Source: www.voip-news.com
VoIP News of the UK says that Ofcom wants reverse VoIP tracing for emergency calls in the UK.
Smith on VoIP says that niche applications are driving the adoption of video calling.
Network World says that Google has grabbed 1 million phone numbers for Google Voice. Whoa.
Source: www.voip-news.com
VoIP Watch says that Google Voice is going to support local number portability. YAY! That’s a good move on their part.
Smith on VoIP wonders which you’d prefer: good service or good pricing for VoIP … since you just can’t have both. Or can you?
A new smartphone that supports Skype video conferencing? Yep. Elektrobit MID Reference Device does that. Read about it on VoIP & Gadgets Blog.
Source: www.voip-news.com
Vertica Systems and Sigma Systems are holding a webinar about new internet protocol detail record mediation and data warehousing solutions for cable and telecom service providers. The solution being discussed allows providers to analyze terabytes of usage and subscriber data at any level of detail and in real time.
Here’s the detes:
DETAILS:
Attendees will learn how to:
– Do fast, ad-hoc reporting on real-time IPDR and other telecom data
with minimal impact on equipment and systems performance.
– Gain better insight into service fulfillment, rating, charging,
billing and profitability that result in competitive advantage, tight
regulatory compliance and a better customer experience.
– Examine network and call data in real time to improve quality of
service.
– Query years of data at any detail level.
– Eliminate revenue leakage and reduce customer churn.– Identify fraud.
WHEN:
Tuesday, June 16, 2009, 10:00 AM Eastern time
To register: http://www.vertica.com/.
Source: www.voip-news.com
Add newspapers to the ever-growing list of companies that have transitioned to a managed voice, Internet and data networking solutions package. The Kansas City Star in Kansas City, Missouri, is now using a solution from tw telecom.
“We’d outgrown our old network and needed a provider with the ability to support us in creating a robust 10-location wide area network (WAN) to sustain The Star’s continually increasing network needs,” said John McPhail, Systems Manager for The Kansas City Star. “Important to us was that tw telecom was able to provide The Star with a cleaner, self-healing solution that gives us a better network with improved bandwidth at every site, and a layer of redundancy we didn’t have before. The Star’s headquarters, production facilities and seven distribution centers throughout the metro area are now connected over a much more secure and cleaner network than we had before.”
The company’s new network is a multi-solution, 10-location Ethernet-based network that provides 40 Mbps of metro Ethernet connectivity and voice services.
“Critical to our decision to select tw telecom was its network fiber footprint,” said McPhail. “When we reviewed all the proposals, many of which were priced similarly, none could match tw telecom’s network capabilities or technical sophistication. The Star is now directly connected to a fully protected network, and we immediately reduced our costs by more than 10 percent. We gained more than just an improvement in cost, we were able to upgrade nine of our sites from a consumer-type DSL connection to a production quality T1. In addition, this transition to tw telecom had the added benefit of reducing to one the number of providers we now have to manage.”
Source: www.voip-news.com
Patton has reduced prices on FXS models of the SmartNode 4110 VoIP Gateway Series. The change went into effect on June 1.
“Recent technology and process innovations at Patton have brought substantial cost-savings in our analog gateway production. Over the years our customers have stood by us through all the economic storms. During the present global economic downturn, it makes perfect sense to pass our savings along to those who have sustained our business through those other tough times,” said Burton A. Patton, Executive Vice President.
According to the company:
Expected to stimulate the analog VoIP gateway market, Patton’s lower prices reflect an average decrease of 20 to 40 percent for distributors, resellers and end-user customers.
In spite of the current economic crisis, the lower pricing makes the stability and interoperability of Patton’s high-end, carrier-class SmartNode VoIP equipment affordable for small to medium enterprises (SMEs).
Source: www.voip-news.com
World Discount Telecommunications is going to deploy Stratus Telecommunications’s ENTICE telecommunications platform. WDT offers landline and mobile long distance services as well as residential VoIP. The company has chosen the technology to simplify the management of different technical platforms by combining them into one, which will also help reduce the costs of operation.
“WDT laid out a clear road map for changing their network infrastructure, and they wisely did their due diligence based on the entire plan rather than taking a piecemeal approach. That led them directly to our ENTICE platform,” said Nathan Franzmeier, President of Stratus Telecom. “Our end-to-end integration delivers the streamlined administration and one-stop source they were looking for, and it remains a major ENTICE competitive advantage for the market at large.”
According to the companies:
The first phase of the project, completed in late 2008, involved installation of clustered ENTICE session controllers to allow more efficient port utilization enabling connectivity to international carriers as well as to handle wholesale routing and billing. The ENTICE solution made it possible to mix IP traffic from multiple gateways previously dedicated to calls to and from a single country to provide a unified routing and billing platform.
The second phase, completed in April, added Dialogic’s CSP hardware to allow interconnection of WDT’s ENTICE switch with its Nortel DMS-250 programmable TDM switch. This portion of the project is enabling WDT to cut costs by transitioning TDM traffic from traditional carriers to IP. Configuration and management of the Dialogic hardware are built into the ENTICE interface, yielding additional savings by consolidating ENTICE/Dialogic administration. The Cisco gateways that the Dialogic CSP is replacing had to be programmed separately.
Source: www.voip-news.com
A new phone service from sipgate claims to be a landline replacement that has all the functions of a phone service including telephone number but it carries no cost for the set-up, the number itself or any monthly charges or minimums. Sipgate one works with any phone (including standard analog ones, mobile phones and VoIP phones). It operates over the internet.
Calls cost 1.9 cents per minute, but calls to other sipgate users and received calls are free as well, giving it an advantage over Skype where you pay for incoming calls.
“There is simply no barrier to people disconnecting their old phone lines anymore. Phone and cable companies have long been pushing voice plans in the region of $25 to $40 per month–which end up being as much as $60 or more with extra charges–and that’s just ridiculous,” said Thilo Salmon, CEO of sipgate. “Even with calls to other landlines and mobile phones, most users will spend less than $5 a month using sipgate one. And for those people only receiving incoming calls on their VoIP phone, the service is completely free.”
I have to disagree with Salmon on there being no barrier to disconnecting old phone lines — if the internet goes down or the power goes out, you will lose your phone service, which is a problem for some people (like parents who want the security of having an analog backup phone with a traditional line so that you can phone anytime in an emergency). Nonetheless, as far as VoIP goes, this sounds like a good deal.
Here’s the benefits:
At no additional cost, sipgate offers a rich feature set designed to make users’ lives easier and more convenient:
– Need to write down a number while driving? Record any phone
conversation by pressing *6
– Want to customize your voicemail? Upload an mp3
– Want your calls to follow you? Have your home, office and mobile
phone ring in parallel
– Left your mobile phone at home? Simply go online and divert calls to
your office line
– Want to talk to friends in an ad-hoc conference? Bridge them with the
touch of a button
– Missed calls while on a flight? A list is waiting for you in your
Source: www.voip-news.com
There is a new suite of performance monitoring service from Tata Communications that offers integrated, end-to-end, network and application performance monitoring in three choices of service: Network Visibility, Application Visibility and Voice over IP Visibility.
“As global enterprises depend highly on their IT infrastructure to deliver quality applications to end-users, they require efficient, end-to-end view of network and application performance. To that end, Application Performance Visibility Service facilitates improved performance and management of all network elements, including managing remote sites from central locations, while reducing costs and delivering detailed reports for wise capacity planning decisions,” said Genius Wong, Senior Vice President, Global IP and VPN services for Tata Communications. “This is especially relevant now during the global, economic crisis.”
Here’s the detes:
Application Performance Visibility Service equips IT managers with in-depth, real-time, historical data on every network site. The service offers comprehensive views across the infrastructure (Layers 1 – 7), that multiple users can share simultaneously to plan capacity, create reports, troubleshoot performance problems, and reduce mean time to resolve (MTTR). Enterprises can monitor events across the infrastructure, including the local loop, port, site-to-site circuit, application, and server performance. In addition, they can test performance of business-critical network applications before rolling them out into production. In-depth visibility options provided by this service can be combined with the Application Performance Optimization Services launched in 2008, which offer optimization, compression, and acceleration features for a complete WAN and application performance management solution.
Tata Communications will be the first Indian-based provider to offer integrated network and application monitoring services.
Application Performance Visibility Service includes cost-effective, scalable architecture based on Fluke Networks’ proven Visual Performance Manager Platform, a complete system for monitoring end-to-end performance of applications and services across the enterprise. While real-time monitoring occurs, this platform archives network, server and application data in a back-end database that delivers a holistic view of enterprise performance with up-to-the-second granularity.
Source: www.voip-news.com
8×8, Inc. and Aastra have teamed up to offer co-branded Virtual Office business IP phones bundled with the 8×8 Virtual Office suite. The new products are available at Office Depot.
According to the companies:
The 8×8/Aastra 6755i Virtual Office IP phone replaces the Virtual Office ST2118 analog business phone which Office Depot had previously been carrying. These plug-and-play IP telephones serve as endpoints for the 8×8 Virtual Office hosted IP PBX business phone service, currently in use by over 16,000 companies. 8×8 Virtual Office provides businesses with a complete, enterprise class phone system at a fraction of the cost of a traditional PBX and roughly half the cost of traditional business phone service.
“The 675xi Virtual Office IP phones developed jointly by 8×8 and Aastra have been favorably received by our subscribers since their introduction last summer and we are excited to now offer this next generation product to Office Depot customers with the added convenience of retail availability,” said 8×8 Vice President of Business & Channel Development Huw Rees. “Office Depot has been a valued sales partner for over two years and we applaud their continued commitment to offer businesses the latest advanced communication technology services and products.”
The new phones can plug into any broadband Internet connection, allowing users to make or receive calls instantly without any changes to the firewall or network configuration.
“8×8 and Aastra have experienced great synergy working together on an OEM level, and we look forward to broadening our relationship into the retail sales and marketing channel,” said Tim Whittington, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Aastra USA. “The combination of Aastra’s superior quality business IP phones together with 8×8’s
Source: alanweinkrantz.typepad.com
I still have until June 11 to make a decision on what to do about my AT&T U-verse service.
Source: alanweinkrantz.typepad.com
Back in late December, I managed to negotiate a pretty dramatic reduction in my triple play AT&T services from $169 to $99 per month.
This lead to some pretty amazing media coverage with my story being told inThe Wall Street Journal, NPRand even an appearance on Good Morning America.
In telling my story my goal was to help save the American consumer millions of dollars, especially during this economic downturn.
Source: www.voip-news.com
What’s the future of high-def voice? Global IP Solutions recently polled participants in a webinar about how they think it will be applied.
Of those polled, 57 percent said that conference calling would benefit most, followed by about 33 percent who thought it would increase productivity. Another 16 percent said the greatest impact would be on call centers.
“The results validate our belief that there are many opportunities in corporate America that can greatly benefit from high definition voice,” said Joyce Kim, chief marketing officer at GIPS. “As a leader in providing the core technology for HD voice, a growing importance for call center operations, conferencing and overall employee productivity; these results demonstrate the value GIPS continues to deliver to its customers worldwide.”
According to GIPS:
As voice technology continues to migrate from circuit-switched services to modern IP-based network foundations, call quality has yet to receive straight “A”s in business and consumer use. Enter HD voice technology, and its leading driver: GIPS. Its advanced wideband CODECs and VoiceEngines, which solve the issues related to IP networks such as delay, jitter and echo, is capable of delivering high quality IP voice regardless of network conditions.
GIPS is building on the momentum of market interest in high-definition voice by sponsoring the HD Communications Summit on Thursday, May 21. Produced by VoIP pioneer Jeff Pulver, the conference is being held at New World Stages in New York City and will explore the issues and benefits associated with the widespread deployment of HD VoIP.
