The ABCDs of recent VoIP Happenings.
There has been a lot of interesting stuff going on, what with AT&T buying Bellsouth, which of course is happening for one reason and one reason only: to acquire 100% ownership of Cingular (which is 40% owned by Bellsouth) and Jeff Pulver writing a Dr. Seuss rhyme about it complete with video. And there you have your ABCDs.
Now for some commentary on the whole mess. Like there hasn’t been enough of that.
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AT&T buying Bellsouth: Yeah, it’s gonna happen. Everyone needs to get over it. It’s basically the telcos versus the cable companies and the people in Washington are willing accomplices to make this happen. We knew this was coming. I’m just curious if Verizon is going to happen to Qwest. Some say Verizon may be interested, though after their bidding war over MCI, I don’t believe so. Maybe Qwest will bulk up by buying some of the smaller telcos. Perhaps it could grow to be as big as Verizon and Qwest? Of course, this is all sleep-deprived delusions, so don’t assume I actually know anything about this.
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Cingular having one owner: with AT&T owning 100% of Cingular, you can bet they will confuse everyone by changing the name of Cingular to AT&T Wireless. No sir, you were a member of the old AT&T Wireless and therefore you must upgrade to a new handset and sign a new two year contract to replace your 6 year old TDMA phone.
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The whole Dr. Seuss thing: I agree that the Dr. Seuss rhyme was funny. I didn’t particularly like the video of it for a few reasons: it looked like a really bad home movie with lots of frequent jumps and zooming. I also didn’t particularly like the fact that the video didn’t play on my Linux box because for whatever reason, there isn’t a Flash player that can play version 8 movies (or at least it’s not in Gentoo yet).