• FTC seeks to recover $52.6 million in alleged phone cramming charges

  The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is seeking a civil court contempt ruling against the largest third-party billing vendor in the U.S., alleging that it placed more than US$70 million in unauthorized charges on telephone bills in violation of a previous court order.

• Groups protest Verizon's proposed special access rate hikes

  Members of the NoChokepoints Coalition will ask the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to stop Verizon Communications from raising the rates for middle-mile broadband connections that many businesses rely on.

• India asks regulator to clarify on 2G auction prices, after protests

  India's Telecom Commission has asked the country's telecom regulator to clarify on proposed reserve prices for an auction of mobile spectrum, following protests from companies and industry associations that the prices were too high.

• FCC takes steps to crack down on phone bill cramming

  The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has voted to require telephone carriers to provide their customers more billing information in an effort to crack down on mysterious, unauthorized charges on phone bills.

• Cisco to add IM software to enterprise IP communications system

  Cisco will include Jabber instant messaging and presence software at no extra charge with its Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) enterprise IP communications system, the company plans to announce on Wednesday.

• Unifying unified communications

  Integrating enterprise communication tools -- from telephony to e-mail, conferencing and instant messaging -- is the key to delivering a richer collaboration environment that increases productivity. But deployment and management of unified communications systems can be daunting.

Whitepapers about telephony

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  The Case for Real-Time Networking

  CIOs are facing several powerful trends and inflection points that are defining the new IT landscape, including cloud computing, virtualization, the consumerization of IT, smart computing, and communications to collaboration. Taken individually, each one of these trends will have significant ripple effects throughout the planning and operations of IT network infrastructure. In aggregate, they will have an even more dramatic impact on the way that future network architectures need to be planned and designed. Read on.

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  The Convergence of IT Operations Management

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  Blurring boundaries: The disappearing gap between work and home life

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  The A to Z of Mobile Workforce Scheduling Optimisation