Source: www.voip-news.com

The VoIP and videoconferencing product company Beyondis is going to begin distributing Avistar Communications Corporation’s C3 desktop technology in the UK.

“Avistar desktop videoconferencing increases the ’stickiness’ that resellers want in their relationship with customers. It expands their ability to meet their customers’ needs, and it offers a whole new product area that is proven, cost-effective and easy to use. They’ll quickly find that it will help them in existing customer installations as well as open new doors for them,” said Darren Innes, General Manager, Worldwide Sales, Avistar.

Andy Aikman, Technical Director of Beyondis, says that the Avistar desktop complements Beyondis’s current offerings.

Source: www.voip-news.com

NeuStar, Inc. has successfully trialed its SIP-IX VoIP Interconnection Exchange service. The company used four competitive local exchange providers for the trial.

“We’re glad to have been working with NeuStar during this trial,” said Jerry James, CEO of COMPTEL. “Our members that participated in the trial have told us that NeuStar’s VoIP Interconnection Exchange service performed exactly as NeuStar promised it would. We look forward to the next phase of this project.”

FYI:

A detailed panel discussion regarding the benefits and technical aspects of VoIP interconnection will be held on Tuesday, October 7 at 11:00 a.m. at the COMPTEL Plus Fall 2008 Convention & Expo. The COMPTEL event will be held October 5-8 at the Orlando World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida. Tim Cody, NeuStar’s Senior Director of Product Management, who conducted the SIP-IX Interconnection Exchange service trial with the COMPTEL members, will be one of the presenters on this panel.

Source: www.voip-news.com

There’s a new product available that combines elements of trixbox Pro Unified Agent Edition and salesforce.com’s AppExchange. Fonality’s trixbox Pro Unified Agent Edition can be obtained from Fonality Australia.

The collaboration of the two innovative systems provides a unique customer centric view of a company’s telephony interaction and contributes to the customer value creation.

Fonality Australia director, Marc Englaro said that it used to take time and budget to create the kind of deep integration between a CRM and a phone system.

“Fonality is creating a clear channel between the two systems and helping organisations get a complete picture of the interactions with a customer or prospect. Fonality is the first company to provide automatic logging of phone calls into Salesforce.com. No longer do the sales and service representatives have to manually log calls into the CRM system. Now, all inbound and outbound calls are automatically matched with the corresponding record in Salesforce.com, and call data is captured and logged,” said Fonality Australia director Marc Englaro.

According to the companies:

The Fonality UAE value creation process is driven by the following features:
- Performance Management:
- Automatic Call History provides a detailed history of who employees are calling and the duration of each call.
- Integrated Call Recording allows any call to be recorded from the PBX system and attached to the corresponding record in Salesforce.com.
- Lead Management Reporting provides reports on how many calls were required for conversion, lead activity, etc.
- Agent Activity Reporting ranks agents based on activity and productivity.
- Outbound Call Reporting shows which reports are busiest on the phone, how many calls have been made to leads and customers.

Source: www.voip-news.com

A school district in Colorado is giving the checkered flag to a new VoIP system.

Boulder Valley School District in Colorado is getting a high-tech system that will connect the area’s around the district’s schools with Wi-Fi and also implement VoIP. There are municipalities that aren’t this fortunate. Many of them.

Xirrus is deploying the network for the massive district with 29 elementary schools, 10 middle schools, 10 high schools and more.

According to TMCnet:

The district-wide deployment includes a high-speed Wide Area Network, Voice over IP implementation, and a video distribution system. Theupgrade is part of anverall infrastructure upgrade plan to support new types of teaching including distance learning, e-learning, and the distribution of educational video content directly to students using laptops in the classroom.

“Our legacy Wi-Fi network used thin access points and controllers and couldn’t handle the density or flash traffic patterns that were occurring in our classrooms,” said David Williamson, chief information officer of the school district. “We looked at several different options and we found that Xirrus’ solution provided the most coverage and capacity per cable drop allowing us to support a wide variety of educational enrichment applications and to better serve our community.”

Source: www.theregister.co.uk

The IEEE has formally approved 802.11r, the amendment to the Wi-Fi standard that allows devices to smoothly transition between Wi-Fi hotspots without breaking the flow of conversation.

802.11r allows a mobile device to move smoothly between hotspots, with connections never suspending for more than 50 milliseconds. Inaudible to the human ear which is presumed to be making use of such connectivity, the standard was published last month, but manufacturers are only now starting to show an interest.

It’s strange to think that Wi-Fi was once considered a serious threat to mobile telephony, but there was a time when city-spanning Wi-Fi networks promised to carry phone calls for free, if only there was a decent hand-off between cells. 802.11f provides a fast enough hand-off for data services, but that can take a second or two if cryptography is being used, so 802.11r was kicked off in 2004 to provide consistent connections.

These days no one seriously expects Wi-Fi to challenge the network operators, indeed the reverse is more likely to be true, but enterprises might be convinced to deploy VoIP solutions based on Wi-Fi thanks to the new standard.

Earlier this year the Wi-Fi Alliance tried to create interest in using VoIP over Wi-Fi with their "Voice-Personal" certification, which has been largely ignored by VoIP users and manufacturers alike. Now that 802.11r has been completed, the Alliance will likely create some sort of enterprise-level certification that will mandate 802.11r conformance.

As femtocells start to provide the same functionality with less complexity, and cellular networks ramp up speeds to match the real-world performance of Wi-Fi, it’s probably time for Wi-Fi to concentrate on the data services it delivers so well and leave voice traffic to the professionals. ®

Source: www.voip-news.com

VoIP, wireless, security, RFID and portable data collection distributor WAV is going to begin selling Azalea Networks’ network intelligent broadband wireless infrastructure products.

The Azalea technology, which is patent pending, is intended for enterprises, government agencies and service providers that deliver voice, video and data.

“WAV’s strengths in value-added distribution and wireless technical expertise will provide a key link between Azalea’s innovative technology and the applications that can best benefit from it,” reported John Elms, CEO of Azalea Networks.

Azalea’s network-level intelligence for broadband wireless infrastructure uses wireless routing technology.

“Partnering with Azalea Networks expands our reach and enables the delivery of cost-effective and innovative solutions that our customers are looking for,” said Norm Dumbroff, president and CEO of WAV, Inc. “We’re excited to continue to offer our solution providers, and the wireless and mobile VAR communities, outstanding technologies, as well as our full portfolio of value-added services.”

Source: www.voip-news.com

Junction Network is offering a free SIP trial to Response Point users. The trial, which is geared toward SMB owners, will give users a chance to experience the service before committing to it.

According to VoIP News:

To introduce its service, Junction Networks is offering a free 30-day promotion to Response Point customers: two phone numbers — including a toll-free inbound number — and $7 in credits for calling in either direction. The company is also permanently waiving the $9.95 per month that it usually charges its SIP-trunking customers for basic PSTN connectivity.

Source: www.voip-news.com

The Beacon School District in New York has chosen AltiGen(R) Communications, Inc.’s  VoIP phone system for district communications. Yep, this district is going VoIP.

“Our goal was to standardize on one phone system that would seamlessly unite our 500 employees across the entire district without increasing costs. As an educational institution, it was extremely important that our system employ redundant AltiGen servers to ensure reliability in the event of an emergency situation. AltiGen met all of our requirements at an affordable price with flexible features that improve employee efficiency and reduce system management costs and burden,” said Charlie Symon, Beacon’s assistant superintendent for media and operational services.

GraceCom Telecommunications installed the system.

“While this six-site deployment meets the district’s current demands, it can also be scaled easily to meet future growth needs simply by adding to the initial investment through upgrades to the system, including adding more gateways,” said Mike Plumer, AltiGen’s vice president of sales. “Other benefits of the AltiGen solution include redundancy, call recording, mobile extensions, administration and phone system / call activity reporting.”

Source: www.voip-news.com

TransNet Corporation was awarded a $1.85 million contract by a New Jersey regional high school district to upgrade the district network and telephony systems.

“The new telephony solution will employ the latest Voice-over-IP (”VoIP”) technology from Cisco Systems, Inc. This solution provides technological advancement in a sophisticated new system that costs less to operate than the one it replaces. The return on investment realized through immediate savings in operating costs was well received by district officials,”said TransNet President Steven J. Wilk. “Voice mail will now be available for all teaching staff, facilitating interaction among staff and parents. Automated outbound dialing will provide notification to the community about such matters as snow days, event cancellations, or the steps being taken to protect their students in any emergency. The current system for outbound dialing incurs costs with each usage. The new system is part of the overall VoIP solution and can be used without surcharge.”

The project will lower operating costs while increasing security and services for the district. What district? Who knows.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

Om has a very good description of what I’m calling "the Skype Movie Player" that was announced today.

It made me remember that I wrote this post back in 2005….which opens the door to only more questions..

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

If you want to know about another player in the mobile VoIP space called TringMe, check out Ken Camp’s long post. It tells me a lot, maybe more than TringMe would have. Way to go Ken.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

Have you looked at the price of Cisco’s Personal Telepresence that was announced today?

$33,900 USD per seat

That’s 22 years worth of SightSpeed For Business for a ten (10) seat pack.

Granted SightSpeed is my agency’s client, but let’s get real and think about value and the budget. For every $33,900 a company can have hundreds of people inside the company using SightSpeed in the work place versus one glamour puss (CEO). Of course the IT director won’t get fired for buying Cisco, but if they tried SightSpeed to see how much use the video conferencing solution really receives they can quickly do some back of the napkin math to determine need and value to the company.

Oh. And here’s one more point. SightSpeed keeps getting better and improving what they do. All I’m seeing is that Cisco is carving up their Telepresence technology, as it drops down in price.

One has to really wonder if there’s that much difference in IP communications that’s worth an almost 300x investment when prices of technology always drop with each next generation of release. For me, the cost of Telepresence just don’t make sense (and I’m a Cisco shareholder and fan) given the ease of use, and low cost of a high quality service like SightSpeed already being on the market, plus having an award winning and proven track record clearly makes it a more than worthy option to consider.

Candidly, if I was the CFO of a company thinking of making the Telepresence investment, I’d at least want to SEE the comparison between the two with my own eyes before forking over $33,900 dollars for ONE SEAT versus $19.99 a month per seat.