Source: www.voip-news.com

Add newspapers to the ever-growing list of companies that have transitioned to a managed voice, Internet and data networking solutions package. The Kansas City Star in Kansas City, Missouri, is now using a solution from tw telecom.

“We’d outgrown our old network and needed a provider with the ability to support us in creating a robust 10-location wide area network (WAN) to sustain The Star’s continually increasing network needs,” said John McPhail, Systems Manager for The Kansas City Star. “Important to us was that tw telecom was able to provide The Star with a cleaner, self-healing solution that gives us a better network with improved bandwidth at every site, and a layer of redundancy we didn’t have before. The Star’s headquarters, production facilities and seven distribution centers throughout the metro area are now connected over a much more secure and cleaner network than we had before.”

The company’s new network is a multi-solution, 10-location Ethernet-based network that provides 40 Mbps of metro Ethernet connectivity and voice services.

“Critical to our decision to select tw telecom was its network fiber footprint,” said McPhail. “When we reviewed all the proposals, many of which were priced similarly, none could match tw telecom’s network capabilities or technical sophistication. The Star is now directly connected to a fully protected network, and we immediately reduced our costs by more than 10 percent. We gained more than just an improvement in cost, we were able to upgrade nine of our sites from a consumer-type DSL connection to a production quality T1. In addition, this transition to tw telecom had the added benefit of reducing to one the number of providers we now have to manage.”

Source: www.voip-news.com

The National Security Agency (NSA) has awarded a $2.8 million contract to add a Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) feature to Sectera vIPer Universal Secure Phone. The feature allows users to use the vIPer Phone to connect to the traditional telephone network using a secure network.

“The idea behind PSTN Connect is to provide users with a flexibility they don’t have today. For example, the vIPer Universal Secure Phone will appeal to those whose installations currently use the PSTN network, but who plan to migrate to voice over IP; users who currently have voice over IP networks; and others who plan to stay with traditional PSTN,” said John Cole, vice president of Information Assurance for General Dynamics C4 Systems. “It’s about protecting our customers’ investments by providing a product that will accommodate evolving communications technologies.”

The Sectéra vIPer Phone was released in 2006 and is the only VoIP phone approved by the NSA for top secret information.

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician and the wiretapping whistle-blower, whose allegations that his former employer wiretapped the internet on behalf of the government, largely holing up the the lawsuit against AT&T have visited Washington to persuade Lawmakers not to deliver a blow to the law suite.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on the surveillance bill today.
But according to TPM Muckraker’s Spencer Ackerman, Klein is finally getting the media and other attesion that have evaded him for last two years, ever since he revealed the new about the secret room 641A. The New York Times also carries an article
Here is a Video of Mark Klein outs the NSA on Olbermann;