The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the FCC lacks authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic on their networks.

The decision also has serious implications for the FCC’s massive national broadband plan. The agency needs authority to regulate broadband to push ahead with some its key recommendations, including one to expand broadband by tapping the federal fund that subsidizes phone service in poor and rural areas.

Matsui’s proposed bill, the Broadband Affordability Act of 2009, would have the FCC “establish a broadband program that provides low-income Americans living in rural and urban areas with assistance in subscribing to affordable broadband internet service.” The new legislation would in effect expand the USF’s Lifeline Assistance program for universal broadband adoption.

Matsui pointed out that even in her home state of California, there’s a large disconnect between the broadband haves and the broadband have-nots. Although 96 percent of California’s residents live in an area with broadband access, most of the people who actually are connected make more than $80,000 a year, while only 58 percent of residents that make less than $40,000 can afford a $60.00 a month broadband package.

By offering SILK broadly in a very “open way, royalty free” to any third party developer, Skype thinks it can “unlock one of the major obstacles in the migration from narrowband video,” said Skype GM Jonathan Christensen.

SILK is designed as an Internet-specific speech codec able to work with variable bit rates. At its highest “superwideband” rates, it samples at 24 kHz, providing 12 kHz effective voice. It’s designed to be scalable from 6 Kbps to 40 Kbps with very low delay, low CPU and memory consumption, and it’s designed to be “very robust” for jitter and packet loss. The codec is written in fixed-point ANSI C, so it can run on basically any platform.

In comparison, the traditional PSTN delivers voice at an “effective bandwidth” of around 3 kHz – sometimes a lot less when you move to mobile phones and/or transcoding involved for long-distance transport. More recent “traditional wideband” codecs provide around 7 kHz effective bandwidth, with Skype’s earlier codec delivering 8 kHz effective using 16 kHz sampling.

Christensen said SILK had been independently tested against other various popular codecs with “very favorable” results. Using MOS scores, SILK performed better than other codecs at various bit rates and every percentage of package loss.

A spokesperson for SaskTel said WebCall had “limited marketing success” and had been operating “at a significant loss” as a result. WebCall customer were informed of the service termination in January and were told to find an alternative solution prior to March 1.

Customers may have some headaches transferring their numbers, depending on where they live and who they transfer service to; doubly so if they have waited until the last minute to find another provider.

SaskTel joins a number of larger phone companies that have pulled the plug on VoIP services, but given the small number of customers that were using its service, it is unlikely the company will be launching a new service under a different brand and/or infrastructure.

Both AT&T and Verizon closed out their initial stand-alone consumer VoIP offerings last year and launched distinctly different offerings more aligned with their broadband services.

Vonage reported a mixed bag of results in its fourth-quarter and full-year 2008 earnings report. The company had its first year of generating positive cash flow from operations, seeing a revenue increase of 9 percent to $900 million for the year. However, the company reported a net decline in subscribers, losing a net of 14,700 customers for the quarter.

The net decline in customers says quite a lot. With job losses and unemployment skyrocketing, some people don;t want their phone service tied to what might be thought of as a luxury.

JAJAH has already rolled out its platform for the iPod Touch and the iPhone, and the addition of these mobile operating systems dramatically expands the solution’s potential reach. JAJAH is touting the white-label solutions as end-to-end applications that carriers can brand and launch with very little development expense.

“Every carrier faces pressure to develop new services to keep hold of their subscriber base,” JAJAH CEO Trevor Healy said. “JAJAH gives carriers the ability to roll out these proven, simple to use services no matter which device their customers have, with almost zero time to market or development cost.”

JAJAH’s move to be compatible with all major mobile operating systems is a necessary market move for the company. The versatility of the client will make it all the more attractive to carriers seeking value-adds to their offerings.

Following that development is the fact that more bandwidth for voip, now called VoIP HD, will help sound quality. HD – high definition – simply means more bandwidth. A typical telephone conversation on land lines (the old telephone service) uses half of the bandwidth used by VoIP HD.

To follow these new developments, and to track our voip articles, downloads, and providers, we are transitioning all of our previous material to VoIP 883 HD’s website. We will have more information as our programmers test the installations