By David Sims

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The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the strains of Joni Mitchell’s Court & Spark wafting up from my wife’s CD player downstairs:

Canada appears to have realized that “We hate the United States and everything they do” a) wasn’t much of a national “identity,” and b) was becoming noticed south of the border. Congratulations to Stephen Harper, you’ve got your work cut out for you, mate.

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Onyx is eager to put CDC’s failed bid for control behind it, announcing Onyx Employee Portal Wireless for Japan. Described by company officials as “part of an integrated suite of mobile enterprise CRM” products, OEP Wireless for Japan is immediately available for Foma 3G and mova 2G Series iMode devices.

Onyx’s introduction of OEP Wireless for Japan opens the market for 45 million iMode users to access Onyx’s CRM platform. OEP Wireless for Japan is designed to deliver capabilities for managing customer and partner account, sales, service and support activities.

OEP Wireless features a thin client mobile interface using Onyx’s XML-based pure Internet platform. For the Japanese market, it uses iMode Internet cell phones. Accomplishable tasks include initiating phone calls and e-mails, requesting and sending literature to customers, receiving alerts directly through links on records, updating sales forecasts, and generating customer quotes.

“Mobile CRM capabilities are especially important in the Japanese market,” said Andie Rees, Senior Vice President, International at Onyx. “There has been strong demand for an iMode-based CRM product.”

“One of the big benefits of an enterprise CRM solution is the ability to access vital customer data, regardless of device or locale,” noted Todd Chambers, Chief Marketing Officer at Onyx.

Onyx mobile solutions operate across multiple devices, such as laptops and handheld devices for real-time wireless or disconnected access with data synchronization. Onyx uses ultra-light Internet architecture for multiple access options, including Onyx Employee Portal Offline Edition as well as Onyx Employee Portal Wireless versions for Blackberry, Palm and Pocket PC devices, and now iMode.

Following up on Vodafone from yesterday’s column, Standard Life Investments on Monday night became the first big investor in Vodafone, the UKs fifth largest company by market value, to criticize publicly the telecom groups global strategy, according to the Financial Times.

The fund management group is Vodafone’s 9th largest shareholder, therefore somebody to pay attention to, and it wants Vodafone to sell off its 45 per cent holding in Verizon Wireless.

Other analysts and investors would like to see Vodafone get out of Verizon. Industry observer. Susie Mesure says “some in the City [London’s financial district] are losing patience and want to see [Vodafone CEO Arun] Sarin offload Vodafone’s 45 per cent stake in America’s Verizon Wireless, thought to be worth $44 billion, and return cash to shareholders.”

Vodafone revenues in Germany and Italy are falling, organic revenue growth is dropping from 6.9 per cent in the second quarter to 6.2 per cent, and its week-long drop in share price resulted in a 20 percent loss over the past quarter, cutting over $10 billion from its market cap – 6.5 per cent of the total. As a result many are questioning the company’s global strategy.

David Cummings, head of UK equities at Standard Life Investments, told FT that “we are very supportive of a sale of Verizon. It would give a massive earnings uplift and there is a willing buyer in Verizon.”

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Agilent Technologies Inc. is announcing what company officials think is “the industry’s most robust QoS management hardware and software” to measure the end-to-end telecom service experience.

The new Wireless QoS Manager supports “diverse technologies” that will be phased in throughout the next six months, starting with GSM, UMTS and CDMA. These let telecommunications providers characterize service behavior and identify service and customer problems.

The end-to-end test probe offers a sleeker chassis (whitewall tires optional) and added flexibility to replace probes with upgraded or new device technology. Promised future enhancements will let users remove and relocate test probes for remote testing.

Users can install the hot-swappable remote probes in less than 15 minutes, Agilent claims.

The WQM software platform adds support for CDMA as well as more advanced tests for GSM services. Graphical troubleshooting reports help customer service and network operations personnel isolate and identify service-related problems, with the potential for saving service providers capital and operational expenses and improving their operational efficiency.

To ease interoperability with non-Agilent systems, the solution includes service tests that are compliant with European Telecommunications Standards Institute) standards.

Patrick Kelly at OSS Observer, a communications analyst company has said that distributed network architectures will “fundamentally shift how networks are operated in the future. The value of WQM is in its ability to extend support for new technologies and map this rich data to customer and service performance.”

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Allied Telesyn, an Ethernet/IP and IP Triple Play vendor, has today announced what it claims is “the industry’s first commercial deployment of a Gigabit Ethernet Passive Optical Network FTTH” product for integrated IP Triple Play services.

It’s also announcing the availability of VDSL2 service modules for its iMAP integrated Multiservice Access Platform, and that aforesaid iMAP integrated Multiservice Access Platform is now available with 10G Ethernet network transport.

Which, if Allied Telesyn officials are correct, makes the iMAP the only true IP multiservice platform that consolidates Metro access, aggregation and protected transport in one device capable of offering last mile service flexibility, backhaul scalability, service robustness and investment protection.

Building 10 gigabit Ethernet capability in to the Allied Telesyn platform is part of an attempt to position the iMAP as a serious alternative to SONET/SDH networks in the transport layer of operators’ networks, and as a resilient high capacity aggregation device for IP Triple Play services traffic.

The iMAP is a last mile and Ethernet transport product providing high density modules for POTS, xDSL, T1/E1, Ethernet, active fiber, GEPON FTTx technologies and now 10G backhaul. Philip Yim, the company’s executive vice president of global marketing & product development calls it “the world’s first IP multiservice platform capable of supporting interfaces ranging from POTS to 10G.”