Source: www.voip-news.com

The Metropolitan Nashville Hospital Authority now has data and voice services from tw telecom, the company that also does their data and internet services.

“The Hospital Authority needed to upgrade communications capabilities to meet the growing needs of Metropolitan Nashville,” said Robert Stillwell, CPA, Chief Financial Officer for the Metropolitan Nashville Authority. After a thorough RFP and search we saw that tw telecom could provide the solutions and expertise required for this transformation. As essential care facilities for the residents of the City of Nashville and Davidson County, we see tens of thousands of patients each year and this improvement to our infrastructure will support our mission to provide seamless, high quality care to our patients.”

The Authority now has two 10Mbps Ethernet circuits, a point-to-point data connection, a 500Mbps Ethernet connection to an off-site disaster recovery and business continuity location, and voice services at Nashville General Hospital and other locations.

“We were very pleased with tw telecom’s Internet and data services, and these additional services were the next component required for our upgrade,” said Ken Irwin, Telecom Manager for the Authority. “Today we have a single provider that delivers a converged, SONET-protected communications solution to the Authority. Having one provider streamlines network management capabilities as well as providing real expense savings that ultimately benefits taxpayers.”

Source: www.voip-news.com

With Google Voice in beta (for previous GrandCentral users, that is), there is a lot of buzz around about the new service. Wondering what everyone is saying?

Here’s a roundup:

• Lifehacker does a screenshot tour
• App Scout evaluates the transcript function
• BeBizzy gave it a run through
• NCS Tech had to give it two tries to get it to work
• CNET evaluated it too

Source: www.voip-news.com

A large, unnamed hospital chain in St. Louis has opted to upgrade their existing Ascom Personal Wireless Telephony system to the Ascom Freeset IP DECT system, the company said.

According to Ascom:

The Ascom Freeset IP-DECT on-site wireless system combines the best of both worlds. It utilizes the proven Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) 6.0 standard for over-the-air transmissions along with the emerging technology, VoIP, for backhaul over the Local Area Network (LAN). Current Ascom customers have used the FCC-protected Unlicensed-PCS spectrum (1920-1930 MHz) for many years. They seek to upgrade to the latest technology while maintaining the interference free operation they have enjoyed for years. The Ascom IP-DECT system is a dedicated wireless network that eliminates the complexities and regular adjustments necessary when attempting to manage voice clients on a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). Once IP-DECT is installed, it takes virtually no maintenance and can be managed remotely.

“I am delighted that this healthcare system has decided to continue depending on Ascom wireless solutions throughout all 7 hospitals,” says Chad West, President & CEO of Ascom (US) Inc. “This decision demonstrates the confidence that they continue to have in Ascom. Our Freeset IP-DECT offering provides them with the same dependability that they have relied on for many years at a lower Total Cost of Ownership.”

Source: www.voip-news.com

Aruba Networks, Inc. is supplying the wireless medical network for Taiwan’s Taichung Veterans General Hospital. The 1,515 bed hospital serves 5,000 outpatients daily and has nearly 3,000 medical professionals on staff. “Aruba was selected for the upgrade following a technical evaluation focused on voice over IP (VoIP) quality of service, interoperability with the existing data network, and network security,” a news release said.

“Aruba’s excellent performance in the VoIP QoS tests, its compatibility with our core medical network, and the flexibility of its policy-based firewall — especially for guest access — convinced us that we should not only replace the existing network but expand Wi-Fi coverage throughout the entire hospital,” said Ching-Wen Yang, Taichung Veterans General Hospital’s Director of Computer Centers. “The system’s guest access provides exceptional flexibility with respect to provisioning visitor and employee access based on bandwidth allocation, resource access, and group type. Our Wi-Fi network is at once secure, easy to manage, and very flexible — an essential combination we always needed but had previously been unable to obtain.”

A wireless network allows medical staff to have access to critical data, anywhere, anytime, which helps the immediacy of care.

“Hospitals have very demanding wireless networking requirements by virtue of the regulatory environment in which they must operate, and the critical nature of the data, voice, and video information they handle,” said Marco Lee, Country Manager of Aruba Taiwan. “Patient records must be secured, voice traffic delivery must be assured, and large video files must be reliably transported. Aruba’s centralized encryption, adaptive radio management, and client-to-core security address these requirements and are well-suited to healthcare applications. It’s one reason why Taichung Veterans General Hospital and hundreds of other hospitals, clinics, and healthcare institutions worldwide have selected Aruba mobility solutions.”

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

PhoneBoy and to some extent Dan York get the gold stars here.

Both are security experts and have a real expertise in Voice. Dan hosts a regular podcast and Dameon does a wide range of blogging. But at heart both are white hat hackers, and what Dameon did in finding the flaw in a released version of iSkoot so quickly was worth its weight in gold.

This is just one more example of how the Blogosphere helps the startup community, whether asked or not.

It reminds me of the time when an former eBay executive said to some bloggers who were only trying to help "I’m not sure if you’re reporters, developers or consultants so I don’t know how to deal with you" and then repeated the same comment to me in a slightly different way. Basically, shortly after the eBay purchase Skype had a great chance to embrace the blogosphere, but only in the last six months or so has that really happened well, and largely at the direction of their out of house PR agency in NYC and Chaim Hass, who leads it.

Compare that to iSkoot whose team since the moment the first post went up, were engaging with the bloggers and after a first, reply, after some behind the scenes work a few of us to people we both know at iSkoot (as Dameon points out) the real mystery became clear and iSkoot did the right thing.

This is how the blogosphere helps and will continue to do so. Smart companies embrace passion. It’s only insecure executives who fear their help.

Bravo Dameon, Dan and Jim. Bravo iSkoot.

Source: www.voip-news.com

VoIP seems to be everywhere these days. But VoIP dating? Learn about a new, free service at Click for Nick. (The maps thing really is creepy.)

Voice Over IP Weblog is dishing on the alternatives to the now-defunct PrivatePhone. Check it out here.

VoIP Information tells us about the negatives of VoIP service. Negatives? There are negatives? Seriously though, the author misses one big negative: it won’t work in a power outage. VoIP equipment needs electricity to run, unlike traditional phone lines . . . so if you are in an area of the country that loses power due to snow or tornados or other weather conditions, you could be in trouble. Unless you have a generator, that is.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

Pal Paul Amery, who was unceremoniously made redundant in the month of December by the grinches at Skype along with a few others in the developer program, has joined the blogosphere.

Paul will provide some very good insight into VoIP and VoIP software development as well as how to build an ecosystem with developers.

I got to know Paul at the Skype Developer Day in Mountain View last fall, and then met up with him and got to speak at Skype House a few weeks later.

Personally I’m touched by his kind words here on his thank you page. While many people in my profession are strictly mercenary, I’m the kind of person who regularly lends a helping hand to others, especially when times turn tough. It’s part of my early upbringing in business, about giving back to the community that gives unto you something that was made apparent to me by Philadelphia Flyers owner Ed Snider when I worked with the hockey team in the 70s and 80s.

In many ways the giving back is not monetary, it’s helping in ways that create far greater growth. Sometimes its just lending an ear, being another set of eyes or actually doing some work gratis to get things on the right direction. Other times its being supportive, even if you have no personal gain. By giving something good, one gets more in return. I’m happy to have helped Paul and look forward to continuing to.

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

VoIP IP Telephony @ http://snapvoip.blogspot.com

Atlanta, Georgia (USA) –– Feb 14, 2007. TransNexus, Inc. has made the OSP Toolkit and RAMS open source projects publicly available on SourceForge. The OSP Toolkit is a client side implementation of the OSP peering protocol. The OSP Toolkit, written in C, is a mature open source project begun in 1999 and has been integrated into numerous commercial and open source VoIP products. The RAMS OSP server is a java based OSP server developed for testing and as a reference implementation.

The Open Settlement Protocol (OSP) is an IP Operations and Billing Support Systems (OSS/BSS) protocol defined by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI TISPAN), www.etsi.org. OSP is officially known as ETSI Technical Specification 101321 for inter-domain pricing, authorization and usage exchange. OSP is unique because the way it uses PKI services to enable secure peer to peer communication between VoIP networks. “The OSP protocol was developed to enable direct multi-lateral peering among VoIP networks. OSP provides secure inter-domain access control and eliminates costly network bottlenecks”, stated Richard Brennan, Chairman of ETSI TISPAN Next Generation Network Architecture working group.

RAMS is a java based server useful for managing inter-domain VoIP routing, called number translation and Call Detail Record collection. RAMS supports the European Telecommunications Standard Institute’s OSP Peering protocol (ETSI TS 101 321).

The OSP Toolkit and the RAMS OSP test server is available at links provided below. A free version of the TransNexus commercial OSP based peering server is available at www.transnexus.com.

Links;
The OSP Toolkit
RAMS server
www.transnexus.com

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

Anglero at Telecom’s Tsunami tells us about OSP from VOIPUSER.ORG, OSP is as old as VoIP but has been used very little. All the occasions that I know, the OSP was used for billing purposes. When I ran a H323 gatekeeper, for servicing some of the big time providers requested me to provide call information via OSP. I had to get a SUN box just to run the OSP code, because it did not run on anything else at that time.

OSP is an Operational Support System (OSS) protocol well suited for managing inter-domain routing, access control and accounting of SIP transactions. OSP uses the communications protocols below to convey messages. The content of an OSP transaction is an HTTP message formatted according to the standard for MIME. Individual components in the message are XML documents and the message may be signed with an S/MIME digital signature.

So VoIP peering among all the Providers and routing of SIP information among users will provide an stable standard among VoIP users. As Anglero says, OSP guarantees that when "Pamela.Anderson@voipuser.org" is calling you, it is actually Pamela Anderson.

Links;
Telecom’s Tsunami: Setting a new standard in VoIP Peering -VoIPUser.org
VoIPUSER.ORG