Discover the reasons that ENUM is not popular with telephony service providers. How does ENUM + EmeR = decentralized ENUM in order to attract telephony service providers to get involved.
Since what is stored in blockchain, supposedly cannot be hidden, this poses transparency in every kind of business imaginable. On the other hand, blockchain does enable users to hide coded messages and links to information or media, sometimes that which is illegal. These are hidden. Hidden? I thought that nothing can be hidden in blockchain. Just asking ...
He says, “We have one customer here in the USA that is running about 5 million devices on a very small footprint. We use 6 servers to manage their entire network. They wanted to offer a free service to their customers, not per minute, not via the PSTN connection. How do we do this over the top?”
Cloudonix COO Eric continues, “How do we use VoIP? They approached various CPaaS providers. All of them said something like, ‘You want 50 million devices with 10 million minutes per month. Okay, that is ½ cent per device. Okay, that will be 2.5 million USD per month.”
Response is typically, “No, that doesn’t make any sense. That is too expensive.”
So Eric says they built a solution that requires less server, does not connect to regular voice lines, doesn’t go to PSTN, no per minute fee. This allows them to do low bandwidth activities and low battery usage because they are using the SIP keep-alives … which help to keep the following from occuring: dropped calls, inbound calls from going straight to voicemail, only receiving some inbound calls, but not all, inbound calls that don't ring and inbound calls that automatically fail.
He notes that one of the side effects they discovered that is built into their system is the contextual communication. For example, their customer had an account with them for a car or a device and someone would call and say, “I need help. I need to know how to work this.”
Eric says, “If you have the policy number of the unit and the same unit as in the policy, they would give you service. The problem is that it wasn’t going to the person who had the same policy. What they found is because of the way we handle data out of stream back to their service, call center and CRM, they can now determine who the user is because it is already a two-factor authentication and they can determine the phone that they have which is registered with them.
“Because of the information on the phone inside the app, they are able to collect the data from the app… which page in my app are you on, which button did you click, what is the context of what you were doing? This information goes back to the call center and suddenly they know which device and which person is there. It is not just someone picking up the phone off the wall or off the desk … you actually know who it is. You can’t do that with regular caller ID identification. Now, it’s inside the data stream, fully allowing full blown data enablement from the app.”
“A good example is if someone is in an automobile accident. Everybody is safe. The first thing you have to do is exchange information with the other driver such as insurance and license. Call the insurance company to possibly have a tow truck take the car. All of this starts with, ‘Please type in your policy number. Who are you? Where are you? What happened?’”
“You go through a whole IVR menu and then you are finally with the agent. It may take 5-10 minutes’ worth of authentication and building a context of what is going on. You go into the app from the insurance company. You click the choice of ‘I had an accident.’ They know from the GPS of the phone where you are physically located. They know who are and what your policy is. This is already available with the setup of the Cloudonix app.”
“The agent may ask you to take a picture of the driver’s license of the other person involved which updates the system automatically. Now, ‘take pictures of the surroundings...you say there was no stop sign for you but there was for the other person? We need all this in case you need to go to court. You need a tow truck. It will be there in two hours. Let me send you a pizza and a bottle of something to drink while you wait…’”
Eric continues, “The claim can be completed through this simple app process while memories are fresh before the tow truck arrives.
“To take this one step further, partnered with the car company, sensor data can be read by the app off the car. What happened before, during and after the car crash? This reduces appraisal time and such.”
The above explains what contextual communication means.
“One can even hook up to Google Services for stress analysis and use it with a call center to see if a person is lying. The app can do transcription also. This whole setup makes processes available in a new way that are not available in traditional CPaaS,” Eric added.
I (Suzanne) mentioned that it was good that Eric described the technical process behind contextual communication and then gave a couple of examples. He replied that even developers need concrete applications of a technology to fully understand it. Like, it’s a wonderful technology, so what do I do with it?
One could apply the technique that Eric and I discuss here to a bank app for a mortgage company or to handle the kinds of challenges that companies like Uber and Food-to-Go have. It’s all about saving time and money and making the customer happy and making the customer want to stay aboard. Eric actually explains this use in detail also during the interview.
The use of contextual communication can help to reduce the number of agents a business needs to handle customer service, technical support and sales communications, or keep those agents and handle more customers. A happy employee is proud of the company and takes more initiative and a happy customer refers other happy customers, remember?
Eric discusses the fact that all the communications occur “in-app,” making it much more secure, even HIPAA-compliant, than traditional forms of communications. More information is available at cloudonix.io.
Learn from the most empowering companies at ITEXPO and other TMCnet conferences and exhibitions. (I'm with DIDX.net global wholesale DID number marketplace VP and Suzahdi.com custom designed cosplay and classic leather jacket business co-founder.)
Virtual number, direct inward dialing and network technology are all different now than they were in say, the late 1990s. I remember when all I could get was CDMA in the US which meant I was situation-normal-all-messed-up from 2002 - 2010 even while traveling for DIDX in Europe, Middle East and Asia. I had to keep the same phone number no matter where I moved unless I used a virtualphoneline and routed it via FreeWorldDialup or something like that.
Even GSM feels like a very old technology and either today or tomorrow it is going...gone. Check out Republic Wireless (republicwireless.com), Google Pixel (https://store.google.com/product/pixel_phone) and Sprint Wifi (https://www.sprint.com/landings/wifi-on-the-go/). They already offer connection via eSim, and it's considered SIM-less. A few hundred DIDX direct inward dialing phone number customers offer such paired with access to virtual numbers as needed according to business and travel needs. It seems like most them have the word "roaming" in their company name.
Still, eSIM use is in the infancy stage, and reviews may not be very good because it is so dependent upon Internet driven connections. Problems with reception and connectivity can make them feel unreliable. It has to improve, and I am sure the best answer to this is in one of these kids' minds who play with Legos, virtual headsets and SnapChat while jumping at the local trampoline park during their free time.
eSim has so many advantages over traditional SIM line. The calls are less expensive, and traveling is not interrupted because changing one's country of residence does not affect call rate! It is geographically-boundary-free phone service because of Internet connectivity. Plus, 3G Wifi is usually free, etc.
Telecoms have to invest big money in infrastructure changes, something they all talk about at TelcoDays Las Vegas, CommunicAsia, ITW and ITEXPO.
With such a large majority of consumers using mobile phones with traditional SIM, our DIDX head developer Kamal Panhwar guesses it will take at least 10 years before eSIM will become more of the norm. It will change definitely to take advantage of WIFI and Internet connectivity, without Sim...but I think it will happen just in time for some newer technology that promises even more efficient and empowering mobile communications in some really unusual way none of us are thinking about right now.
Scenario 1
Twilio API enables you to make calls, so we can send an alert to a pager using Twilio's API.
We can set up our own email type of service, and we can send an email. Can anyone validate this? I don't have a pager number to test on.
Scenario 2
We can create our own pager using Anduino. Some people are saying, "Sweet."
Check https://www.twilio.com/blog/2014/11/go-old-school-build-a-pager-using-arduino-node-js-and-twilio.html for an interesting tutorial of how to do it.
There are actually many services that work like a pager available today. We can create an IT desk alert service using Twilio. An example is at https://github.com/eurica/PagerDutyCallDesk.
Intrigued and want more info? Let me know, and I'll put you in touch with more technical people on my DIDX team for sample code of Twilio to call and things like that.
See you at ITEXPO in Fort Lauderdale, Florida Feb. 13 - 16, 2018. Looks more exciting than ever.
Thanks to Leslie Bester, smart guy and owner of Les Net and Magic Online, for sharing the image of the pagers. He says, "Rockin the pager array."
A few days before Astricon 2017, TMCnet's Rich Tehrani, Telespeak and Asterisk Community's David Duffet and MongoTel's Moshe BT recorded a video conversation with me about cloud communications gatherings, starting an ITSP, and how VoIP companies can leverage artificial intelligence and other new technologies for business revenue and software development growth. Moshe BT, tagged as the Jewish Steve Jobs of Israel by "Voice of Israel" and also known as founder of now three multi-million dollar telecom / tech companies joined two other well-known IP communications master minds and me. David Duffet, the "one who helps the geeks speak" Director of the Worldwide Asterisk Community and the only certified Zig Ziglar Legacy Certified Coach and Trainer in UK and Rich Tehrani, CEO of TMCnet with 12,300 + organic Twitter followers, and who has helped millions of cloud communications communications companies start and grow successfully since 1999, the year of the first ITEXPO conference.
MongoTel's Moshe clued us into a new project of his, not yet launched, to take telecom completely out of SIP, with zero per minute and zero connection fees. It will include certain security features and as such projects evolve, ways of monetizing will arise.
David Duffet mentioned it sounded a bit similar to Jeff Pulver's FreeWorldDialup. He noted that Astricon 2017 had five business tracks which included Developer, Developer Xtra, Infrastructure, Business and Deployment. Speakers included, for example, Voneto founder, Kamailio Co-founder, Red Hat's NF Partner Engineering Head, Bicom Systems' business development director, Qxip's RTC specialist, Fenero's CEO, Jenne's senior director of marketing, OpenSIPS core developer Razvan Crainea, FreeSWITCH's founder, NIPPON TELEGRAPH AND TELEPHONE CORPORATION's IT engineer and Disruptive Analysis' Dean Bubley.
Early in the talk, Rich Tehrani shared thought-provoking realities, "VoIP, more or less, transformed communications. Now, we are seeing focus on business transformation, becoming more efficient...help companies compete with new entrants whose goal is to put every other business out of business. Who would have thought that Ford and GM would be disrupted by an app that connects people with a stranger in a car that gives them a ride? Some crazy entrepreneur stuck a bunch of laptop batteries inside a car chassis and made an electric car and now the entire industry's gone electric...Germany and Detroit are behind the curve on two fronts."
Moshe replied, "If you don't disrupt yourself, you will get disrupted. Kind of like Apple disrupted their laptops with their iPads, and now with their cellular watch, they want to disrupt their iPhones. Kind of like Amazon's Kindle disrupted books themselves."
From there, Rich spearheaded a new topic cyber security and how it's a new world, not like it used to be. Even big company CEOs and CFOs are being bilked by simple email fraud.
David Duffet added, going back to the previous topic, that Asterisk is popular as a tool of disruption. Asterisk was helpful in the adoption of SIP (session initiation protocol) and now again helpful with webRTC and Internet of Things.
ITEXPO 2018 is Feb. 14 - 16 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a warm and popular place for that cold time of the year. Rich mentions in the talk there will be tracks or pavilions like * SD-WAN, Managed Service Provider, Asterisk World, Telecom Reseller Week, IDEA Showcase (like TedX for tech and telecom), Business Intelligence, ** Blockchain (public ledgers that disrupt many industries), and more.
August 22, 2017, Dean Bubley discussed the blockchain trend on his Disruptive blog. His stance on the technology is "pragmatic optimism."
He says, "Blockchain technology has many possible touch-points with the telecoms industry, from data-integrity management to back-office systems to billing - but maturity will take time. Some of the Utopian 'it'll change the world' and 'telcos are obsolete' rhetoric is overblown. Distributed ledgers will have many uses and opportunities in telecoms/networking - but are unlikely to overturn or radically-disrupt industry structures, at least on a 5-10 year view."
David Duffet answered my question about the planned Bicom Systems presentation at Astricon 2017 titled "How to Start and Run an ITSP." He shared, "You definitely need those visionary people that are looking toward the next thing, going after the early adopters of new technology and executing it. At the same time, you need the people who keep on keeping on, optimizing models based on existing technology."
Moshe shared, "Founder of Skype said that telecom is 100 years old, and telephone numbers will be dead in a certain number of years, and it's still not dead. The reason that it's not dead is that nobody actually killed it."
We move on to discuss how traditional VoIP companies can work with IoT, connected cars, blockchain, artificial intelligence and such to keep their evolving companies alive. David Duffet notes that Asterisk can be a building block for these things, such as not what is being said in voice but how it is being said, like the context of voice to judge certain things like medical conditions.
So the world of medicine as well as any other industry more fully integrates with the power of voice. For example, Parkinson's Disease can be diagnosed in this manner earlier than any other physical examination. Duffet worked with Aculab several years ago and remembered many conversations about speaker verification and not recognizing what is said but recognizing who is saying it. He flippantly predicted that at some stage of a sales discussion the potential customer's voice could be analyzed to tell you right away when they are ready to buy. I'm sure this is possible today.
Mongotel's Moshe noted that the emphasis is finally heading to focus on customers' needs instead how cool the new technology is. He gives advice to VoIP companies to do exactly that... such as if they need an alarm system that works with the VoIP service, provide it. In addition, add the necessary security for that system. Adjust the CRM per the company's size and needs.
Tehrani believes companies whose main service involves cloud communications will benefit when they research new technologies such as cyber security, office applications and others to understand how they can leverage them for their customers. One's geo location has much to do with which technology services to add like IoT for smart farming to save money and improve crop production in the Midwest US. Two other things to pay attention to are analytics and what your kids are doing like their texting craze was the path that eventually led to business Slack and their big interest in Snapchat, Youtube and Vine have led to more interest in using video in business. Think webRTC and all types of conferencing! Tehrani says to devote time studying trends every day to stay on top.
In regards to business continuity and disaster preparedness in the midst of the 2017 hurricanes, Duffet believes that SIP and partnering up with a company like Mongotel play a positive part in staying up and running. Open source telephony platforms such as Asterisk make it easy to do this at low or practically zero cost.
"Cloud has changed the dynamic for disasters. It allows companies to have a flexible way to take communications that at one moment goes to a phone on a desk to be forwarded to devices in practically any location such as hotel lounge, your cell phone (in the case where cell towers work during a disaster)," Tehrani noted.
Speaking of cell towers, the ones in Puerto Rico did not fare well, he says, because they were not set to withstand the strength of the winds; whereas, the towers in Texas were, so more damage occurred in Puerto Rico.
It was reported on Sept 20, Hurricane Maria rammed directly into Puerto Rico early Wednesday morning as a powerful Category 4 storm with 140 mph winds. It's the strongest storm to hit the island in 80 years. In late August, 2017, Hurricane Harvey was forecast to make landfall as a hurricane somewhere over the Texas Coast. ... Extreme wind warnings were issued for landfalling major hurricanes with winds of 115 mph or higher. Harvey was forecast to have winds in the eyewall between 115 and 130 mph!
Be sure to watch Moshe BT, Rich Tehrani, David Duffet and I discuss crucial topics to cloud communications companies: how to make your VoIP company more helpful to 2017 and future customers and disaster preparedness and the IP and cloud communications and technology events that will help us all meet the experts, do the research and develop new business and gain and retain customers to do both.
*SD-WAN is a software-defined wide area network, a specific application of software-defined networking (SDN) technology applied to WAN (wide area networks) connections, which are used to connect enterprise networks – including branch offices and data centers – over large geographic distances.
** Blockchain is a method of managing electronic cash without a central administrator among people who know nothing about one another.
Visit www.itexpo.com (Feb. 14 – 16, 2018), www.mongotel.com, www.astricon.com, www.didx.net, https://www.opensips.org/events/index.html/ (May 1 – 4, 2018 in Amsterdam) and www.cluecon.com (date TBA) for more information.
]]>Areski Belaid, Star2Billing CTO and founder, as well as Newfies-Dialer explains his company's services that can push a business and especially contact center business forward to better organization, customer retention, and communications. His Newfies-Dialer is a Cluecon sponsor, and the voice broadcasting system has some awesome news. Read on!
1. In a few words that would make sense to even my Dad or a newbie to open source development, what does your company do for its clientele?
Star2Billing provides installation services, support, training and development on our freely available open source products that include A2Billing, a telecoms product allowing our customers to provide calling card, VoIP service and sell telephone numbers, also we provide auto-dialer systems used in outbound call centers, and phone surveying for market research and phone polling.
2. What's the latest news of your company?
Our voice broadcasting system, Newfies-Dialer, although not freely available, is being used by companies worldwide in outbound call centers, for market researchers and pollsters, particularly suiting telecoms companies who wish to provide these services to their customers, as Newfies-Dialer is both multi-tenant and can bill customers.
3. How is your company involved in the global open source community?
We contribute at a technical level to the projects that we use in our own products, as well as assist on community mailing lists and forums. We have also released and continue to maintain a long list of free and open source libraries, some for charting, some for text to speech. We try to spin new projects when we see there is a need for something that may be useful for other developers.
4. Does your company use a variety of open source platforms like FreeSWITCH, OpenSIPs, Kamailio and Asterisk and how?
We use Asterisk for A2Billing and in some cases Kamailio as well for scaling up A2Billing installations. FreeSWITCH is used in our premium product, Newfies-DIaler. Our other product, CDR-Stats, supports FreeSWITCH, Asterisk, and Kamailio.
[Pretty well-rounded as if often the case in IP communications industry in regards to open source! One of the companies I work with...DIDX also uses all four. The same can be said for many of the 25K members. This is less about competition and more about what we can all make happen for the better overall. < Suzanne]
5. How can the IP communications industry participate in the opportunities of chatbots & AI?
As a company operating in the call center industry, we are always looking at chatbot and AI. Conversational chatbots are booming recently, and the technology to power a chatbot are now available to us, all thanks to solutions like API.AI and Amazon lex. There is plenty of innovation to be made in the telecommunication industry, but it’s now easy to provide Intelligent interaction on phone calls. The time where we use to press a key on a phone to navigate through a multi-level IVR will soon be a thing of the past...
AI is also becoming a strong player in our industry, for instance companies like Lyrebird are using AI to build text2speech systems that can reproduce anyone's voice using a few minutes of recording, quite scary! AI & Machine learning is key for speech recognition; we will see these technologies getting better, faster and more available to everyone in the coming years. It’s still in the early days, but there are huge opportunities for our industry to create new products and improve existing ones.
6. What are the best social networks, websites, and forums where people can learn from you, collaborate with you and do business with you?
If people want to know more about our auto-dialer product, visit our website and our blog, we actively blog about our latest releases, the tech we use, and the problems we are trying to solve:
https://www.newfies-dialer.org/category/blog/
You can also hear more about Newfies-Dialer on twitter https://twitter.com/newfies_dialer, and for people that want to follow me directly and interact online, you can find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/areskib.
1. In a few words that would make sense to even my Dad or a newbie to open source development, what does your company do for its clientele?
Everything is about communication, or about transporting voice, person to person or in bulk fashion. Of course, transporting over IP networks (or Internet, for my Dad). Now, what we do exactly, is to help our customers to build system/service/platforms to allow such a communication. And we help them with knowledge or with product or solutions.
[So funny because I am always using the term Internet and not IP network or network. When I do, younger people around me say things like, "Don't call it that." What can I say? < Me, Suzanne]
2. What's the latest news of your company?
There is a bit of ambiguity here, when referring to the "company" - in most of the time I tend to think of the OpenSIPS project as the "company", instead of considering the commercial company. If we look at the commercial company, the latest news is about preparing a new generation of products to reflect the latest capabilities of OpenSIPS. We focus more on offering a more flexible and versatile Front End (or SBC) with a wide range of capabilities, from topology and security to billing and analytics.
3. What do you look forward to the most about Cluecon conferences?
As in each of the past 10 years, we will be attending (and sponsoring) ClueCon 2k17. Thanks to the wonderful organizer of this event, we will gather in Chicago among fellow VoIP enthusiasts and put our shoulders to the wheel in pushing things forward. After all, making things better (and learning about them) is the main purpose of ClueCon, isn’t it?
4. How is your company involved in the global open source community?
Well, OpenSIPS is an OSS and it is globally used, for global communication purposes :)
5. Does your company use a variety of open source platforms like FreeSWITCH, OpenSIPs, Kamailio and Asterisk and how?
Of course that OpenSIPS is our main pillar in all our platforms, but FreeSWITCH and Asterisk are also there whenever we need the media or classV support. And I have to admit we worked with Kamailio too....surprisingly, right ? :)
[I know you guys do, and that is the beauty of the open source IP communications community - collaboration! < Suzanne]
6. How can the IP communications industry participate in the opportunities of chatbots, Internet beacons, virtual assistants, AI, IoT, blockchain and/or crypto currency? Typically VoIp companies always thought VoIP is what they would do forever...by itself.
SIP (and its entire ecosystem of extensions and implementations) offer a reliable and powerful infrastructure for anything requiring communication or sessions over IP . And all those areas do rely on a communication under-layer. You can have IoT devices using SIP to talk to each other, to exchange data or share events. AI learning is based on interactions ; and interactions means communication.
7. What are the best social networks, websites, and forums where people can learn from you, collaborate with you and do business with you?
In terms of business, LinkedIn is the best place for networking. In terms of OpenSIPS project, all social medias are in used. ***In order to build a communication software you need first to learn to communicate with people. Follow and / or join Bogdan Iancu on LinkedIN today.
***[One of the wisest statements I've read in a while.]
The perfect example of a communications tech company that is setting the bar (with development such as OpenSIPs) for many of us is Telnyx, a key sponsor for OpenSIPs Summit 2017. The trendsetting business sponsors, speaks at, exhibits and hosts parties at events such as ITEXPO, Enterprise Connect, Cluecon and OpenSIPs Summit. Visit their website and be thrilled with the encouraging words: "BE YOUR OWN CARRIER® Bringing businesses the next evolution of real-time communications." Dave Casem, the CEO and founder, started the company in 2009 because he knew he could provide maximum flexibility and great value-add features in wholesale space. He's got a fresh, honest, outgoing attitude, and so does his team and the solutions his company provides. Meet him and other smart, collaborative communications technology business and technical developers like him at OpenSIPs May 2 - 5.
Pictured is Telnyx headquarters in Chicago.
Send your technology developers to OpenSIPs Summit 2017, or find the developers you need there. Your marketing and executive teams need to immerse themselves into the new IoT, big data, voice and video over Internet, chat, Internet SMS, mobile app, social media and other integrated service opportunities that are powered in the background with OpenSIPs. Have your software and app developers mix with the brightest minds behind the biggest Internet communications and technology development sensations.
Learn how to propel your company into one that its users never want to
leave. Make your startup, your CLEC, your MNO or MVNO, your multi-location contact center business, and your mobile app and social media company something that appeals to all generations: the team playing, civic oriented GIs; the optimistic, technology envisioning baby boomers; the entrepreneurial, individualistic Generation X; the digitally literate, highly organized Generation Y / Millennials; and the savvy consuming, more interracially mixed Generation Z / boomlets.
Don't have any developers on the payroll yet and need some to start a new service or to improve and expand? At OpenSIPs, discover the right people to hire and the right consultants to guide you now who are trusted, experienced and knowledgeable. Take advantage of one on one talks, panel discussions, intense workshops and more.
OpenSIPs Summit is May 2 - 5, 2017 in the most exciting city of the world: Amsterdam, Netherlands! At the Summit, your human resources will participate in sessions on native clustering support, enhanced SIP (session initiation protocol) capturing capabilities, Quality Based Routing, VoIP security and more in presentations and workshops with world-renowned international speakers and collaborations. An exciting Round Table talk is planned. There are design clinics for one to one conversations about your project or application for expert opinions and perspectives. Plus one full day of total immersive Advanced OpenSIPs training with highly effective, veteran project developers and leads.
Pictured is Bogdan Iancu, founder of OpenSIPs.
A special boat dinner trip is planned during OpenSIPs Summit 2017 through breathtaking canals of Amsterdam, Netherlands, thanks to VoiceTel, VoiceCenter (Israel), VoIPGrid (Netherlands), Qxip, RateTel (with an impressive array of business partners), Telnyx (Chicago), and OpenSIPs Solutions. The arts, music, nightlife, excellent public transportation and total walkability make the city so much fun outside actual Summit hours. With the friendly participants of OpenSIPs such as me Suzanne Bowen, VP DIDX.net and co-founder of Suzahdi (leather jacket fashion brand), you will have others to hang out with practically anytime. Plus ... someone will win a totally, bad-to-the-bone leather jacket by Suzahdi.
Speaker proposals and sponsorship applications are being accepted for a limited time at http://www.opensips.org/events/Summit-2017Amsterdam.html. Just click on "Call for Speakers" and the sponsorship link at the bottom of the page. Register now. See you in Amsterdam May 2 - 5, 2017 at OpenSIPs Summit!
]]>Digits enables T-Mobile's users to have a single phone number that points to and rings to multiple devices even in addition to the main smart phone, including computers, other phones, tablets, and even wearables like the Mobvoi Ticwatch2. Where Digits truly surpasses competition and truly warms the hearts of users are in its features like advanced call forwarding support. Like the perks that many call forwarding, virtual phone line and virtual phone number service providers already offer who use wholesale DIDX.net, Voxbone, DIDww, DIDLogic and VoIP Innovations to buy phone numbers and resell them to their customers... T-Mobile's Digits lets users buy as many phone numbers as they want and point them to ring to even a single device. It makes available temporary phone numbers, awesome for things like your short term Craigslist, eBay and Amazon sales listings, for special events like conferences and festivals, or just anytime the user does not feel good about sharing a certain business or personal number.
Here is the clincher, the shocker! And I have written quite a bit on business collaboration among "competitors." T-Mobile numbers even work with phones and devices that use AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Credo Wireless and other competing service networks. Simply download T-Mobile's Digits app to the device. Whether a user needs additional phone numbers to maintain ability to receive calls from VIP no matter where he or she is...whether the main phone number is the personal number and the additional number is the business number, separating work from personal...whether traveling means using a different carrier than T-Mobile...well, time to take a deep, relaxing breath of fresh air.
T-Mobile's Digits enables what is currently offered by a hodge podge of VoIP services that are currently available such as Rebtel and Skype. What makes T-Mobile's offer different is that it is a single solution with carrier-grade technology and from one of the world's most popular mobile service carriers.
Want to try T-Mobile Digits? Current subscribers have been beta testing in late 2016. This year 2017 is when anyone can take advantage at very low subscription cost, T-Mobile says.
What is your opinion of a service like Digits? What do you think about this powerhouse T-Mobile rolling out a service like this after over 35,000 have done so worldwide (per the number of DIDX.net signups)? How does Digits as noted above...compare to other companies' similar innovations? Let's talk about it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Tumblr...and in person at ITEXPO in Fort Lauderdale, Florida this week Feb. 8 - 10, 2017.
]]>Though freeSWITCH and Asterisk are well-known in USA and Kamailio and Asterisk are well-known in Europe and Asia, more interest than ever is evident with the increased number of Kamailio World 2016 signups from the Americas over the period of time since Kamailio World 2015 conference.
Why? Web services and WebRTC are two reasons with the popularity among people in all works of life who are providing medical advice, music performance, language instruction, preview of events, and such via Blab.im, Periscope, FreeConferenceCall, ZipDX, Hangout, GoLiveWith (TBL soon) and other like web communications apps. New video live streaming and conferencing apps launch regularly that support 1, 2, 3, 4 and more videos at one time, often accompanied by features such as recording, high-fives, shared text chat and call in options such as phone numbers and SIP. Some of the platforms listed above "realize" that any given participant may find her or himself with no or poor Internet available, so calls via direct inward dialing (DID numbers) are a choice, too.
According to several CPU usage tests, Kamailio is proven more economical than other open source commmunications platforms. For example, Asterisk can be easily fronted with Kamailio to make large scale WebRTC a reality. Kamailio supports SIP over Websockets. With just a few changes in one's configuration, Websockets can be enabled. Now, users can communicate not only in different combinations of soft phone to/from handset to/from PSTN, but also to/from web browser.
What's the big deal? Kamailio helps make unified and rich communications more effective, more accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Websocket clients work well behind network translation devices and firewalls. Several Kamailio modules help make this possible including outbound, stun, and websocket.
Readers are invited to register for Kamailio World and check out Kamailio mailing list for more information. Visit the TMC WebRTC Community, too.
Thank you to Peter Dunkley, WebRTC expert, technical director at Xura, previously with Acision and Crocodile RCS, who co-wrote today’s blog post.
Great talking with Daniel-Constantin Mierla, co-founder of Kamailio and Givoanni Maruzzelli of OpenTel.IT and active FreeSWITCH community contributor!
]]>
Service assurance in the mobile and telecommunications business helps companies to maintain and maximize networks for peak performance. Right? It helps to optimize quality of service with a goal of top proficiency and efficiency. OSS (operations support systems) services companies' portfolios cannot stick with just business as usual if they want to guide their first and other tier "communications service providers" to become "digital service providers." Two examples to expand services are automation and analytics. That is what MYCOM OSI does.
Mounir Ladki says in a recent DIDX telecom and mobile related podcast that to be really successful in the mobile and telecommunications space, one has to have more than one area of expertise, not just software, just telecom, or just OSS and IT, but a combination of all. There are, of course, proponents of specialization in one area, but MYCOM OSI makes the combination method work well for top tier communications service provider customers such as AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Maxis, STC, Telefonica, Telenor, T-Mobile, and Verizon,
The business model of MYCOM OSI's solutions development is quite agile with input very welcome from customers. Collaboration with customers is one of their goals.
"We implement this agile cycle. Learn fast. Fail fast. Move on to discover the successful part," says Mounir Ladki (about 6:41 into the podcast.)
He compares 5G's deep impact of today to that of the industrial revolution of 1760 - 1840. The cotton gin, the telephone, the perfected design of the lightbulb and more were absolutely changemaking just as the smartest phones and other devices and the abilities to entertain, secure, inform and build business over the Internet are today.
The UK's 5G Innovation Centre is funded by the UK government. Mounir, who is on the advisory board of the TM Forum (TeleManagement Forum and the Network Management Forum,) says there is much conversation surrounding 5G, a mobile communications technology. What are the key capabilities that we want 5G to deliver? Other popular topics are modulation schemes and radio propagation.
Around 9:33.0, Mounir Ladki and I switch our discussion to the acronym "NFV" which stands for "Network Functions Virtualization" and the ITEXPO East 2016 NFV SDN schedule. He says that 5G translates to the telecom world what has been happening in the IT...computing industry in the recent past...virtualization. It is very costly to run a telecom network, so of course, communications service providers are looking for ways to reduce that cost. NFV enables them to take their data and operating systems back to the cloud, reducing expenses and increasing opportunity to innovate.
Mr. Ladki says that communications service providers "spend a lot of money on infrastructure, but in the end, most of the revenue goes to what we call OTT, over the top Internet companies, the likes of Google, Amazon, and Facebook...NFV gives the agility the communications service providers need to launch services that correspond to their customers' requirements in realtime."
MYCOM acquired OSI in 2014. Throughout the last 20 years, they both have become major industry-leading operations support systems experts, so together, they are well-respected OSS experts in mobile and telecommunications especially.
Related URLs:
Key differentiators for the mobile network of the future by Mounir Ladki
NFV Offers Potential for Carriers Looking to Profit from the Cloud by Susan J. Campbell
Questions to Ask in Choosing the Right VNF for NFV Solution by Jim Machi
DIDX Podcast with OSS and Communications Service Provider Service Assurance Expert MYCOM OSI president and CTO Mounir Ladki
Telecom, mobile, IT type events I will be and where I'd like to network with my readers:
Convergence India January 20 - 22, New Delhi, India
ITEXPO East January 26 - 28, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, USA
GSMA Mobile World Congress February 22 - 25, Barcelona, Spain
Enterprise Connect March 7 - 10, Orlando, FL, USA
Shopping and Can't Get Help? WebRTC to the Rescue from Suzanne Bowen on Vimeo.
Rehan Allahwala, CEO of Super Technologies, Inc. and inventor of DIDX, jokingly throws in, "Hello, India!"
View the contact center on one video screen. It's all WebRTC-based! Shoppers and retailers, WebRTC customer service is a dream come true.
MERA Software Services works with products of Ericsoon, Tieto, Avaya, Ascom and more. Now, if only more brick and mortar stores would offer free WiFi. This Mera Software Services' video software package demo shows how people enjoy touching the products they want to buy but often enjoy getting more information on their own rather than from a physical salesperson. Well, we just don't want to wait.
MVNOs fit in this picture somehow, right?
Be sure to register for ITEXPO East 2016 now for more exciting opportunities to exhibit your company's products and services, to present white papers, and learn as well as develop business via the Expo and the Conference sessions! It is scheduled January 26 - 28, 2016 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Related information:
* Retail Customers Linked with Real-Time Customer Service via Video over Internet In Store
* Stellar ITEXPO East 2016 Exhibitor List
VoIP startup from Silencemedia on Vimeo.