No Jitter Contributing Editor, Industry analyst, and TalkingPointz creator Dave Michaels provide his assessment on the recently announced Ericson acquisition of Vonage that will join the company's 5G offerings with Enterprise CPaaS. The question now in front of us is: As an industry, have we wandered back into the "valley of the giants"? Dave thinks that we just may have.

All my friends in the US, have a wonderful day giving thanks to our friends and families, on this Thanksgiving Day 2021.

More infrastructure investment to connect the unconnected on wired and wireless. Last week, investment firm Apollo Global Management unveiled a plan to deploy fiber to 3 million locations across the 20-state ILEC footprint that it acquired from Lumen Technologies earlier this year.

In last week's Open Meeting, the FCC approved a Second Report and Order to expand access to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by establishing the ability to text 988 to directly reach the Lifeline to better support at-risk communities in crisis, including youth and individuals with disabilities.

As the Federal Budget Bill bill goes through edits on the Senate side, funding for NG911 across the US hangs in the balance. What was once $12 billion has been whittled down to a token payment on Public Safety's future of $500 million. iCERT, the Industry Council for Emergency Response Technology, plays an important role in educating Congress on public safety needs and funding requests. George Keleman is iCERT's new Executive Director and sat down with me this weekend giving me his take on the subject.

After a couple of decades spent lost in space, satellites appear to be exciting investments once again – thanks in no small part to Elon Musk and the Starlink project he hopes will somehow pay for the colonization of Mars.

Even celestial old-timers like Viasat and Inmarsat are maintaining their valuable real estate far above the planet.

DID YOU KNOW - Americans lost $29.8 billion in phone fraud over the past year? Over 59 million Americans said they lost money as a result of phone scams in the past 12 months. AI fraud detection CAN change this, but it requires a bit more. Find out what in today's TeleCom NewsByte.

The FCC has officially designated Huawei and ZTE as national security threats, and not allowing any Universal Service Fund monies to be spent on any equipment or services from these Chinese firms. Huawei revenues are off by 30% and the company has gone into 'survival mode' according to the new Rotating Chair Eric Xu.

Canadian PSTN operator Telus has moved one step closer to a full-fiber future when it announced that only a mere 12% of it’s customers residing inside its footprint are still served by copper. Telus expects all existing copper lines to be retired by late 2022 or early 2023, which require 35% fewer repairs in the legacy infrastructure.

Another player enters the space satellite race. Boeing gets approval to launch a series of low-level Earth Orbit Satellites targeted at delivering Internet services to remote areas. With this latest addition, the skies around the planet are destined to become a bit of a parking lot for space junk.

RingCentral is again shaking up the UCaaS competitive landscape, this time with Mitel.

A new strategic partnership will provide Mitel’s global customer base with a migration path to RingCentral’s Message Video Phone (MVP). That’s RingCentral’s cloud phone system.