Stories by Stephen Lawson

To the storied names of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, add Kevin Johnson and Pradeep Sindhu.

Juniper Networks reaffirmed its long-term forecast for annual revenue growth of 20 per cent or more as it met with financial analysts on Thursday following two big product-line introductions.

Juniper Networks is developing a massive switch that could replace traditional IP (Internet Protocol) routers in the core of service-provider networks and combine optical and electronic technologies that today exist in separate systems with dedicated staffs.

Overture Networks and Hatteras Networks, both privately held vendors of carrier Ethernet equipment, have agreed to merge in a deal with undisclosed financial terms.

Verizon is getting set to offer its customers unified communications services that can include presence information, instant messaging, videoconferencing and fixed-mobile call handoffs through a Cisco Systems-based cloud infrastructure.

T-Mobile USA suffered a net loss of 23,000 customers in the fourth quarter but gained 1 million smartphone users, which helped to increase the data revenue that the carrier pulled in from an average subscriber.

Worldwide server revenue and unit shipments continued a yearlong recovery in the fourth quarter of 2010, but growth is likely to slow this year, research company Gartner said on Thursday.

Virtualization, video and massive amounts of data are all driving enterprises and service providers toward 100-Gigabit Ethernet, but the cost of the fledgling technology remains prohibitively high and few products have been installed, industry observers said at the Ethernet Technology Summit.

1. It really is fast. TeliaSonera, the Swedish carrier that in 2009 launched the first major commercial long-term evolution (LTE) service, delivered an average downstream speed of 33.4Mbps in informal tests last year. Verizon Wireless, which is using narrower spectrum bands, estimates that even on a fully loaded network, individual subscribers will get between 5Mbps and 12Mbps downstream and about 2Mbps to 5Mbps upstream.

Less than a year after 100-Gigabit Ethernet was standardized, an industry group is considering a set of specifications that might make the high-speed technology less expensive and more useful.

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed an amendment to its annual government funding bill that would prohibit the Federal Communications Commission from using any funds to implement the Net neutrality rules it approved last year.

Clearwire gained 1.5 million subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2010 and more than doubled its revenue, but lost US$128 million, the mobile WiMax operator announced on Thursday.

Wi-Fi looks set to play a growing role in mobile networks even as LTE and other new cellular technologies with higher capacity are deployed.

In a move that underscores the importance of both mobile devices and video in staying connected within enterprises, Logitech is extending its LifeSize video streaming system to iPads, iPhones and iPods.

Global spending on mobile infrastructure has been falling for the past two years despite rising demand for network capacity, but investment will rebound this year, according to a forecast by Dell'Oro Group.