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ICE
TMC’s Bob Liu and Tom Keating wrote an excellent article on Microsoft and Cisco collaborating on the ICE standard, a technology used to enable VoIP traffic to more easily permeate firewalls in a secure fashion. Currently, session border controllers (SBCs) are useful but not standardized and punching holes in firewalls is not secure. The ICE standard can work with SBCs to allow more easy VoIP deployments in enterprise networks.
ICE isn’t a new protocol. It actually makes use of two other protocols called STUN and TURN, respectively, but it does require additional signaling capabilities to be introduced into the multimedia session signaling protocols. The only new element added to the network architecture are STUN/TURN servers that sit outside of the NAT firewall of the two calling parties, as well as ICE support on the client-side.
“ICE is very simple. It's very lightweight. The other great thing is you don't need to replace your NATs and firewalls," said Russell Bennett, Program Manager of Microsoft's Real Time Collaboration (RTC) Group. He added, "It's not anyone's intellectual property. It's certainly not Microsoft's and it's certainly not Cisco's. It doesn't impose any cost to anybody,” Bennett told TMCnet during a Live Meeting briefing.
He continued by explaining that ICE works with the existing infrastructure. Bennett said, "You don't have to buy a ICE-compatible firewall with an ICE-compatible sticker for instance, so it doesn't impose a cost on anybody. ICE will ship as a feature/function inside of SIP clients going forward - certainly inside of Microsoft SIP clients. So the only new element in the STUN/TURN servers and it doesn't matter who owns them."
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Google Calendar
Russell Shaw points out that Google is likely contemplating a calendar service. On the surface this makes sense because Google is becoming a portal and the calendar is an essential part of the portal. But what Russell did to back up his hypothesis is type in calendar.google.com to see if anything came up. He was redirected to the Google home page.
So this confirms the company probably has such plans and they will likely be announced shortly. Internetnews has thoughts on this as well.
Is there a VoIP hook here? Possibly. How about scheduling conference calls on the calendar and having the call come in at a predetermined time. A wake up service can also constructed here with an ad waking you up. Imagine, “Hello, this is your wake up call sponsored by Starbucks. For the location of the nearest Starbucks just enter your zip code or just walk outside and look left and right and one is bound to be nearby.”
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ITEXPO Exhibitor Survey
I am so grateful to all the Internet Telephony Conference & Expo Exhibitors that filled out surveys for our last show that took place just two weeks ago in LA. In just under 80 days we have our next show in I wanted to share the results of our latest exhibitor survey with you.
- 75% of these exhibitors had exhibited at 3 or more shows in the past year
- 100% percent of exhibitors said the exhibit hall traffic was equal to or better than anything they had seen in the past year!
- 84% of exhibitors felt they got more leads at the Internet Telephony Conference and Expo than any other show they had exhibited at in the previous 12 months
- 83% said that the target audience was exactly what they were looking for.
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