Hosted PBX

The Continued Importance of Stationary Handsets in the Smart Phone Era

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The rise of the Smart Phone has been dramatic. It seems like everyone has one of these devices these days, and nearly every single Smart Phone owner raves about their device. Smart Phones certainly represent attractive and powerful telephony technology. Not only are they sleek and stylish, Smart Phones also provide a huge range of features and applications which you can take with you everywhere you go. While Smart Phones have presented a superior alternative to previous mobile phones, does that mean they stand to replace all telephony devices?

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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 Today these discussions are sounding more and more like outdated statements of the obvious. Yes, it is obvious that Hosted PBX is far more feature rich and cost effective than traditional PBX or outdated Centrex services, but that isn’t the point.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.

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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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.

VoIP Hacker

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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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

Hosted PBX vs. Virtual PBX ?

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When it comes to Google searches on keywords such as “Business Phone Service” – one can get lost in the myriad of options: “PBX, VoIP, Hosted PBX, Virtual PBX”… . One of the challenges facing entrepreneurs and business executives looking for new communications provider is having an ability to understand the difference between technology solutions. … Read more