Plus: MCI to snap up NetSec; phishing attacks up in December; 802.11n Task Group moves a bit closer to 100M wireless spec; HP to pay to settle lawsuit.
Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC for the past four years, announced Friday he will resign, effective sometime in March.
A Republican who championed telecom deregulation, Powell sent a letter of resignation to President Bush saying his resignation comes with a “mixture of pride and regret. Having completed a bold and aggressive agenda, it is time for me to pursue other opportunities and let someone else take the reins of the agency.” Bush will nominate a new commissioner and chairman.
During his tenure, Powell pushed the commission to scrap many of the rules requiring incumbent telephone carriers – often called the regional Bells -to share parts of their networks with competing carriers. Powell argued that market forces, and not the government, should determine the competitive landscape of the telecom industry, but he also pushed the FCC to get more involved in areas such as policing indecency on television and radio airwaves.
In November, Powell’s FCC ruled that VoIP carriers were exempt from most state regulation and taxes. Powell argued that VoIP will give consumers a new telecom choice, resulting in lower prices and better service. Some consumer and technology groups faulted Powell for pushing policies favoring large companies, particularly large incumbent telecom carriers, to the detriment of competition.
MCI last week announced plans to acquire NetSec, a managed security service provider, for $105 million. “We want to make MCI’s brand synonymous with security,” says Jonathan Crane, executive vice president and chief strategy officer at the carrier. NetSec provides managed and professional security services to the federal government and enterprise business users in 32 countries in the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia. Crane says NetSec is bringing risk and vulnerability assessment professional services to MCI.
Reports of online phishing attacks were up again in December, when more than 1,700 active phishing Web sites were reported, a 10% jump from the previous month, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group. The group reported a steady increase in both the number of phishing Web sites and e-mail messages, and evidence of more sophisticated techniques to hijack personal data.
More than 9,000 unique e-mail messages linked to phishing scams were identified by the APWG in December, an increase of 6% from the month before, and a 38% increase over the number reported in July. Again in December, financial services companies were the top target of phishing scams (85%).
The IEEE 802.11n Task Group last week winnowed out some proposals for a standard that’s intended to increase wireless LAN throughput, not just the overall data rate, to at least 100M bit/sec. Qualcomm withdrew its separate proposal and joined one of the two main groups remaining. And Motorola’s proposal failed to win enough votes during the ballot to stay in the running.
Two main proposals remain: TgnSync, which includes Atheros, Cisco, Intel, Nokia and now Qualcomm, got about 50% of the votes; and WWiSE, which includes Airgo, Broadcom, STI, and Texas Instruments, got about 34%. A proposal has to win at least 75% to “win” as the basis for the standard. Both proposals are based on multiple input, multiple output technology, which generates two or more unique radio signals, and uses two or more transmit/receive antennas. Airgo is the only company to ship a MIMO chipset.
HP last week said it has agreed to pay $141 million to Intergraph to settle a dispute over HP’s alleged infringement of Intergraph’s microprocessor patents. The companies have entered an agreement that grants HP a license to all of Intergraph’s patents, and provides Intergraph a license for any HP patents relating to Intergraph’s products, HP says.
The settlement resolves several outstanding lawsuits between the companies. One of the suits, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, had been due to begin trial Feb. 21.
The suits relate to technologies Intergraph developed for its Clipper family of microprocessors, which is now discontinued.
