Source: voipworld.wordpress.com

By Traci Patterson
CedMagazine

In the past year, cable telephony subscribers have increased by nearly eight million worldwide, according to a new report from In-Stat.

Growth in North America has been particularly strong as cable operators near the end of their transition to VoIP-enabled network architectures, In-Stat’s report found.

“Current priorities for cable telephony service providers are expanding the availability of their service and attracting business end-users, especially small- and medium-size businesses,” said Mike Paxton, an In-Stat analyst.

In-Stat’s research, “34 Million Subscribers: Worldwide Cable Telephony Services Continue to Expand,” found that:

As mentioned above, the Pivot JV involved cable operators Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications and Advance/Newhouse (Bright House Networks), which were working with Sprint Nextel to offer the Pivot wireless service. In April, it was announced that the cable operators were done with Pivot (story here).

In-Stat’s research covers the worldwide market for cable telephony. It discusses the business case for cable telephony services, discusses the availability of the service and examines specific network architectures, In-Stat said. In addition, it updates leading cable TV operator telephony deployment strategies and presents the results of a U.S. cable telephony subscriber consumer survey.

The research also provides forecasts for worldwide cable telephony subscribers, VoIP cable telephony subscribers and installed cable telephony lines through 2012, and it forecasts cable telephony service revenues and “Voice-over-Broadband” cable telephony subscribers over the next five years.

Source: voipworld.wordpress.com

ShoreTel has been awarded the ’Best Overall VoIP Provider’in the fifth annual Memertes PilotHouse Awards for Unified Communications & Collaboration.

ShoreTel emerged as the overall best following opinions poll conducted for customers to assess VoIP vendors’ performances. In all, the opinions and experiences of426 customers were examined against 24 VoIP vendors and the overall result came in favour of ShorTel.

The vote was conducted in an Olympic gymnastics style voting system,where winner amassed the most points or votes. ShoreTelgot a total score of 4.22 out of a possible maximum high score of 5.0.

Among the parameters considered during the vote are the kind of technology used covering the underlying software, platforms, intelligence and standard compliance; product features focusing on handset and switch capabilities; solution experience focusing on the ability to understand business requirements and craft solutions that meet customers’ needs.

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

Tilgin delivers Next-generation Home Gateways to Dansk Bredbånd’s Fiber-based VoIP and IPTV offerings

Stockholm, 14 January 2008: Tilgin, a leading provider of customer premises equipment (CPE) for triple play, next-generation broadband and IMS-based services, today announces a new $550,000 (US) deal with leading Danish operator Dansk Bredbånd.

Dansk Bredbånd is investing in new next-generation Tilgin Home Gateways for its national roll out of triple play services. The deal meets forecasted needs for the first half of 2008 and represents a new development in the existing relationship between the two companies.

An intelligent service node for all IP services, the Tilgin Home Gateways will enable Dansk Bredbånd to cost-efficiently deliver high quality triple play and new converged services to residential broadband customers. The gateways are centrally managed and remotely provisioned by the previously acquired Tilgin remote management system (VCM).

“Tilgin is providing us with a Home Gateway solution that gives us the performance and advanced service functionality we need to meet the increasing demands of our fiber customers,” comments Mikkel Jensen, CIO Dansk Bredbånd. “Cost control is an important component of our CPE investments and we are very happy with the way Tilgin’s solutions help us keep our operational costs to a minimum.”

”Key to this is the way we can manage and auto-provision the gateways without interaction from our customers. We also have the advantage of using common software for all the Tilgin gateway platforms we deploy at the customer premises. We have worked closely with Tilgin to design and add value to our service offering and look forward to building further on this relationship in the future”, ends Jensen.

”Dansk Bredbånd is a leading triple play over fiber operator that we have worked with for many years, and in the process received valuable input that we have catered our design to”, says Ola Berglund, CEO Tilgin. “The new Tilgin Home Gateways help them to further enhance their service offering while keeping their installation and operational costs to a bare minimum. We are proud and enthused to have Dansk Bredbånd as a customer.”

Product details
The deal includes two of Tilgin’s newest home gateways. The Tilgin HG1300 Ethernet Home Gateway will be deployed into apartments that are fed off a common fiber access into the building. The other product, Tilgin HG1500 PtP Fiber Home Gateways together with the MSA 912 fiber wall-mounting kit, will be deployed into single family houses with direct fiber access. The full solution also includes the Tilgin VCM remote management system.

The fiber wall-mounting kit is designed to be as unobtrusive as possible in customer homes. Its construction hides the fiber optic cable, protecting it from any potential damage.

The increased capacity and functionality of the Tilgin Home Gateway solution will enable Dansk Bredbånd to roll out a fully wirespeed routed solution to users in the home. This provides Dansk Bredbånd the capabilities to service multiple IP STBs in the home as well as deliver new multimedia applications and services that can include media sharing between devices in the home.

Dansk Bredbånd is both an operator and a content provider, equally known for its quality and its range of content. It is the only operator in Denmark to have signed a deal with national Danish Broadcast channel TV2, allowing it to offer ”a la carte” content over IP from TV2 and making it one of the country’s leading operators.

Tilgin expects additional orders from Dansk Bredbånd to be placed in 2008.
News from Cision.com.

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

Psytechnics’ Experience Manager removes most significant barrier to large
scale adoption of Voice over IP

Ipswich, UK, 7th January 2007 - Voice and Video Performance Management specialist Psytechnics today announces the launch of its new Experience Manager software. Experience Manager provides Voice Performance Management capabilities that resolve the specific complexities of managing the quality of voice and video over IP networks. Psytechnics has developed a product with new features that will monitor, alert, troubleshoot and report on voice quality issues across multi-vendor VoIP networks.

Experience Manager encompasses a real-time view of voice quality issues, based on true user experience and actual call quality statistics. It tackles the complexity of voice by dealing with issues such as echo, delay, noise and incorrect speech levels that commonly plague VoIP deployments. It delivers targeted analytics and diagnostics to get to the root cause of the problem.

Psytechnics CEO, Anthony Finbow, comments: "As VoIP becomes integral to business communications, increasingly replacing existing fixed-line telephones, it is really important that companies can deliver the best possible caller satisfaction. Until now, there have been no real tools or systems for finding and fixing problems on a VoIP system. Voice Performance Management is an approach that is changing that, with more and more companies beginning to feel confident enough to migrate all employees to VoIP".

Experience Manager features

Monitoring
Real time, passive monitoring is used at key points across the network. Calls are analysed and assessed non-disruptively. Experience Manager uses specially developed deep packet inspection technology to go beyond the IP headers. It looks inside the voice streams, monitoring IP header, Listening Quality (LQ) and Conversational Quality (CQ). Only by looking into the payload of packets can issues such as echo, noise and incorrect volume levels be correctly identified. This view of the voice traffic is vital and in most cases is the only real view.

Alerting
Monitoring provides the critical foundation for alerting. Voice performance issues are detected and appropriate alarms generated in real-time. Intelligent pre-processing is used to eliminate spurious alerts, preventing excessive alarms. The ability to alert on specific locations, workgroups and individuals is important for operational control, based on Mean Opinion Scores (MOS). Alerting is based on configurable threshold and recurrence levels enabling it to map directly to operational requirements. Alerting provides the essential insight for efficient and effective troubleshooting.

Troubleshooting
With just a few clicks on the web-based user interface, a non-expert user can pin-point voice performance issues and resolve them. Multiple views and filters provide the ability to quickly drill down and visual indicators highlight the root cause of problems at a glance. This rapid resolution reduces the mean-time to repair (MTTR) and minimises the impact of voice quality issues on the business, even identifying problems before users notice.

Reporting
Experience Manager provides a powerful reporting capability across all of the functional areas of monitoring, alerting and trouble shooting. Historical trend analysis and flexible MOS performance reporting for voice traffic, location and device is available. This functionality creates the ability to provide SLA reports that are meaningful to the business by demonstrating actual voice performance in quantitative terms. This empowers the customer for discussions with vendors, service providers and users about operational performance.

Experience Manager runs on industry standard hardware running Linux and is comprised of an Experience Server, which usually sits on the network operations centre (NOC) with Experience Engines, designed to monitor individual calls, located at key points across the VoIP network. The product also offers pre-deployment and out of hours testing, meaning that for a business planning to roll out VoIP it is possible to make sure the system is running at optimal levels before full deployment.

Source: voipworld.wordpress.com

The business case for adopting voice over internet protocol (VoIP) telephony systems grows more compelling every day.

In addition to the long distance savings, the equipment costs less, and does more. Moves, adds and changes are much easier. System monitoring is straightforward, and the usage reports are richer. And, most importantly, companies can leverage their existing IP networks to achieve an integrated voice and data platform.

Features, such as videoconferencing and unified messaging, offer tools that can transform the way a business operates.

While there are real pitfalls to watch for the momentum of VoIP seems unstoppable, say experts who have managed numerous installations.

This has been made possible by the emergence of very high speed, rliable IP networks.

As Jocelyn Philbrook, vice president of corporate marketing and investor relations at Westford, MA based Sonus Networks puts it, "What we’ve seen in the past five years is the quality assurance and high speed bandwidth that are able to support multiple types of communications-video, voice, data-very rapidly and with a high degree of quality throughout the network."

Early adopters have already worked through various telephony strategies and have started to move steadily to VoIP-based solutions with consolidated voice and data networks, reports Roberta Fox, Principal at Mount Albert based Fox Group Consulting.

But the pace of change has been incremental. This has led to a prevalence of hybrid systems as companies slowly replace legacy TDM (time-division multiplexing) systems with IP based systems. "VoIP has become the de facto standard on net new locations, but we’re not seeing people rip out legacy TDM systems and replace them with IP telephony," said Fox

Itbusiness.ca

Source: voipworld.wordpress.com

Jaxter has Reached the Five million registered member mark–a 10-fold increase from its base of 500,000 members in July. And the Menlo Park, Calif.-based VoIP provider announced that it has appointed Taneli Otala to the position of vice president of engineering, as part of a plan to support its phenomenal growth. Without downloading an application, mobile phone users can use their domestic minutes to make international calls via jaxtr’s technology. After signing up with jaxtr, members get listed in the jaxtr database, where friends and other contacts can find them. Contacts click the "call me free" button, give jaxtr their number, and then the service calls them and connects them with their friend.

Jaxtr members get up to 100 minutes worth of free incoming calls. Once users hit the maximum, their calls are directed to a jaxtr voice mailbox, and they can resume receiving calls when their free minutes are renewed each month.

Jaxtr is available in 220 countries, and some 32,000 new members have signed up each day for the past 140 days. The company has hired Otala, who most recently served as vice president of technology at Various (and CTO of MySQL prior to that) to handle the challenges that come with scaling out systems to meet such high demand.

OMD

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

PC World tells you, home users, SOHO or SMBs to improve the QOS of your internet connection to aid you with your VoIP communications. The best part is that you may already have the hardware, a router, needed for this operation. (If your router is dated make sure that you have the latest firmware from the vendor loaded.) The article uses LINKSYS router for illustration but most modern routers has the QoS built in to them. So better start using it. The person at the end of the line might begin to understand you. Mine did not, even with expensive routers switches and IP PBXs. It is nothing to do with QoS or Networks. It is my accent, by living all over the world I have picked up accents from many a countries and it make hard for me to express myself properly to other people vocally. (So if you thought my writing is bad wait till you hear me!).
Enough bad jokes, here is the PC World article.

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

Ross O’Brien, of VON magazine has written a good, a very good article on peering. Why we peer, how we peer and at the end hopes that the industry will squash its collective competitive fears and realize that the future depends on a bigger, Metcalfe-ian worldview on network connectivity, and peering plays a central part in that.
Next Generation Peering: Into the Future

Source: voipworld.wordpress.com

An expert has released a proof-of-concept program to show how easy it would be for criminals to eavesdrop on the VoIP-based phone calls of any company using the technology.

Called SIPtap, the software is able to monitor multiple Voice-over-IP (VoIP) call streams, listening in and recording them for remote inspection as .wav files. All that the criminal would need would be to infect a single PC inside the network with a Trojan incorporating these functions, although the hack would work at ISP level as well.

The program can index ’IP-tapped’ calls by caller - using SIP identity information - and by recipient, and even by date. Running from August this year until the most recent tap on November 21st, SIPtap had no problems in extracting enough information on the test network to prove that call recording of any and every VoIP call at a hypothetical company was now a trivial exercise.

Source: PC World (NZ)

Source: voipworld.wordpress.com

Lots of companies over the years have thrived on undercutting incumbent operators’ prices for long-distance and international calls. Calling cards and callback systems are the two oldest and most common examples; VoIP is a more recent one. Lots of companies have targeted the mobile market as well, either just through marketing, or with products geared towards mobile users, but their underlying proposition remains the same: cheaper calls.

Last summer, which (among other things) gave users local numbers for their international contacts. So instead of dialing the international number, you’d dial the local number, then the call would get routed through Rebtel’s VoIP network at cheaper rates. It’s a novel idea, and apparently one worth copying, as another mobile VoIP company, Jajah, has announced a similar feature.

Source: voipworld.wordpress.com

Back in May, “Intel has invested an undisclosed amount in VoIP firm Jajah, a Voice over IP firm, and the company will also get access to Intel’s own patents,” p2pnet posted, continuing:

Now Jajah says it’s organised a partnership with Oridian Online Media Solutions centering on in-call advertising.

What that means is the companies will try to persuade users to sign up for a deal under which they’ll have to listen to advertising in return for which they’ll have an “opportunity” to “earn credits,’ or “potentially” cover the cost of the call, says vnunet.“Earnings from an audio ad played while the call is being initiated are shared between the user and Jajah and credited to the user’s account,” says the story.

“Oridian reckons that sponsoring calls allows advertisers to establish new customer relationships and revenue streams, while telcos can generate greater average revenue per user by implementing the service alongside existing infrastructures.”

It’ll probably be like when you make a call to a company and you’re forced to listen to canned audio ad blurb while you’re waiting for a real person to come online.

The story doesn’t say if there’d be some kind of built-in delay so the ad could play before connections are made.

p2pnet.net

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

Join a panel of experts in a live webcast on IP Telephony Deployment.

Overview: Carrying out a successful IP telephony (IPT) deployment takes careful planning and consideration. The detail-laden process requires that you:

• Assess your company’s needs
• Evaluate competing solutions
• Select the right vendor
• Develop an implementation plan
• Execute a trouble-free deployment

To learn best practices for ensuring a smooth transition to IPT, join this live TechRepublic Webcast featuring Keith Ennenga, Technical Marketing Engineer for ShoreTel. Ennenga is a seasoned veteran with 10 years of experience managing IP telephony deployments for enterprises around the globe. He’ll talk about the top 10 issues in planning, deploying, and managing IP telephony systems.

Register here for the webcast that will be held on November 7.