India 2.0 (*).
For four days in July 2007, a delegation of IDATE Foundation member companies travelled to India to meet with players from the country's telecoms, IT and television industries (1). By way of an introduction, it is worth remembering that India has a population of 1.112 billion, and...

Your call is important to us: in the early 1990s, call centres were hailed as a saviour for communities hit hard by the re-structuring of the manufacturing sector throughout the 1980s. Nicky Welch talks to workers in Bendigo's call centres about the reality.
Imagine you are working as an in-bound call centre representative for a large telecommunications company. Your workplace was once a supermarket and has been converted into a 300-seat call centre. You are in a space of one metre square, in a pod of 12 co-workers, turned away 90 degrees...

Treasury: U.S. phone carriers paid Cuba $102m in 2006.
U.S. telecommunications companies paid the Castro government nearly $102 million last year to complete long-distance phone calls from the United States to Cuba, according to data obtained by CubaNews. The Treasury Department has reported to Congress that Cuba received $57.8 million from U.S. carriers in the second...

Phone calls to Cuba keep the dollars flowing.
Miami generates the pressure for U.S. sanctions to cut off hard-currency flows to Cuba. Miami is also the place that generates a great deal of hard-currency flows, which is why the administration tightened its sanctions in 2004 to reduce family visits and family remittances. One...

Is the VoIP bubble about to pop? Despite the hype, deployments are limited and customer frustration is growing.
To hear proponents tell it, Voice over Internet Protocol appears almost inevitable. Commercial users will use VoIP to slice their monthly phone bills. Business users will be lured by a host of beneficial services that make their phone calls and phone services much easier to manage. In...

Online calling connects classrooms to phone service.
A growing number of schools are hooking classrooms up to phone service by using inexpensive services built on a technology called Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), the Portland Oregonian reports. Classes wired for high-speed online access can easily tap into VoIP services. In the past three years, for instance,...

Globe-Taiwan Mobile in OFW tie-up.
Globe Telecom Inc. and Taiwan Mobile recently collaborated to create a service allowing thousands of Filipino workers in Taiwan to get connected with friends and families in the Philippines at half the going cost. The partnership resulted in the Taiwan Mobile "Ok Kababayan" SIM, the first and...

Disability-related electronic bulletin boards.
The disability-related bulletin board services (BBSs) listed below can provide a wealth of helpful information. Use of all listed services is free, however, depending on where one lives, calling a BBS may incur long-distance telephone charges. A few bulletin boards charge fees for increased access or membership; when applicable, these...

When distance becomes irrelevant: has the walk toward extinction begun for the IXCs?
Pressure is mounting on long distance providers to more quickly broaden their product offerings or face the possibility of a new round of bankruptcies. Financial report cards are in from the first quarter of the year, and the results show a continued erosion of customers and profits...

A passage to India.
It's time to consider relocating some workers' comp operations offshore, such as in India, South Africa or Ireland. Lowering costs is an essential element but I think only part of the matter. Try to view offshore relocation not as losing an American employee but rather as gaining a better...