FierceVoIP

Former ITXC execs sentenced

Pete Wylie — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:35:11 -0400

A former managing director of wholesale VoIP provider ITXC found guilty of bribery will avoid prison due to cooperation with federal authorities, according to a Dept. of Justice release. Roger Young, will receive five years probation, three months each of home confinement and community confinement, and a $7,000 fine. Young was found guilty along with former ITXC Vice President Steven J. Ott, who was also given five years probation, but was also given the harsher sentence of six months each of home and community confinement and a $10,000 fine.

Young and Ott plead guilty in July to conspiracy charges related to a scheme in which $267,000 in illegal "commissions" were given to employees of African-based telecommunications companies in exchange for continued contracts with ITXC (purchased by Teleglobe Bermuda Ltd. in 2004).

The payments violated the anti-bribery provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Both Ott and Young were given reduced sentences due to continued cooperation with the FBI, which is still investigating the case. They admitted to conspiring to making the payments, in knowing violation of the provisions of the law.

Time will tell if the investigation will roll heads at any other notable VoIP firms in connection with Young and Ott's conspiracy.

For more:
- read all the sordid details in the Dept. of Justice report

Fonality and snom partner

Pete Wylie — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:16:21 -0400

Fonality continued to add partners to its "ecosystem" this week, as German firm snom technologies announced it would be a third-party partner for deployments of Fonality IP-PBX systems. snom makes advanced VoIP phones, such as the 3xx series and m3 IP Dect, for the SMB market, which Fonality already targets extensively.

snom leadership praised the partnership, saying it would allow them to offer a high-quality, open-source solution to their existing customer base and future clients.

Fonality's FACE program (Fonality Authorized Certified Ecosystem) allows resellers and third-party vendors to assure customer confidence and decrease issues like hardware malfunction and non-compliance. These companies also offer increased integration with Fonality's products, including trixbox CE, trixbox Pro and PBXtra.

For more:
- see the press release here

SPOTLIGHT ON: Adobe adds new AIR VoIP application

Pete Wylie — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:02:23 -0400

Adobe's new AIR app will be more convenient to flashphone users who do not want their VoIP program to be browser-based. After downloading AIR, they can use the softphone, but also downsize it to the system tray to receive incoming calls while browsing other things. This process ensures users can verify their online status while keeping the softphone open. Adobe opened up a comment page on its website, and put an open call out to users to suggest improvements and give feedback to improve the new offering.

For more:
- see the tmc.net blog post

VoIP drives broadband service growth

Pete Wylie — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:46:27 -0400

Broadband value-added services reaped $25.7 billion worldwide in 2007, an increase of 62 percent from 2006, according to Point-Topic research. VoIP and security made up the largest percentage of this gross as well, accounting for 56 percent of the service revenue, or more than $14 billion.

"Value added services are growing strongly and are increasingly significant in overall revenue terms," said John Bosnell, senior analyst at Point-Topic. "The success story of 2007 has been VOIP. Overall revenue has very nearly doubled, average revenue per user (ARPU) is up and take-up in major markets, particularly North America and Western Europe is growing quickly."

Bosnell predicted continued rapid growth in both components of the VoIP business, IP telephony and Internet telephony. He said market saturation is not imminent, but could occur in the future.

For more:
- read the rest of the rosy Point-Topic forecast here

VoIP helps hurricane response

Pete Wylie — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:58:35 -0400

The Voice over Internet Protocol Hurricane Net (VoIPWX) responded to the multiple landfalls of Hurricane Gustav in unprecedented fashion, showing how VoIP networks are revolutionizing disaster response and reporting. VoIPWX's mission is to help save lives and property during hurricanes through RF to VoIP transmissions of local weather conditions and the timely dissemination of this information to authorities such as the National Hurricane Center.

Public information officer Lloyd Colston said VoIPWX's response to Hurricane Gustav was a success story for the organization.

"We got reports from places we never would have heard from so soon 10 years ago," Colston said. "When Gustav made landfall in Jamaica, we got many reports, and analyzed them as a team, where we needed to send them, who could best address them. We also got a lot of reports from Cuba once it made landfall there, and we were able to pass them on to the appropriate authorities so that people could get the help they needed."

Colston stressed the importance of establishing connections before a storm landfall is imminent, as those connections that can be tested and networked before a storm situation are more effective. He said the ham radio community slowly accepted the transition to VoIP more and more as the efficacy of the program was demonstrated.

VoIPWX could get another big test soon, if Hanna threatens the U.S., Colston said VoIPWX would be ready.

"The program lets people send in specific conditions on the ground, like wind speed, barometric pressure, and any flooding that may be occurring," Colston said. "In the future, with AirCards and such, I think it the updates could be even more frequent and sustainable during a big storm."

For more:
- see the VoIPWX website here

Related Article
Howe: A Telco 2.0 Technology Primer

CONTACT CENTER CORNER: Proactive Customer Contact, Leading-Edge Solutions

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:07:20 -0400

By Joe Outlaw

The available solutions to support proactive customer contact run the gamut from single function to multi-function, from stand-alone to fully integrated with other customer contact systems, and from premise-based to hosted. And, any combination of these capabilities and attributes is also available.

Single Function vs. Multi-Function

Single function solutions or, more accurately, solutions with a small number of features/functions are at one end of the spectrum. These can include basic alerting from most of the leading contact center vendors, including Avaya, Aspect Software, Cisco, Interactive Intelligence and Genesys as well as specialty or best-of-breed vendors, such as Envox for outbound IVR and MIR3, or Premiere Global, and Varolii for alerting.

Excellent multi-function solutions, those that support a broad range of proactive customer contact applications (outbound IVR-based, automated dialing, alerting, customer feedback), are also available from the leading contact center vendors, listed above.

Stand-alone vs. Fully-Integrated

There is still a healthy selection of stand-alone customer feedback solutions from vendors including: CDC Respond, Metatude, Qualtrics, Ransys, RatePoint, ResponseTEK, Statmetrics, Vovici and Zoomerang. There are also a few stand-alone IVR platforms and automated dialers available, such as from Envox and SER. But, as I mentioned earlier in this series, the demand for stand-alone or point solutions for proactive contact is fading as the recognition that more comprehensive approaches are more effective.

Fully integrated proactive customer contact solutions are available from the leading contact center vendors, as well as from systems integrators who build the linkages between a set of third party components.

Premise-based vs. Hosted

Almost all of the leading proactive customer contact solutions are either premise-based or hosted. The economic trade-offs of these two alternatives are well known. Other considerations for choosing hosted services include rapidly changing technology and relative scarcity of experienced speech application developers -- in the case of outbound IVR applications, and seasonality or extreme peaks in demand --- such as for alerting services.

Particularly Noteworthy

Interactive Intelligence's Interaction Dialer now supports "skills-based dialing" which analyzes the requirements of the customers on the target contact list and selects/calls only contacts that can be effectively handled by the available agent pool.
Aspect Software's Unified IP supports the broadest range of dialing options (preview, power, predictive, progressive and precision) and offers an optional Advanced List Management capability, which supports multi-tenant deployments and multiple dialers, at multiple sites, on multiple databases.

Part 1 in this series introduced the business drivers for proactive customer contact, Part 2 reviewed the leading-edge business uses of proactive customer contact solutions and services, and Part 4 will highlight proactive customer contact success stories.

Joe Outlaw is President and Chief Analyst of Outlaw Research, a firm that provides results-oriented analysis and consulting of the customer contact marketplace. The objective of Outlaw Research is building a community around the leading edges of customer contact -- the advanced strategies early-adopter companies are applying and the technologies and vendors they are working with.

UC on deck for new Mets park

Dan O'Shea — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:04:47 -0400

Wi-Fi coverage and wireless ticket scanning are becoming increasingly common at sports stadiums, especially the newest arenas built within the last few year. Now, Citi Field, the new home of the New York Mets after they finish their last season in Shea Stadium this year, will have all that plus unified communications applications supported by Nortel Networks. The team's data center operations were recently moved from Shea to the new ballpark next door, and about 200 team employees are getting access to UC features such as voicemail and fax conversion to e-mail, flexible conferencing and VoIP.

Many of the team's ticket agents will be using VoIP gear for ticket sales, though the organization also will keep some agents on circuit-switched facilities as a back-up to VoIP. The Wi-Fi gear, also supplied by Nortel, also will allow concession orders to be placed by fans from their seats. Curiously, it doesn't look like the crosstown Yankees have said much about telecom-related amenities going into their new stadium. Maybe that money went toward A-Rod's salary.

For more:
- see this story at Computerworld

Analyst: Slow adoption of 802.11r affects VoIP

Pete Wylie — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 10:55:50 -0400

The 802.11r wireless network standard will likely be a useful innovation, despite slow adoption by enterprise users, according to Rob Bamforth, principal analyst at researcher Quocerca. The recently ratified standard, which enables WiFi devices to maintain seamless communication while switching between access points on WLANs, is a remedy for the original standard's failure to account for roaming access.

The standard will help VoIP adoption, because presently, VoIP devices have QoS and security issues because it takes 100 milliseconds to switch from one access point to another, according to an IT Pro report. The amended protocol will improve QoS and reduce the hand-off time to less than 50 milliseconds, a common industry benchmark for maximum delay.

Bamforth predicted that enterprise users would need time to integrate the new standard, however, and present investment in VoIP would be a major indicator to adoption speed.

For more:
- IT Pro's full report on the 802.11r uptake

Flash gets its VoIP due

Doug Mohney — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 22:23:23 -0400

Phweet is the most infamous example of Flash bringing VoIP into web-based applications, but there are a number of other sites using Adobe's technology to incorporate telephony into the web.

Raketu is one of the newer companies, as it uses Adobe Flash in its recently released RakOut WebPhone service, says a VoIP News piece conducting inventory. Previously, Raketu had used a PC-based client for VoIP-based services, but a browser-based solution opens up the world of Mac (and iPhone) and Linux users to Raketu's network for lower cost VoIP calls.

Other companies tapping into the power of Flash include Ribbit and Adobe themselves for its free ConnectNow web conferencing services. Ribbit built VoIP into their services using Flash as a foundation block while Adobe's web conferencing services delivers both voice and video communication through Flash.

Of course, Phweet has generated more than its share of attention over the past week by using Flash to conduct VoIP calls as an end-around for call filtering conducted by Aircell's Gogo in-flight broadband service. In theory, any VoIP-incorporating Flash-based app should be able to get around Gogo's filtering as of last week; needless to say, Aircell is working on countermeasures to keep American Airlines cabins quiet and calm.

For more:
- VoIP News gives Flash its due. Article

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SPOTLIGHT: A Phweet conspiracy? - FierceVoIP

EQO supports BlackBerry Bold

Doug Mohney — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:59:39 -0400

EQO has announced it is releasing an enhanced version of its mobile VoIP/multi-network IM software to support the newly announced BlackBerry Bold smartphone.

The new software release enables Blackberry Bold users to run voice and data services simultaneously, so they can IM and make calls at the same time. It also leverages the Bold's dual-mode capability to automatically switch from 3G to WiFi whenever it is in range of a WiFi hotspot.

EQO currently operates in more than 200 countries, and its Mobile VoIP/IM solution operates on everything from LG and HTC phones to Nokia and Samsung devices. Dual-mode support and the capability to support both voice and IM at the same time will likely win over more enterprise customers, but it remains to be seen if this is a big enough differentiator to set it apart from all the other mobile VoIP providers around the globe.

For more:
- EQO's Marketwatch press release announcing support for Bold

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Car-Fi and VoIP

Doug Mohney — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:43:15 -0400

Microsoft is testing WiFi usage in vehicles, an effort that is shedding new light on public wireless networks and how VoIP calls might get transmitted - or not.

Testing is being conducted around Seattle, and the biggest advantage to tapping into a community WiFi network is lower cost of access. Plus, every mobile device has built-in WiFi these days .

However, WiFi has a big problem with hand-offs between base stations; not so good for an in-progress VoIP call over a cheaper WiFi network. (You may queue your WiMAX commercial here in a limited number of second-tier U.S. markets). There's also the assumption that there's a nice big WiFi network available for use; the muni WiFi market has had its ups and downs of late.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Washington and Microsoft have worked up a solution to talk to multiple access points at once. The "Vi-Fi" (Vehicle WiFi) system would treat one access point as an "anchor" primary reception point and use other base stations in the system as auxiliary paths. Some tricky math allows the system to figure out the chance a packet received by an auxiliary base station wasn't received by the anchor; if true, the aux base station relays the packet to the anchor as a backup.

For more:
- Seattle P-I newspaper reports on Microsoft Vi-Fi research efforts. Article

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BroadSoft buys GENBAND App Server

Doug Mohney — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:22:08 -0400

BroadSoft has acquired GENBAND's M6 Communications Application Server (formerly VocalData), product line and related customer base.

The deal allows BroadSoft to further expand its market leadership position in the VoIP applications market (software), while freeing up GENBAND to focus its efforts on its gateway (hardware) business. As a result of the acquisition, BroadSoft will grow its customer base to 435.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but BroadSoft's press release describes the acquisition as the "beginning of a long-term partnership" between the two companies. Future cooperative efforts fall under the heading of "Network Transformation" projects, so one might assume that GENBAND would supply the gateways, while BroadSoft provides the software.

Interestingly, this deal puts GENBAND into the selling category; the company has conducted a number of acquisitions over the past couple of years, including Baypackets, Tekelec's Switching Solution Group and Siemens Networks technology.

Meanwhile, BroadSoft has been hot and heavy on the Web 2.0/mashups front, announcing a number of deals as it grows an independent network of developers to quickly develop and deploy VoIP applications.

For more:
- BroadSoft press release on acquiring GENBAND app server

SPOTLIGHT: Hate and lust over an IP phone prototype

Doug Mohney — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:57:42 -0400

A lot of geek tech sites are frothing over the Tatung VoIP phone prototype. The design has won the 2008 IF, IDEA, and Red Dot design awards... whatever that means. Techno-bloggers seem to be torn between degrading it as an "electronic lollipop," and loving it so much they want to "lick one" the more they look at it.

We'll point out that the creator of the phone -- e-Nova design -- also picked up an award for the TATUNG iHaloo VOIP Webcam Phone, so there should be some very pretty pieces of plastic in the production pipeline.

For more:
- Gizmodo has pretty pictures and conflicting tastes. Blog
- Visit e-Nova design. Website

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FCC discusses new 911 VoIP rules

Doug Mohney — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:35:53 -0400

On Monday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) published a notice for establishing rules on how E911 systems would handle calls from IP phones.

Enhanced 911 calls go to around 6,000 call centers - public safety answering points (PSAPs) - around the country. Under the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), the FCC wants to make sure VoIP providers have access to the capabilities they need to provide both basic 911 and E911 services.

The FCC wants to make sure 911 works the same way, regardless where a call is made. The Commission also wants to make sure calls coming from mobile phones or VoIP provide "meaningful" automatic location information. It is going through with the NPRM to comply with the newly enacted "New and Emerging Technologies 911 Improvement Act of 2008."

For more:
- FCW.com reports on VoIP 911. Article

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Gizmo5 Defends Nokia VoIP Intentions

Doug Mohney — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:43:19 -0400

In an email CC'ed to FierceVoIP, Gizmo5 CEO Michael Robertson comes to defend the honor of Nokia with tech talk.

Robertson, also the founder of Linspire, MP3tunes and REEF, has never been shy about sharing his opinions. In the letter, addressed to Om Malik of GigaOm fame, Robertson says the Nokia N78 phone runs the latest version of the Symbian operating system, which changes how VoIP is supported in the OS framework.

"It actually adds more VOIP support to the OS so developers will need to do less work to build VOIP capable programs. This means that VOIP software which previously worked with Symbian 3.0 and 3.1 devices such as Gizmo will not run on these devices without being altered to account for this new VOIP structure."

Robertson goes on to say work is underway to make Gizmo compatible with Symbian 3.2, which will enable VoIP calls on devices such as the N78. He also points out that Nokia is nice enough to feature Gizmo on the e71 phone under its "Setup Internet Tel" application and Symbian 3.1 OS.

Michael says "...as the software applications and operating system come into sync, I expect the support to actually improve as core VOIP functionality is embedded even further into the OS. Remember, Nokia now owns Symbian." Gizmo5 continues to see "constant growth" as more WiFi enabled devices are sold.

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