Source: alanweinkrantz.typepad.com

About 18 months ago, I asked Ralph de la Vega when I could control my AT&T U-verse^SM TV with my iPhone.  Well now, I can.  Sort of.  As long as you are away from home. 

AT&T has a free application from the Apple App Store to make scheduling and managing recordings on their DVR even easier when you’re away from home. 

The U-verse TV Mobile Remote Access App for iPhone and iPod touch lets customers record their content from virtually anywhere and is another example of U-verse TV applications and DVR enhancements that have been rolled out to customers at no extra charge.

The app allows users to easily search U-verse TV program listings from the full program guide, view descriptions of selected programs, schedule program or series recordings, manage or edit scheduled recordings, and delete stored DVR content.

The Mobile Remote Access App is available for free from Apple’s App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

The launch of the new U-verse TV Mobile Remote Access App follows several DVR enhancements that are currently being rolled out to U-verse TV customers, including an exclusive new Total Home DVR feature that allows customers to schedule and delete recordings from any U-verse receiver in the home — all from a single DVR.

Source: www.voip-news.com

DevMar Associates are now a distributor for AAR’s Contingency Response Communications System. The communications system is intended to provide local, state and federal agencies with an interoperable communications solution that is simple and yet bridges the gap between agencies, command and control.

“AAR is looking forward to working with Dennis DuVal and his team at DevMar Associates,” said Lee Krantz, Vice President and General Manager of AAR Mobility Systems. “Dennis’ extensive background working with government agencies at many different levels, combined with his knowledge of the communications requirements during a disaster and experience as Chief of Police of Syracuse, NY gives him solid credibility and makes him a natural fit to represent the CRCS in the marketplace.”

According to the company:

The CRCS is an IP-based, agency-neutral solution that allows first responders to communicate and exchange information with radio interoperability, live streaming video, wireless Internet and VoIP services. Potential operators include military, firefighters, law enforcement, National Guard, Department of Homeland Security and other organizations involved in disaster recovery activity.

Source: www.voip-news.com

MTS Allstream is going to use NetIQ AppManager to manage their customers’ Unified Communications applications and infrastructure. It will be used to manage more than 1 million VoIP phones around the globe.

“We needed a solution to help us measure performance levels and enhance end-user experience,” said Eric Fletcher, senior vice president, Marketing at MTS Allstream. “NetIQ provides us with the ability to report on service levels, diagnose call quality degradation and remediate issues immediately. NetIQ AppManager allows us to scale and manage our customers’ UC components — all from a single console. With NetIQ, we can deliver value by optimizing end-user Quality of Experience (QoE), which is exactly what our customers need and have come to expect.”

According to the company:

MTS Allstream first leveraged NetIQ Vivinet® Assessor to effectively predict the overall expected call quality on customer networks. Now utilizing NetIQ AppManager, MTS Allstream can holistically manage customers’ UC deployments, including application servers and network devices. As a result, MTS Allstream delivers compelling customer value by preventing end-user downtime and proactively enhancing service levels 24×7×365.

“Now managing over one million of the world’s VoIP phones, our proven history in this space is a testament to the value that our comprehensive monitoring and reporting delivers for the additional applications that comprise Unified Communications management,” said Criss Scruggs, senior manager, Product Marketing at NetIQ. “Service providers like MTS Allstream require a heterogeneous management solution like NetIQ AppManager, as it will not only meet their current needs, but also reliably scale to accommodate future growth plans.”

Source: www.voip-news.com

Bubble, a  broadband services company that offers wireless and fixed options and telephony as well, is using PortaSwitch from PortaOne to keep its billing and call management services flexible and cost-effective.

“My previous experience with PortaSwitch at a previous company made the choice easy,” said Christophe Pauwels, Chief Technology Officer for Bubble World S.L. “PortaSwitch had shown itself to be both reliable and scalable. “Plus it has the advanced billing engine features we need to accommodate all the directions we expect our company to grow into.”

According to the company:

PortaSwitch is an IP multimedia subsystem capable of handling the complete call control and billing functions of a diversified digital services company. Its combination of softswitch and application servers forms the basis for a broad range of services at Class 5 QoS levels, from VoIP-based PBX and residential calling to broadband Internet access. When coupled with a Cisco Gateway, PortaSwitch provides access to the IP Centrex/IP PBX feature set on Internet telephone and/or circuit-switch technologies.

From the beginning, Bubble depended on PortaSwitch to provide convergent voice/broadband billing. The company uses PortaBilling100 (master, slave, and standby servers to ensure redundancy) to provision and bill customers, as well as multiple PortaSIP servers to control and route the calls and PortaUM for unified messaging and IVRs.

“With PortaSwitch we can combine voice, ADSL and wireless services in one monthly bill for our customers. Very few products on the market can accomplish this,” said Pauwels. “Having PortaSwitch on our side enables us to improve our service quality and compete effectively in a crowded digital services marketplace.”

The company hopes to expand its offerings over time.

Source: www.voip-news.com

Smoothstone and IPLogic Inc. have formed a partnership. Now IPLogic clients will be able to take advantage of Smoothstone’s hosted IP communications services and on-demand applications.

“IPLogic has always been focused on offering our clients communications solutions that reduce cost and increase productivity,” said Kenneth Yanneck, President of IPLogic. “We work to offer our clients the best of the best. Our new partnership with Smoothstone is a direct result of the decision we made in our own search for a communications provider. We believe in Smoothstone’s solutions for our clients, because we’re a Smoothstone client ourselves.”

According to the companies:

As a leading managed IP services provider, Smoothstone will offer its industry experience in hosted communications to IPLogic’s varied base of clients, including organizations in healthcare, education, government, financial services, hospitality and gaming, and manufacturing and distribution.

IPLogic had recently selected Smoothstone’s SIP Trunking services for their own communications network. Smoothstone provides trunking to their Cisco CallManager hardware in their New York and Pennsylvania offices. The desire to form a strategic partnership followed quickly after their own successful implementation.

“Smoothstone and IPLogic share a common focus on understanding clients’ needs first and building customized communications solutions around those needs,” added Yanneck. “Smoothstone’s dedicated support and network management team complements their unmatched IP communications experience, which makes them the perfect solution to offer to our clients in need of unified communications services.”

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

When there are natural or human-caused disasters, you need communication to be restored quickly and kept up so that critical communications can reach their destination. Verizon Business’s new Emergency Response Mobile Communications Service does just that. And they can do it from anywhere in North America.

“Obviously, the faster a company can overcome an unplanned communication disruption, the faster it can get back to business,” said Diane McCarthy, senior vice president, network field operations. “But to be most effective, ERMCS needs to be incorporated into a larger business continuity plan. We can help on that score as well by providing professional consulting services that can include developing, assessing and testing response plans.”

According to Verizon:

ERMCS vehicles use satellite links to restore vital business communications. Each self-sufficient vehicle is equipped with wired VoIP telephones and wired and wireless Ethernet access for laptops. Several vehicle configurations are available, including 40-foot and 53-foot vehicles that offer up to 24 individual work stations, each with its own telephone jack, Ethernet port and electrical outlet. These vehicles provide local, long-distance and international calling, along with Internet access and fax service.

“While the details can vary by company, a complete business continuity plan will include a way to reestablish communications,” said McCarthy. “The ERMCS can successfully fulfill that role by offering a complete package of communication offerings combined with reliability and flexibility.”

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.

Source: www.voip-news.com

Sometimes when the FCC makes a new rule it’s for the better. That’s the case this week when the FCC approved a new rule that requires failing VoIP vendors to give their customers and federal offices reasonable notice of an impending shutdown. That is intended to prevent situations where VoIP customers find out that their service no longer exists — the hard way.

According to PC World:

The commission also approved a rule requiring phone providers to provide number portability within one business day instead of four.

The FCC did not specify how far in advance a VoIP provider would have to provide this notification except to say that it should be done in a reasonable amount of time.

Read more here.

Source: www.voip-news.com

Diamond Management & Technology Consultants is now using NetMotion Wireless’s Mobility XE, the latest version of its Mobile VPN. The company, which has more than 600 employees spread around the work, is hoping the new Mobile VPN will increase consultant productivity. Among the benefits is being able to reconnect to the network without logging in again — so that consultants can access pertinent applications like VoIP or databases faster.

“We’ve been a long-time user of NetMotion software and our consultants, who are often at client sites, rely on it to stay connected. They can remain as productive on the road as they are at home or in the office,” said Bill Economos, Senior Director at Diamond. “In addition, our internal IT operations see real benefits in the ease of administration of our wireless networks.”

According to NetMotion:

Around the globe, more than 350,000 mobile workers use NetMotion’s Mobility XE to mitigate some of the most common challenges in mobile deployments today, including application stability as users move in and out of wireless coverage areas, and seamless roaming between Wi-Fi and wide-area cellular networks. In addition, the company provides advanced security and network management controls that extend corporate security policies to mobile devices, while also allowing customers to utilize their existing mobile investments to reliably deploy real-time applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP) and streaming video. For more information about NetMotion, visit www.netmotionwireless.com.

Source: www.voip-news.com

OneAccess will be assisting TeleCable in providing new telecommunications services with VoIP technology for their Asturias business customers. TeleCable will be using a One Access ONE100 router among its new technology.

“TeleCable has a strong track-record as one of Spain’s most innovative telecoms operators. Its selection of our ONE100 multiplatform router demonstrates that the ONE100 is the best solution available in terms of the services it enables and therefore the new revenue streams it provides for the operator. It also cements OneAccess’ position as a leading supplier to the Spanish telecoms market,” said Alan Brazier, CSO of OneAccess.

According to the companies:

The ONE100 equipment allows TeleCable to offer digital telephony services without having to modify its current network, which already has two interfaces for ISDN Basic, or four interfaces for larger businesses.

With this move, TeleCable reaffirms its trajectory as one of the most innovative telecommunications operators and OneAccess strengthens its position as the leading provider within the Spanish market.

Source: www.voip-news.com

Avaya customers around the world will now have access to PROGNOSIS voice quality monitoring solutions from Integrated Research, thanks to a new agreement between the two companies. The solution offers end-to-end support for deploying and managing IP telephony.

“This is an exciting step forward for our organization. Avaya’s selection of PROGNOSIS VoIP Monitor for inclusion with every shipment of Avaya Communication Manager proves that we deliver extensive operational insight for managing an Avaya IP telephony service,” said Mark Brayan, CEO of Integrated Research.

All Avaya Communications Manager customers will have access to a free license for PROGNOSIS VoIP Monitor, as of May 4.