Lance Armstrong is one of only two American riders on the Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team’s Tour de France Roster.

New York native George Hincapie will join Armstrong, but the rest of the squad looks like a roll call of the EU:

Jose Azevedo of Portugal Jose Luis Rubiera, Manuel Beltran, and Benjamin Noval of Spain Paolo Savoldelli of Italy Yaroslav Popovych of Ukraine Pavel Padrnos of the Czech Republic.

Armstrong believes the team is built to win.

“I think we have fielded our strongest team ever with this formation,” said Armstrong. “It has many consistent elements from years past, like the Spanish armada for the climbs, strong guys like George, Pavel and Benjamin, the Giro winner in Savoldelli, plus a guy like Popo (Popovych) with a very bright future.

“I look forward to leading this team and attempting to give the great folks at Discovery a yellow jersey. I'm more motivated than ever.”

Of the eight teammates, Hincapie is the only one who has raced alongside Armstrong for all six of his Tour victories.

Paolo Savoldelli recently won his second Tour of Italy (Giro d’Italia) in the last four years.

As for the competition, Team CSC will counter Armstrong with Ivan Basso (Italy), with Bobby Julich (USA) also a potential contender.

T-Mobile has brought on two highly experienced lieutenants to support Jan Ullrich in his last chance to beat Armstrong: 2004 runner-up Andreas Klöden and 2003 third-place finisher Alexandre Vinokourov. Ullrich won the 1997 Tour and has been runner-up five times.

A reporter, interviewing Vinokourov for the team’s Web site asked if the T-Mobile team could dethrone Armstrong.

After posting this morning's comments about Microsoft being wrong for enabling censorship in China, I had a conversation with our CTO who agreed with me that censorship and/or enabling censorhip is bad, but why pick on Microsoft alone? Another colleague forwarded some more information to me as well a few moments ago, and that led me to an article that appeared on the Industry Standard in February of last year.

The text of the article is below for your convenience. The piece was written by Scarlett Pruitt of the IDG News Service and you can find it online here.

I guess it was indeed unfair to single out one company, when many vendors stand accused of doing the same thing.

I'm also not naive, and I left Polyanna-ville a long time ago. I understand the desire -- indeed the NEED -- for businesses to extend their bottom lines and grow their customer base. That's capitalism, that's one of the key benefits of living in a democracy such as ours.

A new report from In-Stat declares that broadband remains a bright spot  in an otherwise lagging telecom market.

According to the release announcing Common Cents: Consumer Telecom & Technology Spending, 2004-2009, although service revenues for US telcos are expected to decline through 2009, broadband generate significant revenue growth. The report posits that market penetration will grow from 28.6 percent of the population in 2004 to nearly 50 percent by the end of 2009.

"The migration from dial-up to broadband is good news for service providers, as the monthly fees for broadband will remain substantially higher than for dial-up," says Amy Cravens, In-Stat analyst. "With $13.7 billion in broadband revenues in 2004 versus $10.9 billion in dial-up revenues, broadband has already outpaced dial-up as a revenue-generating opportunity."  

The research tells us that:

Total consumer spending on communication services, including local voice, long distance, cable TV, dial-up, and broadband was $114.8 billion in 2004.
By 2009, broadband services will generate $15 billion more per year than dial-up.
35 percent of the respondents currently purchase multiple services from a single provider.

The report explores which services will contribute to a decline in US consumer telecom spending, as well as which services are expected to continue to grow. The report also explores consumer demand for voice services, video services, and Internet services, including revenue forecasts through 2009.

 

ABP is once again playing host at their VoIP Sizzles in Dallas VoIP VAR conference for open systems next month, from July 20–22. 

ABP is a national technology distributor that markets SIP-based VoIP solutions via Resellers. The Dallas, TX-based firm is actively growing a network of professional resellers seeking to integrate VoIP solutions using “Best of Breed” components as opposed to a single manufacturer’s solution.

ABP’s conference is open to data, networking, and telecom resellers that want to become professional players in the VoIP space. Last year this event drew about 100 resellers from across the United States, plus a significant number of Resellers from Latin America and the Caribbean. This year plans call for the event to double in size and the conference will have even more to offer to new Resellers that are planning to focus on VoIP or add a VoIP practice.

Robert Messer, president and founder of ABP, is excited about the return of VoIP Sizzles in Dallas.

Newport Networks announced this morning it is expanding its organization with new offices in Frisco, Texas. Newport likewise announced the availability of Release 2.0 of its 1460 session border controller software.

 

Release 2.0 of its 1460 Session Border Controller adds geographic service resilience, link aggregation (802.3-2002) capabilities, and a series of enhancements designed to deliver carrier-class reliability, bandwidth utilization and profitability.

 

“Service providers now require the same predictability, reliability and profitability as the PSTN for voice and multimedia over IP,” says Terry Matthews, Chairman of Newport Networks. “It’s time for vendors to step up and help providers succeed with new packet-based services. The U.S.