IP Communications

Pretexting â The Good, Bad and Ugly

September 11, 2006

In recent days pretexting has become a mainstream term in newspapers and blogs around the world. Admittedly pretexting is a term that most people are not familiar with and most are shocked when they learn what it is. Pretexting is pretending to be someone else and obtaining personal information about that person under the pretext of being them. What most people don’t realize is how easy it is to get a hold of information like phone records with a person’s phone number and last four digits of their social security number.

The reason pretexting has been in the news so often lately is that Hewlett Packard used this technique to obtain phone records of journalists and board members in an effort to determine the source of leaks of confidential information to the press.

You may recall that Carly Fiorina had dealt with the problems of leaks to the press years ago and obviously things haven’t changed at HP and leaks continue to plague management.

In order to get to the bottom of the leaks HP Chairwoman Patricia Dunn ordered an investigation into the leaks and in doing so hired at least one outside firm to find out who was responsible letting confidential information out.

Posted in IMS, IP Communications, IPTV, ITEXPO, SIP, Technology

Bandwidth Glut

September 11, 2006

We have received some nice comments about the following article regarding the Cisco 4-Slot CSR-1 Router from Zippy. I have to share this excerpt and a specific quote which I bolded below.

---

"As we start to see the abilities of the consumer rise, we start to see the huge impact that video will have and currently has, particularly in the U.S. but also in other markets worldwide," says Milinkovich. "Let's look at a typical home with one high definition TV, which, using MPEG-2 compression, uses around 19 megabits per second per stream.

Posted in Broadband, IP Communications, Video

ITEXPO Attendance Update

September 12, 2006

I had a chance to look at the attendees from the last 2 days who signed up for ITEXPO and remain amazed at the global reach of this event. As you know TMC has a global reach with a North American trade show strategy meaning we believe in having large US-based shows ad inviting the most important decision makers from around the world to come join us.

The strategy has been extremely successful and – surprise!! – it turns out the international market likesto come to venues like San Diego and Florida :-)

Here are the countries represented in the registration database from just today and yesterday:
Germany
Philippines
USA – Obviously but didn’t want to leave it out
Taiwan
Canada
France
Korea
Trinidad and Tobago
Brazil

Here are some of the titles:
Network operations Manager
Chief Strategy Officer
Dir IMS Solutions
Chief Architect
Senior Applications Manager
CTO
Network Specialist

Hope to see you next month in San Diego at ITEXPO: October 10-13th.

Posted in Call Center, IMS, IP Communications, IPTV, ITEXPO, SIP, Video, VoIP

Vonage E911 in Los Angeles

September 15, 2006

I will be speaking next week in Los Angeles and Irvine, California and am happy to know that the city will be much safer now that Vonage has turned up E911 in the city. In addition to Los Angeles, Vonage recently turned up E911 at more than 125 local run emergency call centers across the U.S. in less than one month, bringing the total percentage of Vonage U.S. subscriber lines that have E911 to over 89 percent.

In addition, Vonage has been pretty busy enhancing its business model by partnering with Endeavor Telecom.

Posted in IP Communications, VoIP

Lower Broadband Customer Service Costs

September 19, 2006

Sorry for the self-promotion here but I haven't had a chance to share this with you --the news of a webinar teaching service providers how to lower the costs of broadband customer service. It takes place tomorrow so feel free to forward I to colleagues now so they don't miss it.

Rolling out new technology to your customers is great but you need to make sure that if you are deploying new triple play services you are aren't taking a bath on support costs.

As the complexity of services increases so does support cost. This webinar will help you lower your costs over time by planning early. Enjoy.

--------

Keeping a Lid on Broadband Customer Service Costs

Date: Sept. 20th (tomorrow)
Time: 11:00am PDT (2:00pm EDT)
Register

===============================================
Customer support costs can balloon quickly when rolling out new broadband services.

Posted in Broadband, CRM, Call Center, IMS, IP Communications, IPTV, SIP, Speech Technologies, Video, VoIP

PASATA

September 19, 2006

Depending on what research you subscribe to you will hear that 40-60% of all calls either end up in or are checking voicemail. Now I am no expert on productivity and how it correlates to GDP and work output but it seems to me that even shaving a percent off the above numbers is a major improvement.

Certainly I am a big believer in a world of presence enabled applications and technologies and devices. This is one of the reasons my company launched SIP magazine in fact. I know in the future we will have intelligent networks that will know where we are and what we are doing and these agents will be able to forward our calls to the correct phone depending on where we are, what our presence information is and who is calling.

So I am happy that IBM has teamed up with Telenor to develop Presence Advanced Services for Telco Applications or "PASATA."

The technology holds great promise not only because of its applications in the enterprise, but also because it can streamline call routing efficiency for wireless networks, thus easing network congestion.

Posted in IP Communications, JITC, SIP, Science, VoIP

Adtran

September 20, 2006

If you haven't been watching Adtran lately you may have missed how seriously they are taking the VoIP market. Certainly the company is a well-known name in the networking equipment market having been making data centers products for so many years.

The company has a new series of multi-service routers that are designed for use in small businesses. They allow for things like PoE -- perfect for VoIP phones.

Even though the products in this line are being targeted at SMBs I found it encouraging that they support 500 VPN tunnels.

Every networking vendor is taking VoIP seriously -- I just get the feeling Adtran is trying to be the better IP communications networking company.

For more details on what Adtran is up to check out Patrick Barnard's article.

Posted in IP Communications, Open Source, Video, VoIP

Sonus Caribbean News

September 20, 2006

Sonus scored a major deal in the Caribbean recently. The islands may not be thought of us an IP communications hotspot but I can tell you from experience that the service providers in this area have been flocking to Internet Telephony Conference & Expo when we hold it in South Florida. I expect more news of this sort to come out soon.

Posted in IP Communications

Microsoft Nortel Deal

September 21, 2006

I spoke with a few of Nortel’s competitors and they feel the recent news about Nortel and Microsoft collaborating is not such a big deal. They say there is nothing in the details that excludes any other communications vendor from doing the same if not more with the operating systems leader.

My take is that even if this is true Nortel did a smart thing by working with Microsoft early and they certainly are leveraging this relationship to improve their brand. The financial scandal of years past is slowly being forgotten and anything additional they can do to convey strength and stability makes sense.

Posted in IP Communications, JITC, VoIP

Around the IP Communications World

September 21, 2006

Perhaps this should entry would be better titled around the IP Communications world in 4 days?

Mike Genaro, TMC's VP of Marketing tells me that the International attendance at the ITEXPO coming up in San Diego will be between 60-70 countries.

According to Mike, we are now at 54 countries represented on the IT registration list. This is up from 49 last week.

As I have written before TMC events bring IP Communications decision makers from around the globe.

Posted in IP Communications, ITEXPO

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 ... 293 Next

Communications and Technology Blog - Tehrani.com

IP Communications