A group of conservative think tanks…

A group of conservative think tanks last week wrote Congress panning a growing number of calls to split regional Bell operating companies into wholesale and retail units, with the wholesale companies making local loops equally available to all service providers. The groups, including the Cato Institute, the Progress & Freedom Foundation and Citizens for a Sound Economy, said they feared such a move would cause competitive local exchange carriers and the new wholesale loop companies to skimp on new infrastructure investment. The letter is available at: www.pff.org/Sep arateSubLetter022701.htm

Motorola last week announced it plans to integrate Convergent Networks’ ICServiceWorks softswitch technology into Motorola’s voice-over-IP product family. Motorola’s Broadband Communications Sector unit targets its voice-over-IP gear at cable operators with hybrid fiber-coaxial infrastructure. Motorola also said it’s taking an equity investment in Convergent.

Convergent: www.convergent net.com

Optical component and subsystem maker Southampton Photonics has conceived a design and fabrication process that will let carriers increase the number of wavelengths on one fiber, increasing capacity and lowering costs.

The process increases the speed, consistency and precision of fiber Bragg gratings, components for filtering, routing and conditioning individual wavelengths in a dense wave division multiplexing system. It uses generic instead of custom phase masks when etching gratings into fiber using ultraviolet light, which can pack up to 320 colors – an eightfold increase – onto one fiber.