Crash and Burn
WhISPers Department of Bankruptcy Proceedings hears Colo.com is laying off salespeople and going with an agent program, a last-ditch effort to avoid bankruptcy. Insiders cite poor management as the main problem. No kidding — Colo.coms chief rival, Switch & Data, is still building like crazy.
Show Me Yours
Tell me who your Dynamic Transfer Mode provider is, and Ill tell you how many streaming media clients you are trying to get. Part the crowd this week at NAB 2001 as a new Swedish Dynamic Synchronous Transfer Mode vendor, Net Insight, tries to make a splash. Deployed by European giants like Carrier 1, Tele2 and Telia, Net Insight wants to sell U.S. data carriers on its switches. Built to route voice and video, they are used by professional media organizations to replace satellite feeds. DTM is a new standard that enables sending uncompressed 270-megabit-per-second multimedia feeds over fiber.
Death of Dial-Up
Gateways shutting its ISP service by July 31 is just another in the growing list of free or subsidized ISP offerings to bite the dust. Rest assured, however, that just as fast as some of these services disappear, more launch. American Express, for instance, is not backing off its effort to offer members a free dial-up service. But users say fee-for-service dial-up links are much more stable than the freebies like Kmarts BlueLight.com, which recently became a part-free, part-fee provider.