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If one word could sum up the top priority at AT&T it would be broadband, from both a wireline and wireless perspective, according to Chuck Kalamek, vice president of research for AT&T Labs.

CenturyLink CTO Matt Beal delivered a blunt challenge to his fellow telco service providers at GENBAND's Perspectives13 conference in Orlando. They can transform the way they do business to the point that Alexander Graham Bell would be unable to recognize it, or perish at the hands of those inside or outside the industry who will.

Social networks can threaten communications service providers that don't adapt to a new market, members of a panel at GENBAND's Perspectives13 conference said. Further, customers more interested in social networking apps than in a quality, reliable experience can present a problem to established providers.

GENBAND Chairman David Walsh can see a day when countries become telecommunications carriers, controlling the networks and leasing them out to service providers. In fact, Walsh's vision, as exposited during a keynote address at the Perspectives13 conference in Orlando, sifts down to cities and even hotels.

While admitting that "as technologists, we're probably underestimating what the future will bring," Verizon CTO Tony Melone said the company is set on a path of using four specific platforms--wireless, a global IP backbone, FiOS and data centers--to plot the best course it can for its own future.

Genesis Technical Systems said that its new technology, DSL Rings, can deliver 400 Mbps speeds over existing copper infrastructure "at a fraction of the cost of fiber-to-the-home or fiber-to-the-premise."

It's not exactly sabre rattling—more like fiber rattling—but the United States will brook only "minimal" changes to existing rules governing the Internet when those changes are brought up for discussion at an ITU conference in December.

A West Virginia law that makes it illegal for scrap yards and recycling centers to buy some types of scrap metal unless the seller can prove lawful possession appears to be working to the benefit of Frontier and other companies with large installed bases of copper products.

Things went from bad to really bad for Sprint yesterday when two severed cables—between Chicago and Milwaukee and Tacoma, Wash. and Portland, Ore.—caused several hours' worth of network problems and disruptions throughout the Pacific Northwest.

As expected, Chinese telecommunications vendors Huawei and ZTE vociferously denied that they pose any security threats in the United States and said that a damning report by the House Intelligence Committee is "little more than an exercise in China bashing," as Huawei put it.