VoIP

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

Aastra BluStar Media Phone Launches

February 28, 2011

Aastra today launched Aastra BluStar, a video conferencing solution for the desktop. The BluStar 8000i desktop media phone includes true HD video conferencing quality with unified communications and business applications along with collaboration. It includes a 13-inch touch screen that achieves true HD 720p video conferencing at a rate of 30 frames per second. It also includes excellent HD sound quality, powered by four voice tracking microphones and three speakers.

Posted in ITEXPO, SIP, TMCnet, Video Conferencing, VoIP

Bandwidth.com Acquires Dash - Google Voice, Skype & Others Impacted

February 23, 2011

Bandwidth.com, a nationwide supplier of VoIP network services to Voice 2.0 innovators such as Skype, Pinger, and others, today announced the acquisition of dash Carrier Services (dash), a North American-based provider of tier-one emergency services and wholesale carrier voice solutions. The acquisition provides Bandwidth with a definitive competitive edge, as it will now tightly couple additional advanced services, such as E911 calling, with its core voice and SMS offerings to deliver a stronger experience for customers who would otherwise need to cobble together these services in much less efficient ways. The deal was all-cash, and the combined company is now projected to generate over $100MM in revenues this year.

Voice 2.0 innovators will increasingly need to add services like E911 calling as VoIP adoption continues to accelerate, and Bandwidth.com can directly address this need through its now expanded portfolio of solutions.

Posted in Android, SIP, Skype, TMCnet, VoIP, Wireless

Microsoft Lync Virtualization How-to Guide

February 22, 2011

Microsoft just released a whitepaper that outlines best practice recommendations for running Lync Server 2010 in a virtualized environment.

Here's a snippet from the Table of Contents showing the covered topics:
1.2    Why Virtualize?
2    Virtualization in Lync Server 2010
2.1    Terminology
2.2    Supported Functionality
2.3    Hypervisors
2.3.1    Validated Hypervisors
2.3.2    Other Hypervisors
2.3.3    Unsupported Hypervisors
2.4    Guest Operating System Requirement
2.5    Virtualized Lync Server Deployment General Considerations
2.5.1    Mixing Physical and Virtual Servers Running Lync Server 2010
2.5.2    Spreading Lync Server Workloads on Different VM Hosts
2.5.3    High Availability through Virtualization
2.5.4    Quick Migration and Live Migration Support
2.5.5    Dynamic Memory Support

8    Measuring Performance on Virtual Lync Server 2010
8.1    Performance Indicators
8.1.1    Processor and Percentage of Processor Time
8.1.2    Network Interface
8.1.3    Memory
8.1.4    Databases
8.1.5    SIP

1.7    Establishing Performance Baselines
1.7.1    Resource Utilization Baseline Tests
1.7.2    User Load Baseline Tests
1.7.3    Multipoint Conferencing Unit (MCU) Resource Utilization Baseline Tests: (Monitor on All MCUs)

Running Lync in a virtualized environment is a popular topic amongst Lync aficionados, so read up on this document and avoid any pitfalls in your UC infrastructure!

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

SPIRIT DSP Lands Another Win - Huawei

February 16, 2011

SPIRIT DSP announced today the second big news of the week. Yesterday, they announced Viber, a VoIP app for the iPhone was powered by SPIRIT DSP and now today they are announcing that Huawei Technologies has extended its license with SPIRIT DSP for HD voice and video to carriers. Interesting that I never hear from SPIRIT DSP's competitor Global IP Sound (GIPS) any more -- who at one time powered Skype.

Anyway, under terms of the agreement, Huawei, an existing SPIRIT customer since 2007, will use SPIRIT's TeamSpirit Voice&Video Engine PC in its IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), Unified Communications (UC) and Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) solutions to carriers from the Huawei core network, delivering a PC video softphone to Huawei's carrier customers.

Posted in TMCnet, VoIP

Why Spirit DSP Powers Viber's Popular HD Mobile VoIP App

February 15, 2011

SPIRIT DSP, a voice and video over IP Engines provider, today announced that its TeamSpirit Voice Engine Mobile is powering the new Viber application that offers free HD Voice over IP (VoIP) calls from the iPhone.

"Within three days of launching Viber on the iPhone late last year, we received one million downloads, and seven million within the first month, quickly becoming the No. 1 free app in the Netherlands, Spain, Singapore, Taiwan, Israel and several other countries, validating the enormous demand for quality, free mobile VoIP calling," said Viber Media's CEO Talmon Marco. "We're incredibly pleased with this massive uptake and can credit SPIRIT's Voice Engine Mobile for the quality of the Viber voice experience."

Posted in Android, Apple, TMCnet, VoIP, Wireless

Asterisk + OpenBTS = Be Your Own Wireless Carrier

February 14, 2011

OpenBTS (Open Base Transceiver Station) is a free softare implementation of the GSP protocol allowing the creation of software-based GSM access points that enable standard GSM mobile phones to make phone calls without using traditional wireless providers' networks. In other words, create your own homebrew cellular network!

According to the OpenBTS Project, OpenBTS is an open-source Unix application that uses the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) to present a GSM air interface ("Um") to standard GSM handset and uses Asterisk software to connect calls leveraging SIP and VoIP.

The goal of the project is to reduce the cost of GSM service provision in rural areas and the developing world. They explain, "In plain language, we are working on a new kind of cellular network that can be installed and operated at about 1/10 the cost of current technologies, but that will still be compatible with most of the handsets that are already in the market. This technology can also be used in private network applications (wireless PBX, rapid deployment, etc.) at much lower cost and complexity than conventional cellular."

During the past few Burning Man festivals, OpenBTS has performed a week-long live field test under special temporary WE9XJN authorization to use certain wireless frequencies.

Posted in Asterisk, Mobile Phones, SIP, TMCnet, VoIP, Wireless

Cisco Responds to Polycom's Adoption of TIP and Interoperability

February 10, 2011

A Cisco representative saw my article about Polycom's announcement to support Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) and she thought I'd be interested in hearing Cisco's take. David Hsieh, vice president, emerging technologies, Cisco responded to this news announcement as follows:

"We are pleased to hear that Polycom is joining other companies in adopting the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP), the only open, multi-screen Telepresence interoperability protocol available today. TIP, originally developed by Cisco to enable multi-screen telepresence interoperability, was turned over to the IMTC (International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium) to be managed as an industry standard. It is not a Cisco proprietary protocol — it’s an open protocol available to anyone in the industry.

Posted in Cisco, Polycom, Polycom, TMCnet, VoIP

Hoot.me Wins SMS Voting Contest at StartupCamp3 at ITEXPO

February 9, 2011

I was at ITEXPO East in Miami and got to see some cool companies demoing their products on stage in front of hundreds of people. At the end we got to vote using our cell phones and SMS. Competition was tight, but in the end Hoot.me pulled out the win with their tutoring/study application that directly integrates with Facebook. You can invite friends to work on calculus problems for instance - including calculus symbols like the differential and integral signs.

Posted in Android, ITEXPO, Social Networking, TMCnet, VoIP

Polycom UC Intelligent Core Platform Supports TIP Standard - Interoperable with Cisco

February 9, 2011

June of last year I wrote about how Cisco had to adopt the open source TIP protocol before the EU would approve Cisco's acquisition of Tandberg:

An interesting back story behind the Cisco acquisition of Tandberg is that Cisco had to make sure Cisco's open source and free TIP (Telepresence Interoperability Protocol) protocol was used. The EU wouldn't approve the acquisition of Tandberg without Cisco agreeing to use this protocol. There have been obvious concerns (including my own) that Cisco/Tandberg could create a proprietary telepresence platform that locked out third-party competitors. Cisco and Tandberg just made an announcement stating advanced multiscreen telepresence interoperability with each other as well as other third-party systems, by integrating the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) on Cisco's newly acquired Tandberg TelePresence Server.

The fruits of that effort are now realized with today's announcement from Polycom.

Posted in Cisco, Polycom, Polycom, SIP, TMCnet, Video Conferencing, VoIP

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