Recently in VoIP Category

IP Phones Find a Home in Business, Not at Home

February 11, 2009 10:57 AM
In-Stat is reporting that the business IP Phone market is thriving, and that by 2012, 31 million voice centric IP phones will ship into businesses.
 
And while IP phones are making some headway into the consumer space, In-Stat believes business IP phones will continue to outpace consumers by 10:1.
 
According to the report IP Phones Worldwide - On the Desk and Beyond, IP-based communication is enjoying much more vigorous adoption rate in enterprises than in the consumer space.
 
"Within the business market, corded IP phones remain the standard, and will continue to dominate the enterprise IP phone market through 2012," says Norm Bogen, In-Stat analyst. "However, WLAN and IP DECT phones continue to grow, especially within some specific vertical and geographical markets."
 

Skype to Verizon? Just Sayin'...

January 29, 2009 12:08 PM
 
Then word came down that Verizon was not going to stop offering voice over copper lines after all.
 
Next we heard speculation that eBay was going to offload Skype.
 
Recently we're hearing how Verizon is clipping its VoiceWing VoIP business.
 
 
It's becoming "crystal clear"  to me that Verizon is going to buy Skype and offer the VoIP service to their FiOS customers as a value add. You know, "...those cable guys are making you pay for voice... we'll give you voice for free. Oh and check out our new devices, our diverse lineup of over 100 HD channels, and for a nominal fee, please take advantage of the seamless integration with our wireless service."
 
With everyone else speculating that Skype might go to Google, or Microsoft, or BT or France Telecom or Cisco... I figured I'd throw Verizon's name out there.
 
Just sayin'...

Oh Canada! Dialexia, Sangoma Interop News

January 29, 2009 9:25 AM
Speaking of Canada, Dialexia and Sangoma today announced successful interoperability between Dialexia's award-winning IP-PBX, Dial-Office, and Sangoma's NetBorder Express Gateway.
                
The Dialexia-Sangoma partnership will enable enterprise customers to easily deploy the Dialexia Dial-Office all-in-one, SIP-based IP PBX and interconnect their IP Telephony with the PSTN.
 
Sangoma is a Gold sponsor of the upcoming ITEXPO, which kicks off in Miami Beach in just five days. Makes sense on so many levels. In addition to the obvious IP Communications hook, it's generally colder in Canada than it is in Miami Beach this time of year... Montreal = 12⁰ ... Toronto = 20⁰ ... Miami Beach = 80⁰
 
I can't wait!
 

SIP Trunking Podcast: Avaya's Alan Klein

January 26, 2009 8:00 AM
With only one week to go before ITEXPO, it's an exciting time as we make the final preparations ahead of "The World's Communications Conference."
 
One of the elements of the show that has been very successful in the past is the SIP Trunking seminar, organized by Ingate Systems with sponsorship from the likes of Avaya, BandTel and others. The seminar is taking place at this year's ITEXPO as well.
 
Last week we ran a couple of interviews with BandTel's Joel Maloff, including a Q&A and a podcast.
 
We also published an interview with Avaya's Alan Klein.
 
Well we just posted the podcast interview with Alan. Give it a listen.
 
And when you're done, please cruise on over to the ITEXPO site and sign up for the SIP Trunking workshop. You'll be glad you did!
 
 
 

Rich on Microsoft's Response Point

January 23, 2009 2:24 PM
Rich has a nice post about the opportunity for Microsoft's Response Point phone system in the coming year.
 
Microsoft's John Frederiksen, General Manager of the Response Point group will be giving a keynote at the upcoming ITEXPO
 
Also there will be a 2-day Microsoft Response Point Solution Seminar at ITEXPO East 2009 Best part of this (aside from the education) is that it's free.
 
Check out Rich's post for the details.

TMC Blogs: The Week in Review

January 23, 2009 11:51 AM
What was the big story this week? No doubt it was the inauguration of Barack Obama, as the 44th President of the United States and the first African-American to hold that post. Truly a historic day for our nation: a day when many people put politics aside to welcome our newest leader to his job, and judging by the crowds in Washington, D.C. this past Tuesday it was quite a welcome indeed.
 
Rich is excited. Not so much from any overtly political stance, but he's psyched that the Obama Administration appears to be well versed in technology and will likely raise the tech-level of the White House and the U.S. government in general to new heights.
 
In his recent post, Tech Change is Here, Rich notes that technology is not just a "nice to have" but a necessity that drives an organization's ability to compete.
 
Of course, with ITEXPO just 9 days away, Rich has been hard at work writing about some of the big elements of the show that will take place Feb 2-4, in Miami Beach, FL.
 
Among many other things, Rich blogged about the open source educational opportunities (Asterisk Training Details; Asterisk, Trixbox, and Switchvox Training), and the temperature differential, and he also posted an entry highlighting the series of interviews he conducted with the thought leaders who will be participating at the event (Come Meet the Thought Leaders at ITEXPO).
 
Back on the political thread... Tom posted his thoughts regarding the reported $40 Billion Broadband stimulus that the Obama Administration was proposing: President-Elect Barack Obama's $40 billion Handout Bailout to Internet Providers
 
While that was technically last week, this week saw a tremendous amount of activity in the comments section of his blog. There was some really interesting back and forth, and if you have any thoughts on our government spending $40 Billion on broadband, it's worth a look.
 
Peter Radizeski weighs in with details on the Broadband Stimulus Bill.
 
Tom also was busy doing what he does best, and that's writing about and reviewing gadgets, such as the Verizon Hub (a Web browsing, VoIP phone gadget...), the TechCrunch Touchpad, the AT&T tl7610 headset, and the HTC Touch Cruise.
 
Tony Rybczynski opened the week with a simple message: Nortel is Open for Business, underscoring the message that "Nortel plans to emerge more focused, financially sound and competitive."
 
On his SIP and Serve by a Foodie blog, Broadvox' David Byrd spoke of developments at his firm and some partnerships they announced this week ahead of their participation at ITEXPO.
 
In today's installment, Byrd also discusses the latest adventures of IP Man:
 
This week we announced interoperability with Panasonic's new NCP IP PBX and we released the new IP MAN Adventure featuring AudioCodes, episode 5. The new villainess, Echo, is scheduled for launch during the week of IT Expo. It's a fun story with an exciting storyline featuring Panasonic. Like the duck paddling on a pond, our calm exterior hides the furious effort below the water line.
 
In what's fast becoming one of my favorite features in the TMCnet blogosphere, every Monday, Byrd dishes on what he's been up to in the kitchen over the preceding weekend, in addition to providing insightful commentary on what's happening in the market. This week it was beef short ribs. Yummy.
 
Over in the Convergence Corner, Erik Linask discussed the significance of Interactive Intelligence integrating with IBM for enterprise-wide unified communications.
 
Brendan Read offered a Readerboard post on Genesys' double acquisition; Jessica Kostek covered Apple's first quarter financials as well as the "Fall of Kennedy" -- her take on Caroline Kennedy's withdrawal from consideration for the open Senate seat in NY; and Scott Bouchard vented his frustration at being unable to watch the inauguration live on CNN.
 
Hunter Newby had a pair of interesting posts this week on Skype and Internet-based VoIP Peering as well as the effects of broadband development on the economy.
 
Tsahi Levent-Levi has some great post-CES follow-up on the video solutions on display at that event, and perhaps the funniest blog post of the week, entitled The Naked Truth About Video Conferencing.
 
 

Ifbyphone Offers Service Guarantee

January 21, 2009 9:18 AM
Ifbyphone announced a new service guarantee today, saying that they will deliver their customers' voice broadcast calls on time otherwise those calls will be free.
 
According to CEO Irv Shapiro:
 
Our guarantee helps our business customers understand how important the delivery of their voice broadcast calls is to us. Moreover, our guarantee helps differentiate Ifbyphone's services because we are the first and only provider that stands 100 percent behind the delivery of voice broadcast calls.
 
The guarantee is simple: if any scheduled broadcast call to a U.S. or Canadian phone number is delayed by more than five minutes, Ifbyphone will reimburse customers for the call.
 
Shapiro is also on the schedule at the upcoming ITEXPO, which will take place in Miami Beach, FL, February 2-4, 2009.
 
On Wednesday February 4th, from 1:30-2:15pm Shapiro will be part of a panel discussion entitled: Contact Centers in a Web 2.0 World.
 
For more information on the show, or to register, visit www.itexpo.com
 
Just for the record, as I write this, it's 16 degrees in Connecticut where my office is located.
 
Florida sounds like a good idea.

TMCnet Blogs Week in Review

January 16, 2009 9:02 AM
It's been quite a week for news this week, and not just the run of the mill product announcements, customer wins and such. Some rather big things went down this week, and the TMCnet family of bloggers was all over the important developments.
 
It seems like a month has gone by, but in fact it was just this week that Obama officially tapped his former Harvard law classmate Julius Genachowski to head up the Federal Communications Commission or FCC. According to his bio, he was chief counsel to former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, a VC and led the development of the president-elect's technology and innovation agenda.
 
Rich also covered the ascension of Carol Bartz to the position of CEO at Yahoo!
 
I am impressed and concerned. Bartz has an excellent resume with honors and awards as long as anyone...
 
What the company really needs is someone who has effectively led a small to medium media company in the last 18 months and understands the needs of advertisers and more importantly how to get them to spend more money with Yahoo. Her resume, while impressive includes Sun and 3M.
 
Basically zero media experience.
 
Is this bad? I am not sure. You don't know how someone meshes into an organization until they take the job.
 
It is worth mentioning Bartz should be effective at negotiating with other companies and could strike big deals which bring in revenue. From this perspective she has the appropriate resume.
 
 
The news spread like wildfire that a Verizon executive spoke to a Bloomberg reporter about a world, just seven years hence, when the carrier would no longer be offering voice over copper lines. So I thought, ok, yeah, that's worthy of inclusion on my blog. The next day, Verizon's senior VP of media relations Eric Rabe said, effectively: Not True! Which, I thought was, you know... worthy of inclusion in my blog too. The upshot? As Rabe wrote in the company's Verizon Policy blog:
 
 
The Verizon traditional phone system will serve customers for a long time to come.
 
 
Perhaps the biggest story in telecom this week was Nortel filing for bankruptcy. Rich was ahead of the curve with his initial post, and then several of us followed, weighing in from various angles. I addressed the issue here and here, Tom Keating wrote about the Nortel situation on his VoIP and Gadgets Blog that
 
 
...perhaps we in the media should carefully consider what we say ... Sometimes the media and bloggers are way too gleeful when a company 'titan' takes a fall.
 
 
Rich followed up his original post with an interview he did with Nortel Enterprise President Joel Hackney, where Hackney played down the bankruptcy element of the week's events and focused on the restructuring.
 
Peter Radizeski gives his insights here.
 
David Byrd added his thoughts on his SIP and Serve blog, noting that as Nortel falls, another company in this space, AudioCodes, is rising.
 
And Brendan Read wrote a great piece about Nortel from the Canadian political perspective, and that any potential dismantling of Nortel to US firms would likely be a tough sell. Brendan, a Canadian with a political science background, writes that such a purchase in whole is not likely to happen:
 
...because Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, cannot afford to let his minority Conservative government be ousted from power by the Opposition Liberals who now have a new, smart (and U.S.-educated) leader, Michael Ignatieff, on the albeit simplistic flag-waving nationalistic issue of keeping Nortel Canadian.
 
 
HD Voice, or high-definition voice, based on wideband audio codecs was in the TMC blog buzz this week as we announced plans to host a panel exploring the benefits of this emerging technology at the upcoming ITEXPO.
 
Rich, who will serve as the moderator of the panel, which features speakers from Polycom, AudioCodes, Texas Instruments, Octasic, and Alteva offered up some excellent analysis of the technology in his post, Communications Must Go HD.
 
Writing on TMCnet's VoIP and Video over IP blog, GIPS VP of engineering Jan Linden continues the discussion of HD Conferencing as he describes a way to approximate a telepresence experience at a much lower cost.
 
 
Kim Devlin-Allen, writing in her IP Communications Design blog, revisits the issue of the health and vitality of VoIP and comes away with a positive feeling.
 
I had the opportunity to brainstorm on the future of VoIP with some of the leading IT managers on the west coast, and they overwhelmingly agreed that for their enterprises, it is no longer a question of if they will deploy VoIP, but rather when those deployments occur. Although the current state of the economy may affect the pace of deployments, I think it's fair to say that the enterprise market is committed to merging their voice and data networks and is moving in the direction of full IP.
 
I wonder what Hunter Newby would say? For one thing we can expect he would make his case for proper naming conventions, as he takes the position in his VoIPeering blog that VoIP is NOT Internet Telephony.
 
Make sure you stay up to speed with the latest from all the TMCnet bloggers.

Verizon Plays Down "No More Copper" Comments

January 14, 2009 8:32 AM
On second thought, we will NOT be doing away with voice over copper in seven years.
 
We like VoIP, but we love copper.
 
Clearly our executive was not supposed to say what he said to that Bloomberg reporter. Either that or the reporter got it wrong.
 
It's all a misunderstanding.
 
Nothing to see here... Move along...
 
 
Apparently Verizon is backing away from comments that their CMO John Stratton made to a Bloomberg reporter in a story that was carried by the LA Times and that I touched on in my blog on Tuesday.
 
Eric Rabe, Senior Vice President -- Media Relations has a post today on the Verizon Policy Blog basically saying that no, neither Stratton nor anyone else at Verizon believes that we will move beyond copper in seven years.
 
I for one felt that seven years was much too aggressive a timetable to move away from that bread and butter transport mechanism, but it says a lot that Verizon would come out so strongly to correct the perception that they were somehow turning their back on the tried and true.
 
I've pasted Eric Rabe's blog post below in full:
 
 
There's been a bit of online buzz about remarks attributed to Verizon Chief Marking Officer John Stratton in a Bloomberg interview (carried in the LA Times) at last week's Consumer Electronics Show. The story says that Verizon plans to "do away with traditional phone lines within seven years as it moves to carry all calls over the Internet."
 
Here's the background.
 
First, neither John nor anyone else here thinks that the traditional, circuit-switched phone network will be a thing of the past in seven years. What's often called the public switched telephone network (PSTN) is the world's most reliable, high quality, landline voice communications system. The Verizon traditional phone system will serve customers for a long time to come.
 
John's point was, and there's not a lot of new news here, that we see that voice can and is becoming an application called VoIP on broadband networks.
 
VoIP is a logical platform for any company wanting to break into the voice services business, and hundreds of companies have seized on this technology to do so, including every major cable TV company. However, the quality of VoIP voice calls and the reliability of VoIP networks are in no way superior to the quality and reliability provided by the Verizon PSTN network. In short, there is no logical reason for a company like Verizon, with a terrific voice network already in place, to dismantle that network and replace it with VoIP.
 
At the same time, Verizon is the foremost provider of broadband networks in the USA and a leader in providing broadband around the world. We operate much of the Internet backbone, besides providing wired broadband to 8.5 million American consumers and businesses in the Northeast, and parts of the Northwest, South and Western U.S.
 
It is clear to us that some parts of the market are moving to VoIP. So the right move for Verizon and our customers is to support transition to VoIP as we have already for many business customers and as we will do as consumer customers evolve to VoIP. You'll see us offer new VoIP products for FiOS in the future, and over time we'll do the same for customers served by other wireline and wireless technologies. This is a logical evolution that we understand and will support.
 
But don't expect the landline circuit-switched network to magically blink out in seven years. For many customers, the traditional phone network may be the best solution for years to come.
 

Verizon Exec: No More Copper by 2016

January 12, 2009 2:24 PM
In an item today from Bloomberg News, via the LA Times, Verizon's Chief Marketing Officer John Stratton reportedly said at CES, that the operator plans to do away with placing voice calls over copper lines within a seven-year timeframe.
 
So let me get this straight... In seven years, no more copper? I have my doubts that the last Verizon call to run over twisted copper will take place by 2016.
 
Now, with customers switching to mobile phones exclusively, and 4G wireless technologies ramping up, and consumers abandoning traditional phone companies in favor of cable providers and so-called over the top VoIP providers, the concept of evolving beyind copper is not farfetched. Verizon too, by offering voice over its FiOS service, is hastening the migration away from copper.
 
I don't have a problem with the premise. It's the timing. I just happen to think it will take longer than seven years.
 
"We've built our business over the years with circuit-switched voice being our bread and butter . . . but increasingly, we are in the business of selling, basically, data connectivity," Stratton said.
 
We get it. We too saw this day coming.
 
In fact, we've been promoting this migration to IP since the day we launched Internet Telephony magazine in 1998, and quite possibly before, in prior issues of CTI Magazine. I'm setting a calendar reminder in Outlook for seven years from now. I'd like to check back in Janary 2016 and see how close this estimate came to coming true. 

What do you think? Does seven years sound good to you? Maybe sooner? Maybe later? Let me know...
 
 
 
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