>>>NJ - The INNOvative State: Telecommunications

AT&Ts Global Network Operations Center in Bedminster.

From Landlines To Wireless Apps:

Communication innovations still thrive in the Garden State.
By Joe Cavaluzzi, Contributing Writer
New Jersey has a rich history in communications. Today, companies spawned from the breakup of Ma Bell more than 25 years ago, along with new companies selling technologies that were mere concepts back then, continue to play crucial roles in developing and producing cutting-edge communications products and services. Wireless Moves Beyond Conversation AT&Ts significant presence in New Jersey includes the worlds largest phone and data network monitoring facility at its Global Network Operations Center in Bedminster. The company employs 9,400 people in the Garden State. From 2007 to 2009, AT&T invested more than $400 million in its wireless network here alone. In March, AT&T announced a handful of new Smart Tool mobile phone applications designed to help business people carry on office functions seamlessly while on the road. Our small business customers are very much entrepreneurs. They need to keep in touch with their customer base while traveling. The newest gadgets on the market tend to be of great interest to them, says Cathy Martine, executive vice president of AT&T Small Business Solutions in Bedminster. The new applications include Air Time Manager, which enables professionals to track their hours while working out of the office. If you think about professional businesses, doctors offices, law firms, accounting firms, Air Time Manager allows them to track billable hours on a Blackberry device. Even engineers and archi-

tects have to track their hours when theyre in the field. Applications that can help them save time and save staff are what seem to be of interest to them, Martine says, adding that professional businesses are not the only Air Time Manager customers. Garbage disposal and trucking companies and home-cleaning businesses, for instance, are using it to track their vehicle fleets. They can track people as well as time and materials needed for the next job, Martine says. Other new AT&T smart phone applications include Associate, a tool for mobile dictation; Nice Office, which wirelessly syncs contacts, calendar, tasks and notes; and ProntoForms, which turns paper business forms into mobile forms. Small business customers also benefit from AT&Ts WiFi network, with 499 hotspots in New Jersey and more than 20,000 around the country. What customers, especially small businesses, seem to like the most about our wireless network is that they can talk and surf at the same time. Customers love that. They stop in a Starbucks and work there. So, WiFi is key, Martine says. Many businesses conduct work in public spaces and we can offer that capability and its free access. Making Technologies Mesh Broadband and Internet would be the other legs of the stool of what is happening in communications, says Craig Vielguth, executive director of commercial program management for advanced technology solutions at Telcordia, in Piscataway. The company has 2,500 employees worldwide, 2,000 of them in New Jersey, and holds more than 1,800 patents in communications. Better, faster, cheaper, and, now, anywhere,
New Jersey Business

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anytime is what end users and businesses are looking for. Telcordia Scene Finder is helping businesses tap into the thriving video ecosystem of creating, viewing, buying and leveraging video content. Everyday, 200,000 videos get uploaded to YouTube. The average smart phone user watches more than four hours of video every month on a mobile phone. In the business world, similar levels of video content are being uploaded for a variety of internal and external applications. But how do businesses efficiently wade through it all? Scene Finder allows business users to make a deep browse of a video for specific information. The average YouTube video is three-minutes long. In that same amount of time, Scene Finder allows you to sample a steady swath of scenes, zoom in on two or three that are of interest, and play some brief segments - not just for one video, but half a dozen or more in that same three minutes, Vielguth says. So, in the time it takes you to watch one, three-minute video, with Scene Finder you can do a deep browse of eight or nine. Medical and pharmaceutical professionals, for example, can browse through large sets of visual data, such as bio scans, chemical readings and x-rays to quickly catch the differences between objects while taking part in interactive exploration and discussion. Alcatel-Lucent Corp. has developed Smart DeskPhones that can turn a desk phone into a business management tool that would turn even the smartest head at the companys forerunner, Bell Labs. The desk phone in a lot companies is the odd man out, says David Radoff, director of communications for enterprise applications, Alca-

Our small business customers are very much entrepreneurs. They need to keep in touch with their customer base while traveling. The newest gadgets on the market tend to be of great interest to them, says Cathy Martine of AT&T.

We can provide phone systems with phones on the desk or we can host the business for you and manage the phone system for you, says Julia McGrath of Optimum Lightpath.

tel-Lucent Corp. in California. We use our PCs or our Blackberries or iPhones. But ultimately, we have to figure out ways to use them together. Thats what the smart phone is meant to address: to use the technology to fit the way people are used to communicating today. Alcatel-Lucents New Jersey de-

velopment personnel played a role in developing the technology for the Smart DeskPhone the company plans to roll out before the end of this quarter. Radoff says that the Smart DeskPhone has a seven-inch screen and is capable of downloading applications and accessing the Internet. Its an IP phone, so its not using the traditional infrastructure that used to run a phone. Youre not stuck to landlines because youre using voice over IP, which is a very cost-effective technology. You can have a virtual phone system, where you can transfer a call to anywhere in the country, not just people sitting nearby, he says. The implications are large. A call center, for example, need not be comprised of hundreds of people sitting in a large building. It can be made up of employees working from their homes, but virtually tied together. Instead of having a PC that uses all of the customer relationship-related software that tracks what happens with you, I could be anywhere and virtually working with you, he says. The financial services environment is another area of potentially large impact. I could move a video feed of a trading floor to my desk phone so that it would be going but I wouldnt have to look at it all the time and have it distract me from my core desktop, Radoff says. And, at the same time, I could have a real-time Twitter feed between me and a trader on the floor. The Smart DeskPhone would be bigger than your mobile phone, but its faster and its in sync with these other applications. And I could access them from my desktop or from my smart phone. It ties together these devices in a way that you really couldnt before. The cost is in line with other smart phones.

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Radoff says the Smart DeskPhones price, about 600 Euros, will be competitive with iPhones that run about $600 to $800 and Ciscos IP phone, which is about $1,000. Landlines Still Top Purveyor While wireless communications have garnered most of the ink in recent times, landlines continue to handle the bulk of business communication functions and the competition among those companies revolves around speed and service. Optimum LightPath, the whollyowned subsidiary of Cablevision that operates a 100 percent fiber optic network in New Jersey from the Toms River area north, has been focusing in recent months on mid-sized businesses, those spending $1,500 to $9,999 a month on telecommunications, and very large companies, says Julia McGrath, senior vice president of marketing and development. We have a keen interest in pursuing government agencies, healthcare and education, financial and media and entertainment, McGrath says. Optimum LightPath offers data, voice, video and Internet services and also manages and hosts services. We can provide phone systems with phones on the desk or we can host the business for you and manage the phone system for you. You dont see it, she says. We believe we are distinctly different from big phone companies because we provide more customized services that help with how customers go about work every day. One product, specifically related to finance, is a virtual private ring between various facilities that allows a company to purchase bandwidth in three different levels and move it from one physical location to another as needed, McGrath says. Headquartered in Basking Ridge,

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Verizon Corp. remains the most pervasive landline company in New Jersey and, with 17,000 employees here, it is the states second largest private-sector employer. The Garden State is the home base of Verizon Wireless, Verizon Business and Verizons corporate operations center. Its landline division services 526 of the states 566 municipalities and the company has more than 2 million residential customers that use FiOS and haveVerizon high-speed Internet DSL service. Verizon maintains 284 WiFi hotspots in New Jersey. Realistically, most businesses still are locked to that landline, says David Frendo, director of voice products for small businesses at Verizon. FiOS brings our high-speed fiber connectivity to our customers. That gives them connectivity to the Internet at very high symmetrical speeds (downloading and uploading) with overall download speeds up to 50 megs, which usually is more than enough bandwidth and capability for small- and medium-sized businesses. Verizon bundles data and voice connectivity with unlimited longdistance capability and Verizons Internet Security Suite. All of Verizon broadband service comes with free WiFi. Verizon also uses its broadband capacity to provide customers a virtual CIO (chief information officer), utilizing its small business portal to provide incremental business services to its customers. Different businesses have different levels of expertise. Plus, many small business owners just dont have the time to search for different applications. So, virtual CIO capability brings that expertise to small business customers by bringing in high-quality third-party providers, he says. We offer free social networking capability

David Frendo, of Verizon, says that the companys FiOS gives customers connectivity to the internet at very high symmetrical speeds (downloading and uploading) with overall download speeds up to 50 megs.

so that small businesses can link with each other as well as have third-party relationships with companies such as Fed Ex and Chase Payment Tech for credit card processing. We also offer 24/7 tech support. Will Social Networking Be the Next Big Thing For Businesses? For many business people, the value of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook remains elusive. However, AT&Ts Martine says that is changing. The adoption rate by small businesses of Twitter, and other social networking applications, is growing and thats very exciting. We hire a lot of college kids out of leading universities to help us. How they think is not the way we think, so we need them to help us, she says, adding that the land of opportunity and mobility is emerging every day, driven by the needs of customers. My goal is to have a device that will let you start your car and turn on the coffee, she says. NJB

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