this. (Go to link to listen to audio)

(AP) -- Television viewers who use antennas and were expecting a few more months to prepare for digital TV may not have much time left before their sets go dark: Many stations still plan to drop analog broadcasts in less than two weeks. When Congress postponed the mandatory transition to digital TV until June, it also gave stations the option to stick to the originally scheduled date of Feb. 17. That means the shutdown of analog signals, which broadcasters had hoped would happen at nearly the same time nationwide, could now unfold in a confusing patchwork of different schedules. Lawmakers...

(02-04) 13:32 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- Television viewers who rely on sets with antennas to pick up their broadcast signals have about four extra months to get ready for the nation's switch to digital TV.

"Clearwire has a cooperative agreement with Sprint to build a 4G wireless internet network. When it comes online, it would be the fastest wireless internet network in the country. Naturally other wireless companies are working on their own 4G networks too. Clearwire's major competitor in this capacity is Verizon....."

You're tooling down the highway when a trooper pulls you over and arrests you for going 90 in a 65-mph zone. The trooper admits clocking you at 63, but books you for reckless driving because you can't prove you wouldn't drive 90 one day. It would take a judge 30 seconds to dismiss your case because the proper sequence is crime, arrest, conviction. Unless you're AT&T, in which case Attorney General Richard Blumenthal — the state jobs scarecrow — wants to skip the preliminaries and go right to the sentencing. To improve service, contain costs and improve its competitiveness, AT&T...

President Obama's choice to run the Justice Department has assured senior Republican senators that he won't prosecute intelligence officers or political appointees who were involved in the Bush administration's policy of "enhanced interrogations." Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, Missouri Republican and vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in an interview with The Washington Times that he will support Eric H. Holder Jr.'s nomination for attorney general because Mr. Holder assured him privately that Mr. Obama's Justice Department will not prosecute former Bush officials involved in the interrogations program. Mr. Holder's promise apparently was key to moving his...

Sprint Nextel Corp. will cut a total of about 8,000 jobs by March 31, the company said Monday. The plan is to reduce internal and external labor costs by about $1.2 billion on an annual basis, Sprint Nextel (S, Fortune 500) said in a press release. The cuts will affect all levels of the company and geographic locations will vary, the Overland Park, Kan.-based company said.

The cellphone industry has a plea for the throngs descending on the nation's capital for the presidential inauguration: go easy on the mobile communications. The largest cellphone carriers, fearful that a communicative citizenry will overwhelm their networks, have taken the unusual step of asking people to limit their phone calls and to delay sending photos. The carriers are also spending millions of dollars to temporarily and substantially upgrade their networks in Washington.

It looks like the transition to digital television is going to be delayed for 90 days. My sources inside the Beltway tell me it’s a done deal.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez has asked the two Commerce Committee chairs, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Henry Waxman (D-CA) for $250M to bridge the current converter box coupon problem, noting that his request would keep the DTV transition on track for 2/17/09 and may not even go over the total $1.5B already budgeted. Meanwhile, according to Reuters, Democrats in the House are looking to throw $650M at the problem.

telecommunications company has confirmed for this columnist that its vice president for policy—who is also an Obama donor and a former lobbyist—is advising Barack Obama’s transition team on telecom policy. Obama’s transition team, which has failed to disclose this executive’s involvement, happens to have proposed a significant change in telecom policy that will profit that very company, called Clearwire. By pushing to delay the long-scheduled transition of television broadcasting from analog signals to digital signals, president-elect Obama is directly aiding Sprint and its partner Clearwire while hurting Verizon. Clearwire’s executive vice president for “Strategy, Policy and External Affairs” is R....

A telecommunications company has confirmed for this columnist that its vice president for policy—who is also an Obama donor and a former lobbyist—is advising Barack Obama’s transition team on telecom policy.

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration would support a proposal in Congress to delay the nation's scheduled transition to digital-only television to June, transition co-chairman John Podesta said in a letter to Congress Friday. On Thursday, West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller introduced legislation that would postpone the transition to June 12. House lawmakers are considering similar legislation and may schedule a vote as soon as next week.

Add the switch to digital TV to the simple tasks the federal government has botched. Consumers Union (CU) wants Congress to delay the nation's conversion from analog to digital because the government-mandated and -run transition has been so poorly implemented, and despite $1.34 billion, woefully underfunded. The switch resolves a complicated tug of war between the broadcast and cable industries that spanned decades. Four years ago, Congress passed legislation requiring conversion to digital by Feb. 17. As part of the deal, it promised $40 coupons toward the cost of converter boxes, which cost up to $80, for the estimated 10...

A proposed delay in the digital television transition will apparently have no impact on Hawaii's go-early time of noon Thursday. "We're planning to do the transition as scheduled Jan. 15, 2009, in accordance with the request from Hawaii's broadcasting community," said Lyle Ishida, Hawaii DTV transition manager for the Federal Communications Commission. A proposal by the Consumers Union Wednesday spread through Washington, D.C. like wildfire and was reiterated by President-elect Barack Obama yesterday, citing concern for consumers unprepared for the Feb. 17 national transition date. As of Monday, Hawaii requests for DTV converter box coupons were at 53,012, while...

President-elect Barack Obama this week has joined the growing chorus of people who have concluded that the nation is not ready for next month's Digital TV transition. In a letter to key lawmakers urging that the February 17 switch to digital be delayed, Obama's transition chief cited a litany of issues including the fact that federal funds for digital converter coupons have run out. While Obama's transition team is correct to point out that the digital transition could force millions of people to lose their TV signals, the President-elect is woefully late to address this problem. By calling for a...

Obama urges DTV transition delay President-elect Barack Obama wants more time for the transition from analog to digital TV and has suggested a delay beyond the February 17 date. Obama's transition team today told lawmakers Congress should postpone the exclusive digital TV broadcasting date, suggesting that millions of low income, rural, and elderly Americans have not secured digital converter box coupons and will be left in the dark once the transition goes live. Obama's team did not suggest a new date. The request for postponement comes after the NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) reported earlier this week that funding...

In the past few years, people seem to have forgone the conventional phone conversation in favor of punching in short text messages on tiny keypads, all while mobile phone carriers have cashed in lucratively. In 2008, 2.5 trillion messages were sent from cell phones worldwide, up 32 percent from the year before, according to the Gartner Group. But, what also went up in the last three years was the price — doubling from 10 to 20 cents per message while the industry consolidated from six major carriers to four. Sensing a potential rip-off, Wisconsin Sen. Herb Kohl, the chairman of...

The celebrated openness of the Internet -- network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic -- is quietly losing powerful defenders. Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers. At risk is a principle known as network neutrality: Cable and phone companies that operate the data pipelines are supposed to treat all traffic...