VoIP

VoIP news, trends, and opinions, VoIP reviews. Covering Asterisk, Cisco, Grandstream, Polycom, Microsoft, Vonage, Packet8, etc.

CounterPath Releases Bria 3.2

April 5, 2011

Update: According to a CounterPath spokesperson, "Counterpath had to delay the launch of the Bria 3.2 update to the end of this month."
CounterPath Corporation today released Bria 3.2, with enhanced enterprise features, internal chat rooms, and multiple account integration support. The Bria multimedia softphone is available for Mac and Windows, and adds support for multiple Instant Message and Presence accounts as well as the introduction of a Ribbon for Microsoft Outlook 2010.

“Bria 3.2 lays the foundation of our Social Networking strategy,” said Todd Carothers, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Products, CounterPath. “The way users leverage the Internet for communicating with friends, family and colleagues is changing. Our personal and work lives are blurring and with the addition of Social Networking we see a significant change in how users want to communicate.”

Posted in SIP, TMCnet, Unified Communications, Video Conferencing, VoIP

Google Offers $900 million for 6,000 Nortel telecom patents

April 4, 2011

Nortel's carcass continues to be picked at, with many golden nuggets discovered, making their demise all the more surprising.
Google is offering $900 million for 6,000 Nortel telecom patents covering 4G, wireless, data networking, optical, voice, semiconductors and other telecom areas, according to ZDNet.

Here's Google's official response:

The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation. Some of these lawsuits have been filed by people or companies that have never actually created anything; others are motivated by a desire to block competing products or profit from the success of a rival’s new technology. The patent system should reward those who create the most useful innovations for society, not those who stake bogus claims or file dubious lawsuits. It's for these reasons that Google has long argued in favor of real patent reform, which we believe will benefit users and the U.S.

Posted in Android, Google, Mobile Phones, TMCnet, Technology and Science, Unified Communications, VoIP, Wireless

Infonetics Research - "Breakout year for SIP trunking"

March 31, 2011

Infonetics Research put out a report stating that the VoIP services market is nearing the $50 billion mark and called it a "breakout year for SIP trunking."

According to the report, “The VoIP service market weathered the economic turmoil of the last couple of years, and, with increasing customer adoption, reached $49.8 billion in 2010 (compared to $34.8 billion in 2008). While the residential services segment remains the largest of the market at 69% of total revenue, business VoIP services are growing at faster rates; a notable example: SIP trunking had a breakout year with 143% revenue growth in 2010,” notes Diane Myers, directing analyst for VoIP and IMS at Infonetics Research.

VoIP SERVICES MARKET HIGHLIGHTS

Infonetics Research forecasts the combined business and residential/SOHO VoIP services market to grow to $74.5 billion in 2015
Managed IP PBX business VoIP service revenue is expected to more than double from 2010 to 2015
NTT of Japan retains its leadership as the world's largest residential VoIP service provider, followed by Comcast and France Télécom
The fastest growing segments of the VoIP services market are SIP trunking and hosted UC telephony
The number of residential VoIP subscribers increased 19% in 2010 to 157 million worldwide
Based on healthy demand for cloud-based services, the number of seats for IP Centrex and hosted UC services grew 20% in 2010

Infonetics' VoIP and UC Services and Subscribers report, published twice per year, features an IP Centrex Provider Tracker and provides worldwide and regional market size, forecasts, and analysis of residential/SOHO (small office, home office) VoIP services, business VoIP and UC services, and VoIP subscribers. Business voice services tracked include managed IP PBX services, hosted VoIP and unified communication (UC) services (IP Centrex by business size, UC applications, UC telephony), and IP connectivity services (VoIP VPN/IP access, SIP trunking, IP integrated access). Regions tracked include North America, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), Asia Pacific, and Central and Latin America (CALA).

Posted in SIP, Unified Communications, VoIP, Vonage

Aastra XML 4 SIP Contest Results

March 23, 2011

Aastra today announced the winners of their "XML 4 SIP" contest. Full disclosure, I was one of the judges asked to evaluate and vote for my favorite XML applications that run on their XML-capable Aastra IP phones. According to Aastra, people coming from 16 countries registered for this contest (77 registrations). You can view the various applicants including screenshots here.

Posted in SIP, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

Digium Launches Asterisk Tech Tips Webinars

March 23, 2011

Steve Sokol, Asterisk Marketing Director for Digium informed me that starting this week Digium will be presenting a bi-weekly series of webinars called Asterisk Tech Tips. Steve explained, "Each episode consists of a tutorial covering an interesting feature of Asterisk, followed by an open Q&A session. People are welcome to ask questions about the tutorial topic, but it's also an open forum for general Asterisk questions."

This week Malcolm Davenport (Digium employee #4 & Senior Product Manager for Asterisk and Asterisk SCF) will be covering one of the more popular new features of Asterisk 1.8: tying Asterisk into Google. The tutorial will teach people how to effectively use Google's voice chat (part of Gmail) as a soft-phone with Asterisk, and how to make and receive free calls in the U.S.

Posted in Asterisk, Google, SIP, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

Burma (Myanmar) Bans VoIP

March 22, 2011

Burma's military junta ordered all public and private Internet cafés to stop using VoIP. According to the Irrawaddy:

“The increasing use of the VoIP overseas calls via the Internet services such as Skype, G [Google] Talk, Pfingo, VZO, etc. given by PACs [Public Access Centers] and cyber cafés have caused official overseas calls through the [junta's] communication services to decline, affecting state revenue,” says the official instruction issued on March 2 by Tint Lwin, the managing director of the Myanmar Posts and Telecommunication (MPT), which was sent to the chairman of Myanmar Info-Tech Corporation Ltd.

“Currently, this service has not been officially permitted [by the MPT] to be used, it is illegal under existing telecommunication laws and legal action is likely if the PAC and cyber cafés continue to give the service,” he said.

Posted in Android, Skype, TMCnet, VoIP

Facebook VoIP?

March 18, 2011

VoIP on Facebook hasn't gotten much attention, partly because Facebook doesn't natively support it. Sure there are paid third-party apps like the $1.99 Facebook Messenger app for the iPhone (renamed to Fone). However, it's only for the iPhone and doesn't work on PCs. Facebook has become the central place to interact with friends and family, share photos, IM, post comments, so why hasn't Facebook added VoIP support?

Yes Facebook lets you communicate via IM, but why not VoIP? Facebook leverages XMPP (Jingle) for chat, as does Google Talk for both IM and VoIP.

Posted in SIP, Skype, Social Networking, TMCnet, VoIP

XConnect Has Killer Growth in 2010

March 17, 2011

Back in January 2010 I mentioned how XConnect's peering federation announced at ITEXPO was now offering "High-Definition (HD) Voice Peering Federation". Their federation service for carrier peering let's you carry both HD voice and HD video by passing codecs across carrier networks. I explained one of the stumbling blocks to HD voice when I wrote:

Once you make an outside call then your carrier has to support HD. Further, if your carrier has to hand the call off to another carrier to terminate the call, you need both carriers to have a peering agreement to allow the HD codec to traverse their network.

Posted in Cisco, Microsoft, SIP, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

netTALK vs. magicJack

March 16, 2011

netTALK sent me their netTALK DUO VoIP device to test. Obvious comparisons will be made with magicJack since both offer all you can eat U.S. and Canada calling for a flat yearly rate. In the case of netTALK it is $69.95 $49.95 (the first year); $29.95 (each year after).

Posted in Android, SIP, TMCnet, VoIP

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