Markets traded down for the majority of the trading period as investors are cautious on the sustainability of the recent market rally of nearly 40% since its March lows.  However, a late afternoon surge bolstered the indices upward to close marginally flat on the day; the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 1.36, or 0.2%, to 8,764.49 as Cisco Systems and Travelers, Inc officially replaced Citigroup and General Motors.  Both the NASDAQ and S&P 500 were down 7.02 and 0.95, or 0.38% and 0.10%, to close at 1,842.40 and 939.14 respectively.   Commodities fell today as crude lost $0.35 to settle at $68.09 per barrel and gold decreased $10.10 to close at $952.50.  Prices on 10-year bonds fell marginally as well, pushing the yield up 0.0270 to 3.889%.   The biggest gaining sector today was Financials, finishing 1.1% higher as investors increased buying volume ahead of the Fed’s official announcement of which companies

This is part 2 of my Key Telecom Trends article.  Part 1 can be read by clicking here. Two other trends in Telecommunications over the past few years that should have a significant impact in the future are:

Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP)

Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) emerged on the commercial scene in 2004 harnessing the power of broadband internet connections to deliver unlimited voice plans, both local and long distance, over an internet connection.  VOIP has enabled co-workers within a firm or from different companies to communicate through video conferencing.  Cisco’s (CSCO) Telepresence has been a successful enterprise VOIP system for businesses to communicate in a real-lifelike conference room.  It has also seen substantial growth over the past year as companies seek to cut travel expenses in a recession, replacing it with videoconferencing like Telepresence.  From a consumer perspective, VOIP has became increasingly attractive in

The world is seeing a move to on-demand information and mobile computing, evident by the explosion of smartphones in recent years.  Furthermore, bandwidth demand has increased drastically as more people are emailing, texting, downloading applications and watching YouTube on their cell phones, thus requiring networks to be upgraded accordingly.  Mobile networks have been upgraded both domestically and internationally to 3G and will eventually be revamped up to 4G.  In the home, cable networks have been upgraded from coaxial cables to fiber optics by companies like AT&T [T: 24.79, +0.16 (+0.65%)] and Verizon [VZ: 29.26, -0.01 (-0.03%)] to gain access to more HD channels and faster, more reliable internet connections. There has also been a shift on the consumer front as wireless companies have been rolling out unlimited prepaid plans favoring consumers looking to trade down and cut costs in this tumultuous economic environment.  I’ll give a

Verizon is my long term favorite, beyond 2010 for two main reasons.  First off, Verizon has been aggressively investing in and advertising for their fiber optic network called FiOS. FiOS is a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network that replaces the traditional coaxial cables used for TV, broadband internet and phone with lightning fast fiber optics. FTTP is a complete fiber optic network from the service provider to the premise of the customer. This differs from AT&T’s fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) network called U-Verse in which fiber optic cables are used until they reach a cabinet outside a community. From this cabinet, all houses in a local neighborhood connect using the traditional copper coaxial cables, thus limiting its speed in order to cut corners to save on the high costs of fiber optics. Fiber optics are the future of the internet as bandwidth continues to grow exponentially with people watching more videos and TV