Sam Rozenfeld

What VoIP Readiness Assessment Does Not Tell You

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In the previous posts I had covered many obvious business reasons driving business VoIP adoption in the enterprise including costs savings, productivity increases, and image benefits. These benefits are typically enabled by VoIP infrastructure on a converged network, but achieved through IP telephony applications such as messaging, conferencing and geographic independence.

Realizing VoIP Hosted PBX benefits can be a challenge, and organizations may experience frustration, stress and even despair as they work to deploy it in their environments. Generally speaking, VoIP is much more than just another application on the network, and most organizations have never managed an application with high availability and performance requirements like those of VoIP.

The only real way to ensure lasting trouble free voice quality in an enterprise VoIP Hosted PBX deployment is through proper management of all of the devices within network path between the endpoint device (be it a handset, computer or a softphone) and a VoIP Hosted PBX service provider system.

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Hosted PBX Trends

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Over the past few years there have been numerous online discussions and articles on the subject of “cost” and “price/performance” of the Hosted PBX. Today these discussions are sounding more and more like outdated statements of the obvious. Yes, it is obvious that Hosted PBX is far more feature rich and cost effective than traditional PBX or outdated Centrex services, but that isn’t the point. Appropriately chosen communication technology very directly impact ways and speed with which business is being conducted, more important than ever in the current economic climate.

Recognizing the Value of Hosted PBX

For most businesses, however, communications does not fall into realm of their core competencies. Conventional school of thought preaches that you are not going to be a better law firm, architecture firm, pizza shop, etc by running a better phone system than the competition. But that simply isn’t true any longer. With Hosted PBX services reaching beyond simple voice or SIP trunking and becoming full Unified Communications solution, we see promotion of Hosted PBX as a smarter strategic play for SMBs. The value of converging — or integrating — data, voice and video communications over a single IP network comes in the improved ability of people to share, discuss and develop ideas with colleagues anywhere in the world. Voice itself can become a “killer app.” The new standard environment integrates voice mail, global telephone network, directory, presence, unified messaging capability, text-to-speech, conferencing, online phone, address book and more. Enterprises adding voice to other IP-compliant applications really begin to see what the technology can do for them.

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Android As Your Desk Phone

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Android gained huge popularity with smartphone manufacturers, so it should come as no surprise that the desk phones featuring Android operating platform would start appearing. Lots of companies have been rumored to be working on Android tablets this year in the wake of the iPad 3 launch. What we haven’t heard much of until now is an Android-based desktop handset. Some have recently begun working on Android-powered desk phones.

Why put Android on a desk ? For one: plenty of apps, including visual voicemail, calendars, SMS, and email. Android-based technology offers you the first phone that gets smarter over time instead of obsolete. The other reason is that Google has broad plans for Android. In May of 2011 as it was shipping its new 3.1 version of Android at the company’s annual developer’s conference, Google announced that the next release of its operating system will offer features that would make it more suitable for use on a a big-screen, multi-touch desktop computer. And this, my friends, could have far reaching consequences for Apple and even Microsoft.

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Hosted PBX Toll Fraud Attacks: Phreaking

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Phreaking (or phone hacking, toll fraud, dial-through fraud) is not new. In the not too distant past it was often a domain of adolescents with modems, phone lines and a PCs looking to make a couple of calls on someone else’s tab to their friends out of state or, sometimes, out of the country. Those call volumes often went unnoticed in the overall vast number of calls on company’s phone bill.

Toll Fraud

But phreaking in this day and age has moved from geek to something more sinister and more damaging. Telephone phreaking of Internet era is a big business run by an organized crime. What’s also interesting is that telecommunications carriers reap substantial benefits from these activities by demanding payments for the tidal wave of illegal call traffic phreakers generate at the victim’s expense. Some insiders hint that phreaking is telecommunication’s industry’s biggest dirty secret, generating massive funding for carriers.

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Integrating Hosted PBX and Cloud Desktop Services Into Move Strategy

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Business relocation and expansion decisions are among the most important ones company executives have to face. The rapid advances in information and communications technology over the past few years have dictated a change in the attitude towards working practices, employment patterns and, subsequently business relocation.

When moving a business, small or large, IT relocation strategy matters. Many businesses can not afford to be off their computers for more than a couple of hours. The process of relocation involves the difficult task of packing and a risky affair of moving. The IT department is often called upon to coordinate an internal department move, help relocate a remote office, or be involved in an entire company move. But IT and communications relocation are far more than just disconnecting, packaging and moving equipment. Among most common reasons of business moving disasters are: poor planning, lack of understanding of all of the essential IT components and services that are required and inability to develop a realistic and practical timeline. Many times a decision to move is dictated by availability of space, contract obligations and a desire to minimize the time of operation in multiple locations during the transition.

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DLS Announces Hosted PBX Development Roadmap

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With a focus on more advanced Unified Communications features and improved price performance model, DLS Internet, a leading provider of Hosted Unified Communications solutions, unveils vision and service roadmap for its new Hosted PBX service until spring of 2013. Among other features, the roadmap reveals future plans for integration with Microsoft Office, Skype, addition of Web Conferencing, desktop sharing and support for latest handsets from Cisco, Polycom, Grandstream and SNOM. It contains changes to service features, explains naming guidelines and a release timeline for DLS Hosted PBX service releases.

Since 2004 DLS had focused on continuously advancing its VoIP Hosted PBX service. It now possess a powerful combination of technology leadership and service capabilities enabling the company to provide end-to-end turn-key Unified Communications solutions that fulfill the most demanding expectations from its customers and business partners.

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FCC’s VoIP Regulation Dilemma

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telephone

1835, “apparatus for signaling by musical notes” (devised by Sudré in 1828), from Fr. téléphone (c.1830), from télé- “far” (see tele-) + phone “sound” (see fame). Also used of other apparatus early 19c., including “instrument similar to a foghorn for signaling from ship to ship” (1844). The electrical communication tool was first described in modern form by P.Reis (1861); developed by Bell, and so called by him from 1876. The verb is attested from 1878.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has become a mature technology that allows individuals to place phone calls using the Internet Protocol. VoIP utilizes the Internet infrastructure to make voice and video calls as opposed to the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN) that has been in place for more than a century. VoIP service is less expensive to provide and operate as compared to traditional telephony. Another advantage of VoIP is that a subscriber can make a voice or video call from any global location with a broadband Internet connection. Modern VoIP telephony evolutionizes the boundaries of telephony by adding voice, presence management, chat and other services and by then embedding it into many business applications that are run on computers.

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Launching VARs and ISVs into a VoIP Cloud

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If memory serves me correctly, five years ago, we used to position VoIP versus traditional PSTN-based dialtone. Then came the hosted concept and theme focus has turned to an on-premise VoIP versus Hosted VoIP. Today we are seeing hosted PBX service providers beginning to further differentiate themselves by targeting niche vertical markets by building on their application integration capabilities.

Hosted PBX price wars are continuing to heat up for the fourth year. The biggest battleground appear to be the growing small business market where integration capabilities coupled with soft entry costs are playing a dominant role in SMB’s choice of a unified communications platform. Most small businesses prefer to gradually increase their operating expenses while gaining immediate access to the critical unified communications technology rather than incurring a large one-time capital expense.

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Delivering VoIP over Mobile Wireless

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Both VoIP and mobile wireless broadband are relatively new technologies. With the invention of 3G wireless data network – an opportunity to make free or near free calls from your VoIP phone had become more of a reality than a concept. The war between operators of cellular networks and VoIP providers has ended in an amicable truce with the carriers finally realizing that the bulk of their revenues will be coming from data usage and shifting to the usage-based billing model for their data plans. VoIP Hosted PBX users have been jumping on the bandwagon by making calls over Wi-Fi or the carrier’s wireless data connections on all kinds of smart phone platforms.

VoIP service providers, while reluctant to even mention 3G mobile data network as a somewhat reliable means of enterprise VoIP communications, nevertheless are coming to accept the fact that businesses begin to realize the advantages of readily available mobile networks in order to benefit from truly geo independent voice service. There is even a new term for it: Vo3G which stands for Voice over 3G.

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Hosted PBX 3.2 moving into Alpha testing next week

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We are excited to be wrapping up feature development for 3.2. There is still a lot of testing and work to be done before this version makes it to public release, but there are a lot of exciting new features in here. Display parking lot number on call status page Improved Parking Lot system Integrated … Read more