If you use a pay phone, you are a criminal

Service delivery platform vendors Aepona and Appium are merging to better compete with the big guns

Private equity firms Silver Lake and TPG strike cash deal to buy PBX vendor Avaya, but the door is still open to rival bids

The FCC curses the NY courts

C-COR, Harmonic, Motorola, and Scientific Atlanta are said to be in Comcast's 'early stage' switched digital video tech trials

A Forrester study indicates that consumers who want their cable TV on an à la carte basis underestimate the value of programming

Avaya will be bought out by private-equity firms Silver Lake Partners and TPG Capital, say reports

Content news cornucopia

Elevation, a PE firm part-owned by U2's Bono, takes a $325M stake in the smartphone maker

Nokia Siemens deals with some staffing issues

With a bigger and more feature-packed router, Redback and its new owner Ericsson take on the IP equipment industry's big guns

WiMax backers get a lift with news that the technology has taken the first step towards becoming part of the ITU's 4G standards roadmap

'Primetime has lost its urgency'

Game over for FierceGameBiz

New Prince track via Verizon

Yucky stuff

The high cost of wireless broadband

Volpi gets loosed

Airband, Gemini Technologies, and SiGie Semiconductor see dollar signs in this week's VC roundup

Sweet, juicy archaeology

An FCC ruling affecting the multiple-dwelling unit sector gets a mixed reaction from cable's top lobbying arm

Nortel and Silver Lake Partners are the two players down the stretch, with a deal that could surpass $9B, sources say

It's also lawyer-bait

Cablevision is following through on its threat to fight an earlier court decision that put the brakes on its 'Remote Storage' DVR

IMS and SIP won't be enough to battle the speedy development cycles of Web 2.0 mashups

Speculation is heating up that Indian mobile operators Spice Telecom and IDEA Cellular are in merger talks

Sorry, but Yogi is a bear here