Archive for the 'General' Category

Where Can I Get VoIP Training?

VoIP (http://www.tech-faq.com/voip.shtml) is definitely the wave of the future and there is much to learn about it so that when advances are made you aren’t left in the dark. Whether you want to receive training or professional reasons, you can get great VoIP training to help you understand all of the variables that make up voice over internet protocol. Read the rest of this entry »


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Packet8 and SunRocket Speak on VoIP

I just moderated a panel here at the VPF in Miami and the topic was voice 3.0 and when we will get there and what it would entail. My panelists were from 8x8 and SunRocket and in both cases the technical people within the organizations.
One of my goals as a moderator was to try to figure out from panelists just when VoIP 2.0 or even 3.0 will arrive and the answer seems – according to my panelists -- to be no time soon. The challenge here as discussed by Andrew Newton the Development Manager of the VoIP Platform Group at SunRocket is that consumers do not want advanced applications.
Andrew says consumers want some phone control on their PCs but not much. They are comfortable with the phone handset as the device controlling the phone.

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Living in the Third World of Communications

If you haven’t heard, a court decided Vonage needs to pay Verizon $58 million in past damages for patent infringement in the following areas:
  • Technology used to bridge Internet calls to the traditional phone system
  • Features such as call-waiting and voice-mail
  • Wireless Internet phone calls
Now I know many people at Verizon and they are very smart, well rounded and seem nice enough. From an investment perspective they did a good thing by using patents as a competitive weapon against a small provider who has revolutionized the telecom industry and made telcos wake up and realize they need to compete.
The question worth posing however is how is the consumer benefiting from this lawsuit?

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VoIP Roundup - Thur Mar 08, 2007

Skype Founder Janus Friis: Mile-High Bad Boy Valleywag reported a couple of days ago that Janus Friis, one of the founders of Kazaa, Skype and Joost, and a millionaire by all accounts, got drunk and frisky with his girlfriend while on a Virgin Airlines flight. Get this: his girlfriend is the daughter of Roger Moore. As in Bond, James Bond.

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Explosive Small Business Communications Growth

You would have to be asleep to not realize how fast small business communications is growing. The reason? Small businesses didn’t have so many telecom choices a scant ten years ago. There was pretty much key systems and then some inexpensive PBXs came along thanks to AltiGen and other, similar players.
What is different now? VoIP. Vonage has done the marketing to educate small businesses about the power of IP communications and the small business owners are getting it. Do they all understand the massive potential afforded by the latest in Internet protocol communications? Of course not, but they know there are more choices, ranging from open source to hosted systems to IP PBXs. It is astounding in fact how many choices there are for a small business these days.

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VoIPing For Profit - Skype Prime?

Skype once more releases a feature, Skype Prime [via], that's in direction competition with their developer community. While it's a very exciting feature - which allows you to bill for a Skype-to-Skype call - Skype is once more suggesting that you shouldn't even bother developing anything because they'll just take the idea or partner with someone else. Then again, Jyve, Bitwine and other similar Extras are completely safe because Skype is charging an absurd 30% of whatever you charge your callers. As one commenter at the Skype Share blog says, isn't 30% a bit excessive. Someone charging $100/h would end up paying Skype $30/h for a call that is otherwise free.

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Voice Peering is Hot

At the Voice Peering Forum event here in sunny Miami Florida, the message is simple – voice peering is growing by leaps and bounds. Stealth Communications is the company who runs this event and attendees generally are people who have joined the Voice Peering Fabric (VPF) or who are thinking of joining.
Simply stated the VPF allows interconnection of voice calls and services. The founder of Stealth Communications is Shrihari Pandit and he kicked off the day’s meeting with his usual optimism which was backed up by staggering growth numbers.
For example the VPF carried 139 billion minutes last year and has seen 750% growth for the last three years.

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Telecommunications Magazine

“Technology is changing so rapidly and the merger of communications and entertainment is progressing at a very quick pace. In order for service providers to be positioned to take advantage of applications that consumers and enterprises will pay for, they need to have IMS-enabled networks that will allow rapid deployment of these applications. It will present service providers with an opportunity to continue to make money on services as profits from voice continue to decline,” says Rich Tehrani. chairman of IMS EXPO.

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Where in the World Are… You?

GPS capabilities are supposedly one of the current and near-future hot features of cell phones. It's been predicted, probably even before 2001, that all cell phones will have GPS capabilities, which would be particularly useful for tracking people in emergency situations. However, for tracking bike and pedestrian traffic, PNAs (Personal Navigation Assistants) are supposedly not ready. That's primarily because the necessary cartographic work for bike and foot traffic hasn't been done for most places in the world, so having a nav system for them is pointless. And for safety reasons, you cannot assume either type of traffic can use regular GPS nav maps.

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FCC on Rural VoIP

This morning I was scouring the TMC FCC news page and I came across an FCC ruling which is helpful to the VoIP market. The story was written by InfoWorld Daily. Don’t I have something better to do on a Saturday morning? Apparently not. But back to the story -- the Federal Communications Commission has mandated that rural telecom providers must connect VoIP calls. Since the kids were asleep I even had a chance to see Russell Shaw’s take on his regulation blog. It is great to see positive VoIP news come out of the FCC and this ruling is obviously pro-consumer. Thank you Chairman Martin and the other commissioners for allowing this to happen.

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