The Carlyle group is getting into the TELECOM business!!!!!!

[Joanne98]

Shouldn't this be part of the discussion in the FISA debate? Granting immunity to telecoms for breaking the law could be USEFUL for the Bush families business interests further down the road. I say it's a conflict of interests!

Carlyle in Race to Buy Stake in Tata's Telecom Unit, ET Reports

By Thomas Kutty Abraham

Jan. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Tata Teleservices Ltd. has shortlisted five companies including American Tower Corp. and Carlyle Group for selling a stake in its wireless towers unit, the Economic Times reported, citing people it didn't identify.

The Indian phone carrier may sell as much as 49 percent of the unit, the newspaper said. Other companies in the race are India's Essar Group, Quipo Telecom Infrastructure and Excel Towers, the newspaper said.

A Tata Teleservices spokesman declined to comment, the Economic Times reported. Citigroup Inc. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. are advising Tata on the deal, it said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Thomas Kutty Abraham in Mumbai at [e-mail] .

Last Updated: January 18, 2008 22:42 EST
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601091&sid=agK3HYwmjkVY&refer=india

Welcome to Stealth Communications...stealth partner list..

An operating partner of The Carlyle Group, CRG West provides the telecommunications industry with a robust offering of colocation cabinets, cages, and fully conditioned private telecom suites in the world's richest Meet-Me Room environments. CRG West owns, operates, and provides all interconnection at the One Wilshire Building in Los Angeles, Market Post Tower in San Jose, and 1275 K Street in Washington, DC. The CRG West Any2 Packet Exchange provides Internet peering as a utility for One Wilshire and Market Post Tower tenants, and is also home to the Voice Peering Fabric.
http://www.stealth.net/partner/list

Carlyle owns this company. That just happens to be located in San Francisco. The same city AT&T put it's spy room in. GEE! I wonder if there's any connection?

Established in 2001, CRG West is a premier colocation and data center management company. CRG West operates carrier-neutral data centers in the Bay Area, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Jose, and Washington, DC. Clients choose the CRG West team for our expertise in managing data center infrastructure, providing colocation space and peering opportunities, and serving our customers’ equipment.
CRG West has colocation space (from single cabinets to large, customized cages) available at all of our nine carrier-neutral data center locations, including at the world renowned One Wilshire Building in Los Angeles. Partner with CRG West today and join more than 350 of the world’s leading networks, communications providers, universities and enterprises.
http://www.crgwest.com/

Here's picture of the "voice peering fabric" technology. This is Stealth's invention..

[rox63]

1. Interesting timing there... n/t

[Joanne98]

2. ........

[Junkdrawer]

3. ?????? Stealth Communications ??????

What, was the name Eavesdropping Partners, Ltd. already taken? :wtf:

[Joanne98]

4. I know. How arrogant can you get?

[Joanne98]

5. KICK

[UTUSN]

6. I remind in most Carlyle threads: Its co-founder was a Jimmy CARTER staffer

One David RUBENSTEIN. Why he chose to make ex-RAYGUNites & B.F.E.E. members richer, as opposed to Dems, I've never heard.

There was a veritable NEST of vipers at CARTER's breast: Tweety, Pat CADDELL...

*******QUOTE*******

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3994.htm

.... In a column posted yesterday on Salon.com, Joe Conason writes: "Preferring to avoid public scrutiny for obvious reasons, executives at the Carlyle Group usually say nothing about their firm's connections with the Bush dynasty. But last April 23, Carlyle managing director David Rubenstein spoke quite frankly about the comfy sinecure he provided to George W. Bush more than a decade ago -- and how useless Bush turned out to be. Whether he knew it or not, Rubenstein's remarks to the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association were recorded."

Rubenstein said, "We put (Bush) on the board and (he) spent three years. Came to all the meetings. Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years - you know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company.

Rubenstein continued: "He said, 'Well, I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board.' And I said, thanks - didn't think I'd ever see him again. His name is George W. Bush. He became President of the United States. So you know if you said to me, name 25 million people who would maybe be President of the United States, he wouldn't have been in that category. So you never know. Anyway, I haven't been invited to the White House for any things." ....

********UNQUOTE*******

[Gman]

7. This is by no means the first time

they already have stakes in several telecom companies.

I believe they also bought the Quest/US West Yellow Pages operation several years ago.

[Joanne98]

13. Yeah and they hired Kung Fu to do their commerials.....

[Joanne98]

8. Stealth has already amassed millions of phone numbers in it's data base

What a co-inky DINK!

FiberNet Telecom Group became the latest firm to offer a voice-over-IP peering service today, with the launch of the company’s new Phenomenum offering.

The offering uses the Internet Engineering Task Force’s ENUM protocol to allow providers of VoIP service to terminate one another’s calls. Where a peering partner has the intended call recipient’s phone number in its database, calls can be transmitted without the use of the public switched telephone network.

FiberNet will initially offer its VoIP peering service at the large collocation facility at 60 Hudson Street in New York City and will expand it elsewhere based on customer demand. President and chief executive officer Jon DeLuca expects to make the first interconnections this quarter.

“We’re just at the beginning of this fundamental shift in core network architecture,” DeLuca said. “We wanted to be out in front of it.”

“There’s a market developing, but it’s still pretty nascent, for core VoIP peering,” he said. “Virtually all VoIP traffic still uses the PSTN as a clearing house for call origination and termination, which defeats the purpose of the whole thing.”

In launching the new service, FiberNet is following in the footsteps of other VoIP peer pioneers such as Verisign, Telcordia and Stealth Communications, which has already amassed millions of numbers in its phone-number database with the participation of providers such as XO Communications. DeLuca won’t disclose how many numbers FiberNet has in its database, but he hopes to distinguish Phenomenum by FiberNet’s experience offering carrier-grade services to the world’s largest service providers. FiberNet has about 220 customers in 25 countries and connectivity to a total of 650 service providers, including all four Bell companies and seven of the eight largest PTTs. FiberNet’s new offering will also include conversions of SIP and H323 traffic.

“Stealth was really the first ,” DeLuca said. “Without being disparaging to a competitor, one of the issues with Stealth is its infrastructure is not carrier-grade. As these systems scale and become more integral to carriers’ core networks, they’ll require a different level of service.”

“Stealth has done some interesting things, but I think they’re a smaller business,” he added.

However, DeLuca won’t rule out collaborating with Stealth and others like it in the future, perhaps establishing peering relationships to pool databases.

FiberNet’s news comes the same day that Equinix and NeuStar announced a partnership to jointly introduce new IP interconnection services next year.

http://telephonyonline.com/voip/news/fibernet_voip _peering_102405/

[Joanne98]

9. Stealth has become a "favorite" of government agencies!

Stealth Communications is the owner and operator of the Voice Peering Fabric (VPF). Carrying over 200 billion minutes annually, the VPF has become the preferred platform for Service Providers, Enterprises, and Government Agencies to exchange VoIP traffic and telephony services. VPF functions as an exchange or meet-point and is designed as a private voice Internet allowing members to establish peer-to-peer connections in a secure, quality-of-service environment. To learn more, visit: www.stealth.net.
http://www.ptc.org/ptc08/index.cfm?page=sponsor&subpage=sponsors_list

[Joanne98]

10. Here's the SPY headquarters. One Wilshire a telecom "hotel"..

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7452738

Day to Day, February 19, 2007 · For most of us, the Internet is something we experience on a computer — for instance, this Web site, a favorite podcast, or that e-mail you sent this morning. And chances are, you've heard the term "information superhighway" used to describe that.

But the Internet is also a physical thing: a global network of cables, switches and hulky equipment. And all of that converges in places such as One Wilshire, a high-rise building in downtown Los Angeles.

If the Internet is a superhighway, One Wilshire is a really popular roadside hotel. It's a 30-story building, and once exclusively housed law offices. CRG West, a Carlyle Group company, manages the property.

David Dunn of CRG West says 23 of the building's floors are now designed to house not people, but some of the most important communications infrastructure in the country.

In the tech industry, this site is what's known as a "carrier hotel." The occupants: connection hardware from nearly 300 Internet and telecommunications giants from around the world. Familiar U.S. companies such as AT&T and Google are here, but so are carriers from Europe, India and Asia.

And like the guests in a regular hotel, these networks can get to know each other. So if one telecom company needed to link up with another, it's much easier when they're under the same roof.

That can be particularly helpful in the event of a disaster like the December 2006 earthquake that struck Taiwan, severing critical undersea fiber optic cables. Most voice and data traffic into and out of Taiwan was slowed or halted, and connectivity to and from other Asian countries was drastically reduced.

Getting to the bottom of the ocean and repairing the cables has taken months. But places such as One Wilshire were able to re-route some of that Internet and voice traffic through their facility within days.

Some observers says the role carrier hotels play in the Internet's ability to cope with disasters, could make them an attractive target for terrorists. Could "carrier hotels" like One Wilshire be targeted because of their importance in global communications? And what if an earthquake or other natural disaster hit Los Angeles, disabling this critical site?

Bruce Schneier, author of Beyond Fear, acknowledges the need to secure communications hubs from such events, but says the inherent resilience of the Internet helps it bounce back when a physical connection point, or "node," is lost.

"The thing we learned from the Taiwanese earthquake is that the Internet actually works," says Schneier. "With all of the security problems we have, the one thing the Internet was designed to survive was physical failure of nodes. The loss of nodes was supposed to not affect the Net, or at least affect it in a graceful way. And that's exactly what happened."

Back at One Wilshire, business is booming. The growing popularity of Internet video and other applications that transmit lots of data is drawing even more tenants to this carrier hotel. One floor, which previously housed a law firm, has been stripped bare, to make way for new tenants. Soon, these rooms will be filled with routers, switches and fiber optic cables, pumping more Internet and voice traffic around the globe, at the speed of light.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7452738

[Joanne98]

11. There are three buildings you need to tap.. One Wilshire.....

http://billtotten.blogspot.com/2008/01/nsas-lucky-break.html

For voice traffic, the NSA could scoop up an astounding amount of telephone calls by simply choosing the right facilities, according to Beckert, though he says NSA officials "make a big deal out of naming them".

"There are about three or four buildings you need to tap", Beckert says. "In Los Angeles there is One Wilshire; in New York, Sixty Hudson, and in Miami, the NAP of the Americas".

The United States' role as an international communications hub came at a convenient time for the National Security Agency, which in the 1990s began confronting a world moving away from easily-intercepted microwave and satellite communications, and toward fiber optics, which are difficult and expensive to tap.

Press leaks in recent months have revealed that the NSA began tapping the US communications hubs for purely international traffic shortly after 9/11, at the same time that it began monitoring communications between US citizens and foreigners as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

After the Democrats took over Congress in 2007, the administration put the NSA surveillance programs under the supervision of a secretive spying court, which ruled shortly thereafter that wiretapping US-based facilities without a warrant was illegal, even for the purpose of harvesting foreign communications.

In August, Congress granted the NSA "emergency" temporary powers to continue the surveillance, which are set to expire in February. The RESTORE Act (the Responsible Electronic Surveillance That is Overseen Reviewed and Effective Act of 2007) is the Democrat's effort to extend that power indefinitely, while including some safeguards against abuse. It would legalize both the foreign-to-foreign intercepts, and the domestic-to-foreign surveillance associated with the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

The bill enjoys wide support in the House, but on Wednesday President Bush vowed to veto any surveillance legislation that doesn't extend retroactive legal immunity to telephone companies who cooperated in the NSA's domestic surveillance before it was legalized - a provision absent from the RESTORE Act. AT&T, which is facing a class-action lawsuit for allegedly wiretapping the internet on behalf of the NSA, is reportedly among the companies lobbying hard for immunity.

Experts say that, even with a stamp of approval from Congress, the growth of international communications networks will eventually rob the NSA of its home-field advantage in inspecting foreign communications. "The creation of alternative paths are starting to challenge the dominant position the US has", Manning says, adding that the changes will not be welcomed by US intelligence services.

Exchanges in Hong Kong and London are emerging as local hubs for Asian and European traffic, while new fiber cables running north and south from Japan around to Europe will divert traffic from the trans-America route. Meanwhile, more countries are building their own internal internet exchanges.

"Because the decisions are made by the private sector, you're always going to go the direction where you have the cheapest fiber", Woodcock says. "That's likely to be through the US for a while yet, (but) that's changing as more and more fiber gets installed around South Asia".

Manning points to South Africa as an example of how countries are creating their own internet exchanges.

"In South Africa for a long time, ISPs didn't talk to each other and would backhaul traffic to the US or Europe", Manning said. "What they have done in last ten years, they have built local exchange points and fixed regulatory conditions to allow cross exchange of traffic".

The trend may leave US spooks longing for a simpler time; like 1992, when the first - and at the time, only - internet exchange point, called MAE-East, was erected in Washington DC.

"All the traffic in the world went through Washington", Woodcock says. "But it was coincidence that it was Washington, more or less, and it was private-sector. And it probably wasn't tapped for at least a couple of years."


http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/10/domestic_taps/


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

[Joanne98]

12. CRG West (carlyle) aquires new property......

http://www.thewhir.com/marketwatch/010408_CRG_West_Acquires_New_Property.cfm

CRG West Acquires New Property
January 4, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Colocation service provider CRG West (crgwest.com) announced on Thursday that it has acquired a 285,000 square foot data center and office property in Reston, Virginia.

Level 1 PCI DSS Certified Service Provider! DataPipe delivers the best network & support; top tier data centers; New York metro, Silicon Valley, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai. DataPipe - Personal Touch, Global Reach.
The facility is located at 12100 Sunrise Valley Drive and is a short distance away from CRG West's existing data center in Washington, D.C. CRG West says it will invest more than $20 million in building and infrastructure improvements and is expected to open in the second quarter of 2008.

"We have found a great asset to offer best-in-class colocation space and services to enterprises and government users," says Rob Rockwood, chief investment officer for CRG West. "Our facility will meet government security requirements and offer the power densities and peering opportunities demanded by enterprises. The Washington, D.C. area is one of the key peering points in the Eastern United States and we expect to continue to play a significant role in its growth and development."

The addition of this data center continues the trend of growth for CRG West, which now offers colocation space in the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and Washington, D.C.

CRG West recently opened its newest data center 70 Innerbelt in Boston.
http://www.thewhir.com/marketwatch/010408_CRG_West_Acquires_New_Property.cfm

WELL! Haven't we been busy setting up a massive spy operation. NO WONDER he's so upset about this telecom lawsuit. Someone needs to tell our fearless Dem leaders that we WON'T allow BUSH to spy on us! This is BULLSHIT!

[Joanne98]

14. Technology and Coping with Disaster by John Savageau

http://krakatoa-volcano-eruption.blogspot.com/2006/12/technology-and-coping-with-disaster.html

Technology and Coping with Disaster
+ technology +
+ disaster +


Natural disasters come in many shapes. From the incomprehensible carnage of last weekend's tsunami in the Indian Ocean, to hurricanes and typhoons, to tornadoes and drought, our world deals with the horror of disaster as a normal part of our lives. Throw in a bit of human influence through wars, terrorism, or the threat of weapons of mass destruction, and our need to deal with and overcome calamity almost becomes routine.

Watching CNN and the news channels gives a near real-time view of disasters. While some may find this a bit macabre, it also shows our ability to quickly respond to major events, on a global scale. The same technologies that allow us to view the aftermath of a tsunami also allow us to quickly gather factual data on the extent of a disaster, and use that for disaster planning and response.

Organizations such as the Pacific Disaster Center (http://www.pdc.org/), the Asia Pacific Area Network (http://www.apan-info.net/), try to assist regional nations to build better disaster planning models and response model through training and timely dissemination of critical information. Regional military organizations participate with each other on joint disaster planning (for other than wartime-related disaster) to organize their resources in response to a regional disaster, and can respond within hours to major problems.

While carnage on the scale of the Indian Ocean tsunami cannot be controlled within a day or a few days, the communications and real time information collection on the disaster will most certainly reduce the level of misery experienced by victims at a level that would not have been possible even 40 years ago. As aircraft and on-site persons (using satellite phones or other powerful mobile communicators) collect information on areas of Sumatra, Thailand, and other affected areas, the information is almost immediately being logged, evaluated, distributed, and prioritized among a number of emergency response centers operated by regional governments - as well as international relief agencies.

From the regional and international response centers coordination further occurs among members of organizations such as the Multinational Planning Augmentation Team (http://www2.apan-info.net/mpat/ ). MPAT holds frequent disaster response exercises among member nations to ensure coordination lines and pre-planned responses are quickly executed. All MPAT member nations have access to central databases of planning information, available resources, and a "command center" mobilized when a regional disaster occurs.

Telecommunications and information technology are key components in our ability to respond to disaster. As real time information is collected, it is available immediately to all participants in the relief effort. Other technology - in particular military technology, can easily serve a duel use purpose in a disaster. The same troop transports designed to carry soldiers to war can carry refugees from a disaster. The same photo reconnaissance aircraft used to spy on enemies can provide a clear view of the extent of damage. The same technology used to collect electronic intelligence can locate attempts to use mobile phones, radios, and even audio signals of people stranded in remote areas. Infrared scanning used to identify enemy soldiers in a bunker or building can just as easily locate a family stranded in a jungle.

If you compare the current response to the Indian Ocean tsunami to the effects of tsunami damage following eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in 1883 (http://www.drgeorgepc.com/Vocano1883Krakatoa.html ), you can see the extent of damage from that disaster was not even known for several decades.

In most cases disaster cannot be predicted. We are making progress predicting earthquakes, hurricanes, and eruptions - however science is no closer to effective disaster prediction than we are in fully understanding the human genome. Through effective use of communications, information technology, and duel use military/civilian technology transfer, we are getting much closer to reducing the level of pain following an event.

2005 will be a big year in further exploiting the potential of Internet and communications-related technology. Given the positive moves toward regional cooperation in activities such as MPAT, we should be encouraged our governments understand the need and role of technology in planning - was well as responding - to regional disaster.


by : John Savageau

John Savageau is a managing director at CRG-West, responsible for managing operations and architecture for several of the largest telecommunications interconnect facilities in the US, including One Wilshire in Los Angeles

[Joanne98]

15. kick