We see the consolidation in the rural landline business. Verizon has dumped unwanted regions on Hawaii Telecom, Fairport (New England), Alltel (old GTE areas like Eastern KY), and soon the Frontier deal.  

Centurytel and Embarq just merger. It was May, 2006 that Sprint spun off its wireline business into Embarq. Alltel followed suit with a spin-off of its landline business to Windstream which was a merger of Valor and Alltel. 

The RBOC's have tried to staunch the landline slide, but I think now that they have declared themselves wireless companies, have given up the ghost. Verizon is now advertising to consumers to cut the cord. VZ has been selling Naked DSL longer than AT&T, but not as long as Qwest. I think VZ is betting entirely on FiOS and cellular.  We'll see because Comcast is now bundling Clearwire and Sprint 3G with its triple plays.

By all accounts Hosted VoIP sales are up: http://tinyurl.com/mkjhxxOne reason: "the boost in subscribership is due to the fact that there’s a "crop of new business start-ups" out there "whose entrepreneurial founders had perhaps suddenly found themselves unemployed and ready to take destiny into their own hands.""At FISPA, we had to sessions to help you sell Digital Voice. Are you doing it?

So far most of the information about the Broadband Stimulus (BTOP) has been a re-hashing of the original ideas from the bill and some guesses and gossip about the development of the program. (See here for last BTOP post). But the Notice of Funds Availability was released. (PDF) It's available from the RUS page.Here's the portal to apply for broadband funding under the American Recovery and