Tom Keating : VoIP & Gadgets Blog
Tom Keating
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VoIP

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

Cisco Strengthens Products For Midmarket

February 12, 2013


Cisco today announced a series of news surrounding their midmarket product line and their partners that sell Cisco products in this space. A quick overview is that they announced some enhancements to Cisco Business Edition 6000, their midmarket collaboration platform, a new Cisco Express Collaboration specialization, simplification of Telepresence Advanced Technology Programs, and tools for Midsize Business Marketing Campaigns.

I spoke with Marc Inderhees, Senior Manager, Worldwide Collaboration Channel Sales about this news. He stated that Cisco sees the midmarket as 100-1000 employees with over 3.7 million midmarket businesses worldwide. According to Cisco, 1 in 6 employees work for a midmarket company.


Add-on Makes Microsoft Lync Feature-Complete to Compete with PBXs

January 31, 2013


Yesterday, at ITEXPO I met with some representatives from Bressner, a German-based company with some interesting add-ons for Microsoft Lync. Now targeting the U.S. (English website) their Lync add-ons add some powerful features to Microsoft Lync that help make Lync have feature-parity with PBXs, allowing enterprises to use Lync as a PBX replacement with no compromise.

Bressner's Dr. Klaus Zünkler, Principal Solutions Architect and Mitch Friend discussed three of their Lync products. The first was FonComfort, which is designed to fill the feature-gap in Microsoft Lync. One of those feature-gap fillers is "true busy" so the caller doesn't have to pay for the call if you're already on another call. I asked Klaus and Mitch why this was a popular feature since typically a call would drop to voicemail if you were on a call or unavailable and they said this "true busy" feature was more popular in Europe due to a cultural thing.


Surf Communications Solutions Aims to Slay the Video Giant

January 30, 2013

Video conferencing has held promise for many years - dating back to the 1964 AT&T Picturephone, but now has the time finally arrived for video conferencing to take off? The simple answer is "yes", but it's way more complicated than that. Yes, standards like SIP and H.264 have made video interoperability between endpoints less of an issue, but there are other issues to consider. For instance, Polycom, Cisco, Avaya, and LifeSize have very expensive MCUs for their in-room conferencing systems.

Asterisk 1-2-3 Workshop Well-Attended at ITEXPO

January 29, 2013

WebRTC Challenges

January 22, 2013

WebRTC holds a lot of promise, and with the buzz surrounding WebRTC beginning to reach a fever pitch, it's worth pointing out the challenges facing WebRTC.

First, let's begin with the expectations set for WebRTC. At TMC's recent WebRTC Conference, a panel discussed how WebRTC has high expecations. WebRTC has very ambitious goals, aiming to become the de facto standard by which users voice and video chat with other Internet users, which has the developer community and techies like myself very excited. Recently, I've written about WebRTC Demo fun, 2013 - The Year of WebRTC, and

WebRTC Test Demo Fun

January 21, 2013

WebRTC is pretty cool, allowing you to perform VoIP and video conferencing all within a browser. I thought it would be cool to demo some WebRTC code here leveraging getUserMedia, an API that began as part of HTML5 and was split off into the W3C WebRTC specification suite. It allows JavaScript access to a device's cameras and microphones to enable in-browser VoIP and video-conferencing. Further, with HTML5 it's easy to apply cool video filters (think Instagram) on-the-fly while in a video conference.

So without further adeiu, let's try "Self View" Camera on your WebRTC-enabled browser - Google Chrome, Opera, and Firefox (nightly build only) all support WebRTC, though not Internet Explorer (yet).

Logitech UC Solution for Cisco 725-C Launches

January 17, 2013


Logitech has now integrated voice, video and messaging controls into the Logitech UC Solution for Cisco 725-C, a UC keyboard (K725-C), wireless mouse (M525-C), and HD camera (Logitech C920-C) combo designed for Cisco Jabber. Cisco Jabber is a unified communications software client that gives users access to presence, instant messaging (IM), voice, video, voice messaging, desktop sharing and conferencing.

The keyboard features illuminated control buttons for call answer/end, mute video, mute audio, and volume controls. The keyboard LCD screen displays Caller ID, call duration and receives calls for the user currently signed into the system, making it ideal for hot desking work environments where users don’t have a permanently assigned desk or phone.


2013 - The Year of WebRTC

January 9, 2013

WebRTC has been making great strides of late. A few companies using worth checking out are bistri, Plivo, and twelephone. I'm in the process of testing bistri and twelephone, but I did actual use Plivo's proof-of-concept WebRTC offering, which I'll get into a in a moment.

First an overview of bistri and twelephone. bistri is pretty interesting because it lets you link with Facebook, Google, Windows Live, Yahoo, Jabber/XMPP, and Вконтакте.

Facebook Testing Free VoIP calling in Messenger app

January 3, 2013



Well, well, well - just days after my "Skype vs. Facebook - How WebRTC Will Turn Friends into Enemies" post where I said Facebook could crush Skype if they chose to get into VoIP, Facebook released a new version of Facebook Messenger for iOS that sports VoIP features.

According to the Verge, "Facebook today began testing a new feature in its Messenger app that lets Canadian users call each other for free anywhere they have a Wi-Fi or cellular data connection. The test for now only applies to Messenger for iOS, but could roll out to Android users, as well as people worldwide, if the test goes well."

I just tried it out on my iPhone and so far it's only one-way voice messages that you record and send to your Facebook friends.





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