15th February 2012:
The Pakistani Supreme Court, currently investigating the so called Memogate case, is to use a video conference link to the Pakistan High commission London, in order to examine Mansoor Ijaz.
A few days after the shooting of Osami Bin Laden, Mansoor Ijaz, an American-Pakistani businessman with a long history of commentary on Pakistani affairs and attempts at back-door diplomacy, delivered a memo to Jim jones, former National security advisor. The document, addressed to Admiral Mike Mullen the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asks for the help of the Obama administration to avert a military takeover of the civilian government of Pakistan.
Ijaz alleges that he was asked by the then - now former - Pakistan Ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani, to deliver the document, at the request of the President of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari. The Supreme Court's enquiry is into the origins, credibility and purpose of the memo.
Subsequent to the original memo, Mansoor Ijaz has given his view that Husain Haqqani, who is now banned from leaving Pakistan, together with President Zardari both knew in advance that American forces were going to voiolate Pakistan sovereignity in their action against Bin Laden, a claim that is strenuosly refuted and denied by Haqqani, together with the allegation of his involvement in the memo itself.
15th February 2012:
XConnect, the leader in federation-based IP voice and video interconnection and ENUM-registry services, said it saw revenue and multimedia network traffic surge in 2011, with demand for video communications services poised to become the next engine of growth and new mobile opportunities on the road map.
“Our continued investment in groundbreaking technology and solutions is paying off with satisfying uptake in XConnect services for one-stop interconnection across networks and platforms,” XConnect CEO Eli Katz said. “We continue to foresee rapid growth as video, high-definition (HD) voice and other next-generation services gain traction as more powerful devices and applications emerge almost daily.”
Katz said key indicators of the company?s growth in 2011 compared with 2010 included an increase of 61 percent in revenue across all services, a spike of 85 percent in traffic across the company’s global network and a sharp upswing of 78 percent in the number of calls handled together with an increase in the volume of queries to its global ENUM-based registry to 3 billion, up 78 percent.
The world?s largest number directory of its kind, XConnect?s ENUM registry included 2.2 billion numbers at year?s end.
Video, Mobile Growth Drivers
Katz said XConnect began capitalizing on the boom in video communications last year in a trend he expects to pick up in 2012. Growth of business videoconferencing traffic is significantly outpacing overall business IP traffic, at a CAGR of 41 percent from 2010-2015, according to Cisco, which has projected a sixfold increase in videoconferencing traffic during that period.
“XConnect is uniquely qualified to address the key challenge emerging with widening adoption of IP-based video services: interconnecting the diverse video „islands,?” Katz noted.
In 2011, XConnect launched the Video Interconnection Exchange (VIE), the world?s first neutral federation for video communications. The company has since established strategic alliances with such video ecosystem players as BCS Global and IPV to expand the video community, making video calling as easy as voice calling.
As the recently announced IPV relationship indicates, Katz said XConnect expects to ramp up video activity this year. He sees the company providing increasingly complex interworking to enable previously incompatible video devices to interoperate across multiple platforms.
Focused on continuing to meet growing demands for sophisticated interconnection services this year, XConnect plans to create more national federations with interexchange services partners, such as the one formed last month with Germa n y?s DE-CIX, Katz said.
In line with the proliferation of mobile communications, XConnect plans to work closely with mobile network operators to integrate ENUM registry capabilities into the GSMA Rich Communications Suite (RCS-e) to enable operators to deliver instant messaging or chat, live video sharing, and file transfer across any device on any network.
In addition, XConnect expects to benefit from growth of the over-the-top market to provide video and VoIP capabilities for social networks.