Wayne Rash

Siemens Communications, a division of Siemens AG, announced that the company is extending its unified communications platform, OpenScape, to IBMs Lotus Sametime. Currently OpenScape is designed to work with Microsoft products only. The new application, which features click-to-contact, click-to-conference, advanced presence, and instant messaging, is designed to work closely with Siemens SIP based telephony products, […]

Last weeks IEEE meeting in London demonstrated that the move to the next stage of Wi-Fi is nearly ready. At the meeting, 802.11n committee members unanimously approved draft standard version 1.10, and agreed to create version 2.0, which should be ready in the near future. The outstanding issues before the committee were resolved, clearing all […]

Most federal agencies are far from meeting mandated requirements for having employees work remotely, a situation that is costing the government millions of dollars and contributing to the high turnover in the federal work force, according to a recent survey. The Jan. 22 study, conducted by the Telework Exchange—a telecommuting advocacy group—and underwritten by Tandberg […]

A study released Jan. 22 by the Telework Exchange, a group that facilitates the growth of telecommuting, reveals that most federal agencies and many federal managers are far from meeting their mandated requirements to have their employees work from home or other remote sites. While some agencies, notably in the Department of Defense, have met […]

The long-anticipated 1.10 version of the IEEE 802.11n draft standard was approved unanimously in an IEEE task group meeting held in London in mid-January. According to Atheros CTO Bill McFarland, who attended the meeting, all of the 3,000-plus technical comments to the 11n draft 1.0 were resolved, and that in turn resulted in the successful […]

Sprint Nextel is shipping a series of devices that combine the companys CDMA voice and data services with its iDEN-based push-to-talk services. Sprints PowerSource phones provide both network redundancy and improved performance over phones that just use one or the other of the companys two networks, company officials said. The first two phones in the […]

SpectraLink will begin providing a version of its NetLink Softphone application for use with both Windows Mobile and Windows PocketPC operating systems this quarter, the company said. This allows customers to provide a wireless VOIP (voice over IP) version of a full business telephone to users of the handheld devices, which means that users of […]

T-Mobile has started shipping a new version of Research In Motions BlackBerry Pearl, this time in what the company calls “Pearl White.” According to a T-Mobile spokesperson, the new Pearl is functionally identical to the original black Pearl. When T-Mobile introduced the Pearl last fall, the company said that it was aimed more at consumers […]

Within minutes of the Federal Communications Commission giving final approval to the merger of AT&T and BellSouth Dec. 29, the companies involved created a 22-state communications company that takes a big step in reassembling the Ma Bell of decades past, a huge telecom monopoly broken up by federal edict years ago. However, the world today […]

Motorola is bringing Linux-based phones with strong entertainment features to the consumer marketplace. Two new phones, introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, are the MOTORIZR Z6, a slide-to-open phone similar to the companys existing Z3, and the MOTOMING A1200, a flip-open, touch-screen communications and entertainment device. Both are quad-band GSM phones, while […]