If you've ever complained about a slow Internet connection, and wished for a faster one, you should stop complaining because more bandwidth won't get you more speed, according to AT&T. This twisted logic comes from AT&T COO Randall Stephenson at this week's Media, Entertainment and Telecommunications conference.

If you're not yet convinced that the term "Web 2.0" has reached into the stratosphere of mega-hype, consider this: It just made the cover of Newsweek. So it's time to finally ban the term, because it's become the favorite of hypsters, pseudo techno-hipsters, and scamsters.

The answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42 (as Douglas Adams notes in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series). Apparently, the answer to the Great Question of Server Processor Performance is even greater -- 48, if Azul Systems is to be believed.

We recently surveyed our readers to get an update on their attitudes concerning enterprise WLAN adoption. We received responses from 276 individuals, getting a pretty good mix from midsized-to-large organizations. Our surveys don't typically make their way into the hands of individuals working in small organizations, so in that sense they aren't really representative of the broad business market. But the responses do provide some interesting insights into the views of readers in larger organizations.

The Registrar is reporting that el Skypo has fixed a problem with its SkypeIn service over in the motherland, the UK. Apparently users complained that the SkypeIn service was down for a week.

The outage was particularly frustrating because Skype seemed to have bungled the customer interaction bit. The company provided no explanation as to the reasons for the outage and didn't even return the Registrar's calls. Maybe it's because Skype press folk are too busy explaining away those racketeering charges .

It’s time to stop letting users have access to the Web at work. Companies that take this bold (though unpopular) step will reap substantial rewards. Here’s why.

Cisco and Avaya may be relishing their newest SIP announcements, but the real 1,000-pound gorilla on the enterprise VoIP landscape isn't on your premises. It's in your network, as in the mobile operator.

Companies invest in virtualization technology for a variety of reasons: it makes it possible to support different applications and operating systems on a single server, dynamically allocate resources where they're needed most, and reduce server head count in the process. It can free companies from having to migrate existing applications every time a new operating system is deployed, and vvirtual machines also can be used to develop and test software before deployment and provide a less-expensive way of backing up computers in emergencies.

During our recent review of ESB products, we picked on Sonic Software quite a bit for its design-time environment.

Yesterday, Sonic announced version 7.0 of its ESB offering (with availability May 1) and it appears that it's moving in the right direction.

AT&T, Verizon and the rest of the Big Telcos can rejoice: Their favorite Congressman, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, just squashed a provision in a law that would have outlawed telcos from limiting bandwidth to Web sites unless those sites pay up. Telcos got everything they need in order to practice legalized extortion.

Running Skype on a business network can cause big-time security woes, say a pair of French researchers. At this month's BlackHat Europe security conference, they released a 98-page paper that warned, among other things, that with Skype it is "impossible to scan for trojan/backdoor/malware."

For those who doubt the evilness of some telcos, here's the latest news: BellSouth is fighting to shut down the wireless network helping New Orleans recover from Katrina. The company rammed a law through the state legislature banning cities from deploying networks faster than 128 kbps, and the free New Orleans network runs at 512 kbps.

For the past few weeks, my partner in crime, Preston Gralla, has bombarded you poor folk with his diatribe on Net Neutrality. He's referred to AT&T and other carriers as running a " Soprano-like business model". He's warned you how FCC chief Kevin Martin's interpretation of Net Neutrality was "far too narrow" that could ultimately help "end Internet and network innovation". And he's implored Congress to prevent AT&T and their bundies from charging "extortion fees". What should have been a sensible discussion has reached religious dimensions.

Happy Friday!

Today's freebie is all about streaming live video.

For the past few weeks, my partner in crime, Preston Gralla, has bombarded you poor folk with his diatribe on Net Neutrality. He's referred to AT&T and other carriers as running a " Soprano-like business model". He's warned you how FCC chief Kevin Martin's interpretation of Net Neutrality was "far too narrow" that could ultimately help "end Internet and network innovation". And he's implored Congress to prevent AT&T and their bundies from charging "extortion fees". What should have been a sensible discussion has reached religious dimensions.

Check Point Software put its proposed $225 million acquisition of IDS/IPS vendor Sourcefire on indefinite hold this Thursday due to political concerns.

The acquisition, announced in October 2005, came under the scrutiny of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) in February 2006. CFIUS, headed by the Treasury Department, investigates the acquisition of U.S. companies and assets by foreign governments. Check Point, which is headquartered in Israel, needed a green light from CFIUS before the acquisition could proceed.

THE POLITICS
Michele Perry, a Sourcefire spokesperson, cited “the current climate for international acquisition” as a key reason for the withdrawal. That’s a reference to CFIUS’s controversial approval of the transfer of operations at several U.S. ports to a company based in the United Arab Emirates. Republicans and Democrats in Congress joined together to kill the deal.

According to an Associated Press story, the Sourcefire deal may have been discouraged in part to pre-empt charges of bias. Such charges would likely arise if the Bush administration approved an Israeli takeover of a U.S. company soon after bowing to Congressional pressure to freeze out the Arabs.

THE IGNORANCE
The FBI and Defense Department also disapproved of the acquisition. These agencies were spooked because they use Snort, an open source IDS created by Sourcefire founder Marty Roesch, to protect classified computers. They were concerned that a foreign government would acquire sensitive technology.

Apparently they don’t understand that ‘open source’ means anyone with an Internet connection can acquire this sensitive technology.

Next time you think about hopping onto your neighbor's unsecured wireless network, think twice -- you could face jail time. That's the conundrum being faced by a Rockford, Ill. man who had to pay a $250 fine and has a year of court supervision for using the signal from someone else's Wi-Fi network.

So most of the front-line news this week came from Novell and its Brainshare conference, where the company rolled out SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and talked about its timetable for version 11. Company head honcho Jack Messman also spoke with our colleagues at CRN about the company's plans for Linux and its relationships in the sales channel. SUSE 10 is obviously a big step for Novell as it battles for market share against Red Hat, not to mention Microsoft's Windows and the other systems that companies can use for a base server operating system.

With mobile broadband networks like EV-DO and HSDPA becoming more widely available, many IT managers are asking about the role of mobile (or wireless) middleware. Is it still needed with the higher speeds? The answer is yes, but the reasons have changed.

FCC Chief Kevin Martin yesterday gave his support to AT&T and other telcos who want to be able to limit bandwidth to sites like Google, unless those sites pay extortion fees. Martin made it clear in a speech yesterday that he supports such a a "tiered" Internet.

One of the most exciting technologies that companies can leverage is presence, understanding the status of other online users, but making the business case for presence has been anything but easy. Stumping for a technology on potential productivity gains within the business is a long shot when baselining productivity amongst knowledge workers is still in its infancy.

In this podcast, I chat with the leading experts from Avaya, Microsoft, the Burton Group, and the Yankee Group on the impact real-time and non-real time collaboration technologies will have on the enterprise.

A long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How that browser used to make me smile.
And I knew if it had a chance
That it could make a website dance
And users would be happy for a while.

Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger made it clear yesterday that he sides with AT&T, Verizon, and other big telcos when it comes to allowing them to charge web sites fees for adequate bandwidth. He told the TelecomNext show in Las Vegas: "We do not support any [network neutrality] legislation at this time."

Fall apart when implemented.

Whenever you're in a lab environment there are challenges. It takes a certain mentality to say "Let us gather a bunch of products together, try to make them all work correctly in our environment, then run them through some tests, that sounds like fun, doesn't it?"

For the most part, I have that mentality. I like to learn new things and get going through the problems. But about once a year there's a review that just seems horrendous. My WAFS review is one of those.

Yahoo this week will release a new version of Yahoo Messenger designed to compete head to head with Skype, Om Malik reports in his blog. The revamped Yahoo service is expected to allow people to call PSTN phones as well as make PC-to-PC calls.

A federal judge just threw out a copyright suit against Google by the author of "Why Hotties Choose Losers," among other masterpieces. But that ruling has no effect on the publishers and authors suing Google over its book-scanning project, Google Books.

Today's freebie is brought to you by the letter "N", for NetJaxer.

NetJaxer integrates Web 2.0 applications like Gmail, iOutliner, TadaList, Digg, Writely (recently acquired by Google), and Meebo with Windows, making them easily accessible via several traditional Windows launch mechanisms.

Here's a frightening thought: Cisco and Alcatel are designing features into their routers to allow AT&T and other telcos to deny bandwidth to sites, or give those sites extra bandwidth or capabilities. The technology may be a good idea -- but what will the telcos do with it?

Nothing frustrates the logical minds of network engineers and their kindred than dealing with the vagaries of wireless. A dark art it is, as they tussle with the intangibles of multipath, interference and fluctuating performance.

Brocade remains true to its core switching business, but finds other avenues are opening up as customers contemplate their next generation data centers.

Add Qwest to the list of telcos threatening to charge Google and others what seems like extortion fees if those sites want adequate bandwidth. Qwest honcho Richard Notebaert told the VON conference, "If you have enough money, we can make a lot of things happen."

SAP has made its initial plunge into CRM-as-a-service, with a solid, if unspectacular offering. Can the software giant compete with upstarts like Salesforce.com or SalesNet -- or does it even have to? We take a look at this heated market segment in the Daily Spin.

At times, it seems as if the entire universe will be running on open-source software soon. If Qlusters has its way, that'll certainly be the case for systems management software.

We've all done it, fat fingered a config and not caught it until packets started disappearing or traversing a route they shouldn't have. But generally you find them within the first few days, if not hours, of that last "wr mem" on the router.

That's just what we did in the Green Bay lab, only our somewhat unique configuration - designed specifically to enable multi-speed testing without massive reconfigurations - caused us to not notice for nearly two years.

I had a great chat with Borland last week, and discovered that the death of its IDE business "was greatly exaggerated", in a way.

If AT&T is allowed to buy BellSouth, the company will have an absolute lock on the telecom market, according to a new study by TNS Telecoms. The firm found that the combined company will control 22% of all consumer telecom dollars and 34% of business telecom dollars.

Having a tough time with our ESB TechQuiz (based on our March 16th cover package)? Our answer key is below:

Cable companies in the U.S. and Canada may be moving to squash one of the biggest threats to their future expansion --- VoIP. A Canadian cable company is already charging customers a premium for using competing VoIP products, and users are complaining that Comcast is purposely degrading the quality of Vonage connections.

Should I deploy 802.11a on my wireless LAN?

That's a question that frustrates me immensely. But it's also one that I'm happy to field, as I have on many instances over the past couple of years.

Avaya's new peer-to-peer SIP solution, dubbed one-X Quick Edition, certainly grabbed headlines this week, but users could end up drilling their own teeth if they're not careful. Quick Edition's predictability and availability could suffer because of its unique P2P networking.

I'm a big believer in the idea that just because the technology is there to make something, doesn't mean that it needs to be made. With that in mind, I present to you -- the Wireless Wine Glasses.

Happy Friday!

Today's freebie is a CD/DVD/BD-compliant disc burning utility.

News from USA Today: Google's social networking site Orkut is being used to "rally support for Osama bin Laden, share videos and Web links promoting terrorism and recruit non-Arabic-speaking Westerners."

As seems often to be the case, a few vendors and analysts seem to be having issues understanding an acquisition strategy. This time it the controversy surrounds BEA and BPM vendor Fuego...

Could the end be near for Microsoft Office? There's mounting evidence that Google is about to launch an all-out assault on the productivity suite, by releasing similar software, including a word processor and calendar, available free online.

Just when you might have thought Microsoft had figured out how to deal with antitrust issues as a smart, long-term strategy, the company reverts back to its defensive, paranoid tactics--and all because it thinks it somehow can never be wrong. How stupid.

Whether you think the $612 million Blackberry settlement is a victory for intellectual property rights or legalized extortion, the invisible hand of capitalism applauds the patent racket.

AT&T's increasing vocal demands that Google pay extra fees for adequate bandwidth may backfire. There's evidence that Google may consider building its own nationwide network and compete directly with the big telcos.

Collaboration On The Go Podcast (download here). AOL is in the news again and, not surprisingly, it's not good news. It seems like every time AOL has been in the news for the past five years, it's bad news for AOL/TW or the Internet. Should AOL charge organizations that send massive amounts of email, guaranteeing that the messages aren't flagged as spam?

BEA announced this week that it had acquired BPM vendor Fuego for $87.5 million in cash.

John Chambers electrified the VoiceCon audience here in Orlando in his keynote address that ended 10 minutes ago. The man who VoiceCon co-chair Fred Knight introduced as the "rock star" of our industry walked out to a standing ovation. One only wonders how many of those folk raising to their feet were stooges paid by the company.

The U.K. publisher of the Harry Potter series is so outraged over Google's project to scan and make books available online without the copyright holders' permission that he has called for a boycott of Google. "Its quest to monetize for its own benefit the literature of the world must be stopped," he told a packed U.K. book fair.

Avaya, Cisco, and Sphere Communications took the first step this week towards VoIP-enabling corporate applications by introducing Web service interfaces to their underlying VoIP servers. Such interfaces enable applications to perform nearly any VoIP functions, such as initiating, answering and transferring telephone calls, just by calling a web service. These interfaces radically reduce the development times needed to deploy VoIP-enabled applications while expanding the pool of potential developers by eliminating the need for telephony expertise.

I am on a mailing list for The Evaluator Group.

If you follow my work at all, or have talked to me on the topic, you know that I think most analysis is bogus, as are the firms that sell it. But Evaluator Group is generally pretty on the ball. They have good analysis, and seem to have their stuff together.

So I found it massively amusing when their systems went awry early last week, and my blackberry began buzzing off my hip.

Lost in all the hooplah surrounding the impeding buyout of BellSouth by AT&T is this simple fact: Google and other Web sites are the big losers, because the new Telco behemoth will force sites to pay extortion fees if they want adequate bandwidth.

Many thanks for all the feedback on my prior posting on Itanium. While nobody else claimed to have all the answers either (and really, who could yet? Certainly not me), some of the insights you all provided were quite interesting.

Today I actually have something free for you! Woo hoo!

A 16-year-old Korean student committed suicide last week after receiving a cell phone bill for the equivalent of $3,811 in U.S. dollars. (And you think your cell phone bill is too high?) In response, Korean operators have capped the bill for data access at about $30 U.S. It's time for U.S. operators to follow suit.

AT&T, Verizon and other telcos have been warning that they're going to demand money from Google and other sites if those sites want adequate bandwidth. But now a senator is proposing to ban the practice, and is standing up to the telcos, who are acting more like a cybermafia than legitimate businesses.

This is a scary. How much can Amazon, Ebay or any e-tailer do to predict your buying habits? More importantly what lessons can you apply to you own e-commerce site to achieve better results?

It's not just U.S. telcos that are trying to extort money from Google and others for adequate bandwidth. Now the German telco Deutsche Telekom wants in on the action, saying that Google, eBay, Amazon and others should pay up.

Why is it that perfectly sane, intelligent, and bright journalists get boinked when it comes to open source technology? Mention Firefox and they interpret 10 percent marketshare as market dominance. They sing the praises of Asterisk not stopping to think that Asterisk's VoIP penetration is a pimple on Nortel's, Cisco's, or Avaya's you know what.