eWEEK EDITORS

At the Finishing Touch flower shop in the little town of Fishers, Ind., Karen McDonald has been battling her local phone company for six months, and still her business lines dont work. Customers trying to place orders hear the phone ring a dozen times or more before McDonalds employees — those who havent yet been […]

Spam Action Theyre off on Capitol Hill, and one of the first Internet-related issues that legislators will wrestle with is unsolicited commercial e-mail. Already, Rep. Gene Green, R-Texas, has introduced a bill, and Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., plans to reintroduce her spam bill, which was passed last year by the House but stalled in the […]

Four OC-3 (155-Megabit-per-second) equivalents, going from South America to Miami: provisioned in a week. One OC-3, going from Miami to Washington, D.C.: provisioned in a week. The wait for a 2-mile-long DS-3 (45-Mbps) line in Washington, D.C., needed to activate a 6,000-mile long network: five months. This is a scenario that more and more carriers […]

Bargain hunters are beginning to snap up some of the most beaten-down stocks in our index, rewarding companies that are trying desperately to turn themselves around amid the market slowdown. The result was a 5.3 percent jump in our index for the week ended Jan. 11, its second consecutive increase. Among the best performers were […]

Caching in Infrastructure management company Marimba Inc. has announced the debut of Timbale 1.2, which adds advanced caching functions and support for Linux and AIX platforms. Automatic updating Officials at the Mountain View, Calif., company said Version 1.2s caching system stores content closer to the network edge and automates the content updating process. The system […]

The arcane and secretive world of traffic trading among Internet backbones is in full daylight now that WorldCom has publicly posted its “peering” requirements for the first time. The result will likely be a wave of consolidations among smaller access providers and a codified first and second class of data carriage, industry experts said. With […]

ITL Metro, the competitive local exchange division of International Telecom, wanted to get into the lucrative central office exchange business. No problem — just scrape up a spare $10 million to $20 million to purchase a Class 5 switch and theyd be on their way to bundling lucrative voice and data services. But ITL Metro […]

Virtual central office technology is a business-to-business tool that is quickly moving into the home. “For every sale I make to a business customer, I get three to four residential customers,” says Joel Eisenberg, chief executive of Seattle-based competitive carrier ITL Metro. “Its a viral type of market. You dont sign up one customer — […]

Internet infrastructure and hosting company Loudcloud Inc. has announced a new performance testing service based on technology from Keynote Systems Inc. The service, called Global Response Smart Cloud, lets customers of Loudcloud, which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif., measure and compare the real-time response rates of their sites with their competition. Most important, since many […]

The European Union and a group of European companies and organizations have launched a new project aimed at creating Internet filtering technology tailored for users in several European countries. The World Wide Web Safe Surfing Project is part of a $23.4 million initiative launched by the European Union in 1999 to help users surf the […]