There’s no doubt that mobile operators have gotten the religion about boosting backhaul capacity — just today Verizon talked about delivering Ethernet over fiber to more than 1000 backhaul sites. Network equipment vendors, in particular Ethernet specialists, are poised to take advantage of this opportunity, but test and service assurance vendors are snapping to attention too.

Today, EXFO, which specializes on test and assurance equipment — and is amping up its focus on IP-related opportunities — announced a new end-to-end assesment solution for mobile backhaul networks with a focus on testing Ethernet traffic.

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With net neutrality looming, content owners and service providers are challenged more than ever to deal with customers improperly downloading copyrighted content. Connected Planet talks with Richard Cotton, executive vice president and general counsel for NBC Universal, on how he sees this important issue playing out.

Listen this podcast HERE.

The success of SMS — and the explanation for why Web-based IM or other would-be rivals have failed to replace it — is that it * just works.* It took years and many false-starts for that to be the case, but when mobile operators and their vendors worked out how to interconnect and interoperate formally siloed SMS islands, the telephone industry’s most successful modern app was born. Mobile operators can either figure out how to replicate this success — or they can kiss their ability to delivery mobile services, and the affiliated revenue, goodbye. And that’s where RCS comes in.

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Windstream (NYSE: WIN) CEO Jeff Gardner told me this summer that he wanted to increase the company’s revenue from business customers from about a third of its total revenue to half over the next five years. Today’s acquisition of privately held CLEC NuVox could cut that down to more like two years. more

Faced with mounting competitive and financial pressures, Nokia Siemens Networks (NYSE:NOK, NYSE:SI) is launching a major overhaul, reorganizing its business into three divisions, focusing more attention on partnerships and acquisition, and contemplating cutting its work force by as much as 9%. more