Verizon Communications on Tuesday became the first service provider to say it will use Alcatel-Lucent's upcoming 7950 XRS core routing system, which will bring the French-American equipment vendor into the carrier core routing business for the first time in about a decade.

Looking ahead to growing demand for bandwidth to feed large companies and computing clouds, Verizon Communications announced steps on Friday to increase the speed of the links its enterprise customers can buy and to make its network connections more resilient.

Using caching technology from Akamai Technologies, Ericsson's Smart Cloud Accelerator, announced Wednesday, is designed to allow operators to improve performance in both fixed and mobile networks.

Cisco this week unveiled an updated line of Ethernet switches for industrial environments, such as manufacturing floors.

Avaya has unveiled low-end Ethernet switches for small and medium-sized enterprises and remote branches that include features usually found in higher-end enterprise-class switches.

We're at an awkward stage as the age of network-streamed multimedia matures. Broadband and cell providers have only recently realized the public's enormous appetite for streaming video, VoIP, and the combination of both.

A reader has noticed that the Wi-Fi at her local library has slowed considerably in recent months, and she's wondering what's causing it: "Is it our computers, bogged down with too much junk, or is it something to do with the library's system?"

The world is almost out of IP addresses--or at least it's almost out of the IPv4 addresses that IT admins and users are most familiar with. Fortunately, IPv6 has been developed to exponentially expand the pool of available IP addresses while also providing a few other benefits.