DSL Prime News Briefs

Recession hits all over the world, but Huawei finds it still has to obey China's new labor laws.

by Dave Burstein of DSL Prime and Future of TV and the Web Video Summit [January 23, 2008]

Centillium: Japan Was Not Enough
Ikanos grabs pioneer for $12 million
"We're bringing over a very strong analog design team," Piyush Sevalia tells me. Centillium was a pioneer in DSL, and their engineers always respected. Ikanos has outsourced much of their digital design and is not picking up most of the Centillium digital engineers. Some very skilled people may become available.

DSL for Centillium was long focused on the Japanese market, where fiber is rapidly taking over. Centillium worked with the Japanese standards body from earliest days, and became the favored supplier. This was great as Japan grew DSL at a phenomenal rate; it's painful now the country switched to fiber. They've acquired some customers in other territories, but not enough to support the R&D required to stay in the game.

I hope to write more of Centillium's history next issue, and would very much welcome reminiscences. There will likely be continuing demand for replacement modems, etc., so the Japanese business is a plus for Ikanos. So are the 60 patents they acquired in the deal.

Huawei rescinds 7,000 resignations
China is Different, Part 572
China Telecom and Netcom are cutting spending, but Huawei's cutbacks were not due to dropping sales. 7,000 employees were persuaded to "voluntarily resign" before a new law takes effect making it difficult to fire employees with ten years' experience. They were then to be rehired, but without the legal protections. The government has now intervened in what Xinhua reported as a major attack on worker's rights under the new law.

"This is the biggest change in Chinese labor law in the reform and opening period. It gives legal protection to the vast majority of workers, who had no way to protect their rights under the old system," Qiu Jie, a labor law expert at People's University in Beijing, told the New York Times.

Briefs

• Bravo to Alcatel for signing the UN GlobalCompact "Caring for Climate" initiative.
  
  
• Switzerland is typical of many countries where broadband growth is inevitably modest. Heise reports 70 percent of the Swiss homes already have broadband, and only 80 percent own computers. The only way to get much higher is to sell DSL to homes without computers. Swisscom is looking to bundle an easy to use computer for "older people," and bringing the price down will attract some poorer families. The interesting possibility will be to sell internet TV and radio to people uninterested in computers.

Wall Street

• Hong Lu and UTStarcom agreed to "cancel ten percent (10 percent) of options" for the CEO, after an investigation of due to issues in "historic stock option practices." The word from India is that DSL is picking up, which should be good news for the company. DSL will never come back in Japan, however, as the company moves to 100 Mbps fiber.

Policy

• The stupidest debate in D.C. a few years back was whether broadband is a "telecommunications service" or an "information service." Billion dollar decisions were made based on an argument over the dictionary. The answer of course is both. SBC spent millions persuading Mike Powell and other pinhead angels to declare broadband an "information service" which therefore shouldn't be regulated. So I laughed out loud reading AT&T's careful drawn terms of service "The Service is an interactive information, communication, and transaction service."

Copyright 2008 Dave Burstein.
The DSL Prime Newsletter is reprinted with permission.

"The power of the printing press belongs solely to those who own the presses"
—A.J. Leibling

The Internet is the cheapest printing press ever invented.

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