T1 and MPLS.com

Charter Communications Inc. Friday filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which the heavily leveraged cable-television operator had previously said it would do as part of a debt-reduction agreement with some of its creditors.

The prepackaged plan requires no debtor-in-possession bankruptcy financing, but the nation’s fourth-largest cable operator by number of subscribers will receive $3 billion through refinancing and new equity investment.

St. Louis-based Charter, controlled by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, said last month it would file for bankruptcy protection by April 1 as part of an agreement with some of its debtholders to reduce its debt by about $8 billion.

Charter has been suffering for years under its debt, which was largely built up to finance acquisitions. The company had $21.7 billion in debt at year’s end.

Gregory Doody, Charter’s chief restructuring officer, said the company is “operationally sound” but filed for bankruptcy because of its heavy debt load. Charter was unable to extend maturities of its debt, he said, because of the financial crisis.

Just another example where NuVox competitors can’t make the cut!

Check out what others are saying about Nuvox.

http://www.broadbandreports.com/comment/1827/70017

Though we’ve worried that Hulu’s success might make it a victim, by driving its content providers to limit their offerings and provoking cable companies to get in the game, the site keeps growing its wedge of the American audience.

If Hulu can keep moving up the charts, it may just capture enough hearts and minds to stay there for the long term. The company is now the No. 4 biggest video streamer in the U.S., according to comScore, and the No. 2 according to Nielsen. comScore reports the site grew its number of viewers 42 percent and its number of streams 33 percent in February, a shortened month that saw a drop for most video sites in the top 10.

Here’s Hulu’s account of its rise:

(This data comes via email from Hulu this morning, along with a summary of comScore’s January video stats. It seems Hulu is making a cheeky habit of releasing comScore’s monthly data before the research company does so itself.)

Hulu places fourth by comScore’s measure of both number of streams and unique viewers in February, with 333 million streams and 34.7 million viewers. That’s a significant leap up from 250 million streams and 24.4 million viewers in January. Hulu itself has attributed a major bump to its Super Bowl ad. Owing to its long-form content, the site is second only to YouTube by number of minutes per viewer, with 64.5. But that’s down from 79 minutes per viewer in January.

We have to hope comScore will be irked enough by Hulu putting out these stats to start releasing its own video measurement data earlier each month, so we can stop reading like a Hulu press release! But honestly, Hulu is the story here, after years of YouTube dominance and barely a switch by other sites near the top of these charts. However, it does looks like another story is just around the corner. CBS Interactive, which controls Hulu rival TV.com, cracked the top 10. We’d expect TV.com to grow even further this month after its big promotional push within CBS’s March Madness On Demand video service.

comScore counted 13.1 billion overall U.S. streams in February spread amongst 145 million unique viewers. Google/YouTube had 5.35 billion streams and 99.4 million viewers.

Post Taken from the wall Street Journal

You may or may not have heard of Googles new Voice service. For you beta testers, you may already be up and running. In the next couple of weeks Google will be releasing Google Voice, a free service, which was formerly GrandCentral. This blog post will provide real life examples of using this service, which I believe can be useful for anyone with a cell phone.

I have had the GrandCentral product since it was bought by Google and opened up for beta testing in 2007. The service has been improved and is going to be released to everyone in the next couple of weeks with the new name of Google Voice. It has come along way since 2007 and this upcoming release offers many improvements. At first glance it may not seem like a service that would be worth using, but over the last couple of years I have determined this service is indeed very useful in both business and personal life. So here are some examples of how I use the service.

1. Use your Google Voice number as your work number. So on Friday night at 6 PM when the phone rings with a number that looks familiar do you answer the call in hopes of it being a co-worker wanting to grab a drink or do you send it to voicemail in fears that it’s a business call thats going to cut into your weekend. Google Voice helps to filter calls so you don’t have to make that tough decision. When an unfamiliar (not in your Google Voice address book) call comes in to your Google Voice number the user is prompted to say their name. Once that happens your cell phone will ring and you have 4 options. 1) You can accept the call 2) Send the call to voicemail 3) Listen in on the voicemail or 4) Accept the call and record the conversation. So maybe you’re not sure you want to talk to “Brian” so you listen in on his voicemail and decide to accept the call midway through the message, its easy you just press * and you are now on the line.

2. You will be able to use your current Google contacts or import your contacts. So you can have custom dial tones (instead of “ring” “ring”) and custom greetings. You can customize them at an individual level or at a group level (Friends, Family, etc.). So you can have a professional message for your business callers and a fun more laid back message for your friends and family.

3. You can have web calls from your website via a web call button. This feature allows you to add a “Call me” button on your website with the option of hiding your actual number. An anonymous number will call the person and connect them to your Google Voice number. This would be a handy feature for those that are selling something (like on ebay).

4. You have the option of being notified of a missed call and/or voicemail via email. You can listen to voicemails and recorded calls from your computer. A new feature allows messages to be sent via text to your email, so you can read the voicemail message. This can be a handy feature when you may not have cell phone reception to check a message or you are in a setting where a phone is not appropriate.

There are many other features that are useful and I could go on and on with the advantages of Google Voice but I will let you check it out for yourself here. Again, the service won’t be open to the public for a couple of weeks, but it’s definitely something to keep an eye on so you can sign up when it becomes available.

WASHINGTON — If the hopes for a cleaner, more efficient energy economy are riding on the back of the Internet, it shouldn’t be any surprise that a company like Google is positioning itself at the center of the debate.

Here at Google’s D.C. office, the search giant co-hosted a seminar with GE to press for emerging smart-grid technologies.

Recognizing that the dream of a dynamic, coordinated power grid is as much an electricity problem as it is an IT problem, the two companies have been working together since last fall to develop smart-grid technologies and evangelize about the energy savings they would bring.

“The smart grid is in essence the marriage of information technology and process-automation technology with our existing electrical networks,” said Bob Gillian, vice president of GE’s energy division.

The benefits of the smart grid are clear enough. Sophisticated meters would give consumers a clearer picture of how much energy they are using and how much it is costing them. Other technologies like sensors and new software applications could adjust a household’s power consumption to go easy on the grid at times of peak demand. Utilities would also enjoy new efficiencies through technologies like broadband metering, and an advanced network could store and distribute renewables like solar energy.

“We believe that by working together as innovative companies and innovative leaders in our industries, with GE being a big energy company and Google being a big information technology company, that we have a real opportunity to help realize that change for consumers and to help lead the way in transforming the way our grid operates,” Gillian said.

The discussion was timely. As the panelists were laying out their visions for a new energy regime, President Obama was signing into law the massive economic stimulus package that will direct tens of billions of dollars toward clean and efficient energy initiatives, including $4.5 billion for smart-grid technologies.

Much of Google’s work on the energy front has been headed up by Google.org, its corporate philanthropy arm. Google’s engineers are bringing along a product called PowerMeter, which will enable households to monitor their energy consumption through their computers. It will be freely available to consumers, and Google is currently working to strike partnerships with utilities, government agencies and device makers to promote the technology, which it is still beta testing.

Google, keeping consistent with its philosophy of the Internet, maintains that smart-grid technologies should run on open protocols and non-proprietary formats. Just like open communications networks, smart-grid technologies that were accessible to the developer community would invite a flood of innovative new applications to promote energy awareness and efficiency.

“I think we’ve seen that having an open system such that outside developers can come in and create more value, create useful services, has really been the recipe for success on the Internet,” said Ed Lu, an engineer with Google who is heading up the PowerMeter project.

Smart-grid technologies invariably raise security concerns, but Lu insisted that security is not incompatible with Google’s ideal of an open framework that would court participation from the developer community.

“There is a distinction between a secure system and an open system,” he said. “An open system just means the developers can go in there and add things to it, but it can be entirely secure.”

For Google, it starts with giving households the tools to keep track of their usage in a more meaningful way. After all, wouldn’t consumers be stingier with their energy usage if they saw a meter counting up dollars and cents like a gas pump when they turned on the dishwasher?

Analysts see rural telecoms and communities as potentially the largest benefactors from the $7.2 billion to be allocated to broadband projects under the newly enacted federal stimulus package.

But who gets to dole out the checks? And what form will broadband “stimulus” take? How will those funds be tracked?

Technology and policy experts took a shot at answering some of those questions and more today at a National Press Club gathering here, while agreeing that more questions than answers exist about the broadband stimulus bill.

For one, skeptics warned that it could be difficult to track how the grants are used, suggesting that companies might take the money and then renege on their build-out commitments.

“Some of these funds are not going to flow as we hoped, and that’s true with every construction project,” admitted Blair Levin, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus who served as an economic advisor on Obama’s transition team.

But he thinks that this time, the government money will be tracked with more accountability and transparency.