Greg Galitzine's VoIP Authority Blog

After posting� this morning's comments about Microsoft being wrong for enabling censorship in China, I had a conversation with our CTO who agreed with me that censorship and/or enabling censorhip is bad, but why pick on Microsoft alone? Another colleague forwarded some more information to me as well a few moments ago, and that led me to an article that appeared on the Industry Standard in February of last year.

The text of the article is below for your convenience. The piece was written by Scarlett Pruitt of the IDG News Service and you can find it online here.

A new report from In-Stat declares that broadband remains a bright spot�  in an otherwise� lagging telecom market.

According to the release announcing Common Cents: Consumer Telecom & Technology Spending, 2004-2009, although service revenues for US telcos are expected to decline through 2009,� broadband� generate significant revenue growth. The report posits that� market penetration will grow� from 28.6 percent of the population in 2004 to nearly 50 percent by the end of 2009.

"The migration from dial-up to broadband is good news for service providers, as the monthly fees for broadband will remain substantially higher than for dial-up," says Amy Cravens, In-Stat analyst. "With $13.7 billion in broadband revenues in 2004 versus $10.9 billion in dial-up revenues, broadband has already outpaced dial-up as a revenue-generating opportunity."� � 

The research tells us that:

• Total consumer spending on communication services, including local voice, long distance, cable TV, dial-up, and broadband was $114.8 billion in 2004.

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ABP is once again playing host at their VoIP Sizzles in Dallas VoIP VAR conference for open systems next month, from July 20–22.� 

ABP is a national technology distributor that markets SIP-based VoIP solutions via Resellers. The Dallas, TX-based firm is actively growing a network of professional resellers seeking to integrate VoIP solutions using “Best of Breed” components as opposed to a single manufacturer’s solution.

ABP’s conference is open to data, networking, and telecom resellers that want to become professional players in the VoIP space. Last year this event drew about 100 resellers from across the United States, plus a significant number of Resellers from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Newport Networks announced this morning it is expanding its organization with new offices in Frisco, Texas. Newport likewise announced the availability of Release 2.0 of its 1460 session border controller software.

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Release 2.0 of its 1460 Session Border Controller adds geographic service resilience, link aggregation (802.3-2002) capabilities, and a series of enhancements designed to deliver carrier-class reliability, bandwidth utilization and profitability.

I had the opportunity to take in this morning’s keynote speeches at Speech-World Conference in Dallas, TX. After a brief introduction from Rich Tehrani, TMC’s President, Cisco’s Vickie McGovern – director of Product and Technology Marketing – IP Communications – took the stage to share her vision for speech technology and how speech is redefining communications.

The core message of the keynote was that speech can reduce the complexity associated with business communications. She touched on a variety of key elements including
Virtualization, Rich Media (focusing on personalization preferences), Natural Language (for such applications as directory services, e-mail and voicemail access, password services, communications management, and calendar management), and
Modality, Presence, and Context (a good example of which is someone calling me when I’m on another call, I respond via IM, and the response is read back to them utilizing speech technology).