Source: voipcentral.org

I came to know that Vonage has reached out an agreement with retail giant Wal-Mart to enhance its VoIP services in Canada, one of the major markets of VoIP. A good deal for Vonage, though I have no financial details of the agreement.

As per the mutual agreement, Wal-Mart would sell Vonage VoIP phones in its all most all the 1, 3000 retail outlets throughout Canada. Interestingly, it is for the time that Wal-Mart stores will have bunch of VoIP phones, no matter it is Vonage phones.

It is an open secret that Vonage, which pioneered in popularizing the concept of VoIP in the world, is now one of the worst strugglers in the current market with increasing customer churns and rapid decline in profit rates. With Wal-Mart ready to promote Vonage phones in Canada, the company is likely get a major boost in Canada market.

Source: voipcentral.org

Iristel has announced the launch of their High Definition (HD) VoIP service in Canada. This is said to be the first of its kind in the country promising high quality voice communication services for the business enterprises.

Announcing the launch of HD VoIP, Samer Bishav, CEO of Iristel said,

With more and more business persons working remotely from offsite locations voice quality is of paramount concern, Iristel addresses this issue through its extensive network of industry partners by offering HD VoIP.

The company has also offered Pay-As-You-Go VoIP plan for residential customers. The main objective of Pay-As-You-Go VoIP plan is to ensure cheap VoIP services for the residential customers in Canada.

The newly launched HD VoIP is just like comparing CD quality voice to an old AM Radio. With HD VoIP, the enterprise customers can avoid noisy in VoIP calls while they are working remotely from offsite locations.

Source: voipcentral.org

Following the deregulation of VoIP services in Canada, Vonage Canada, one of the leading VoIP service providers of the country has decided to expand its networking.

According to yorkregion, Vonage has taken its VoIP networking to King City, Maple and Oak Ridges. Now, the customers of these regions can access the VoIP services of Vonage.

Vonage will have to compete with the already established players including Bell, Rogers and Telus in these areas.

Last week, Canadian government has overturned Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commissions (CRTC) proposal that could impose restrictions upon the VoIP market.

Source: voipcentral.org

Here is some good news for the VoIP service providers of Canada. They will now operate under a deregulatory regime as the Canadian government has overturned Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commissions (CRTC) proposal that could impose restrictions upon the VoIP market.

Maxime Bernier, the federal minister of industry confirmed Ottawa is rejecting a CRTC decision to regulate the emerging technology of IP telephony services.

He said,

Barriers to entry in this market are very low. There is no reason to regulate it.

The CRTC came up with a surprising move in May 2005 to regulate VoIP services like the traditional phone services and put restrictions on countrys big telecommunications corporations to enable small players to compete and survive in the market.

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Source: voipcentral.org

As part of the expansion program, Vonage Canada has added five more maritime cities for its VoIP services this week. The latest cities are Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island and Sydney, Nava Scotia.

Before reaching to Nava Scotia and Charlottetown, Vonage has already made its service available in three home cities, Saint John, Moncton and Fredericton. With this, the total number of communities accessing Vonage services has touched more than 70 in eight provinces.

The US-based VoIP Company, which registered nearly 1.8 million subscribers by June 30 this year from 847,000 last year, faced loss in the last quarter. For Vonage, marketing the products matters most. The expansion program like this would provide an additional market to Vonage.

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Source: voipcentral.org

The adoption of VoIP has touched sky-high over the years. This technology has made us to envisage a world without boundaries. It is also the same technology, which is the root cause of security threats, phishing scams and so on.

With a vision to achieve secure VoIP and other such converged networks where data, voice and video pass through on the same communications layer, Industry Canadas Protocol Analysis Lab (PAL) has adopted an Intrusion Prevention Technology from the Ottawa-based Third Brigade Inc,.

Michael Binder, assistant deputy minister at Industry Canada opined,

As VoIP is rapidly being adopted by a wide range of users- from government to small business to the home consumer-it is increasingly important that we work to ensure the stability of these networks.

Third Brigade explains the intrusion prevention technology is a packet inspection engine that checks inbound and outbound traffic streams for malicious code and protocol anomalies that match defined rules.

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Source: voipcentral.org

With CRTCs (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) assertion to maintain its supremacy over pricing of VoIP services, VoIP service providers inclination to function under a deregulatory regime seems to remain a distant dream in Canada.

A Reuters report says that CRTC has upheld its May 2005 ruling, which enforces the regulatory body to play a major role in the countrys VoIP sector. The ruling considers VoIP to be subjected to the same regulatory framework as traditional phone services. Therefore, fixation of pricing for VoIP services should come under the jurisdiction of CRTC.

Although CRTC thinks of deregulating the VoIP sector or frame laws to empower service providers, there is no unanimous view emerging among the policy makers.

The leading VoIP service providers like Telus and BCE are condemning the decision saying it would be harmful for the service providers as well as for the customers.

Telus explained,

It’s bad for consumers because at the end of the day if we’re regulated and our competitors are not, we can’t put our best offers forward … and it means competitors don’t have to be as sharp as they would otherwise have to be.

So long as the old rules are in force, Canadians VoIP players will continue to face pricing and competition controls on their rapidly increasing VoIP services.

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