Category: VoIP
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Skype takes a SIP of Cisco with UC500 Skype For SIP certification
Continue Reading: Skype takes a SIP of Cisco with UC500 Skype For SIP certificationIt’s been a busy month for the folks in the Skype For SIP project. First, back on September 9, Skype announced ShoreTel interoperability. Then last week on September 17, Skype announced interop with the open source SIPFoundry sipXecs product.Today, though, is Skype’s biggest announcement yet – they are announcing the certification of Cisco’s Unified Communications 500 Series for Small Business as interoperable with Skype For SIP.
Beyond simply the interop, what’s perhaps more interesting is to note the direct Cisco involvement with this news release (through a quote). Looking at the overall industry, it’s interesting to see Cisco and Skype connecting. I admit that I haven’t studied Cisco’s UC500 product much at all, although per the news release it sounds like they are doing some interesting things with it:
The Cisco Unified Communications 500 Series platform is part of Cisco’s Smart Business Communications System which continues to expand having just added a new set of IP phones with high definition audio, a unified threat management device as well as support for third party application integration, including products from healthcare, automotive and insurance industries.
Congrats to both Skype and Cisco on this announcement. I expect we’ll be seeing more of…
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I’ll be at VON in Miami on Monday, Sept 21, 2009
Continue Reading: I’ll be at VON in Miami on Monday, Sept 21, 2009If any of you will be down at VON next week in South Beach, Miami, FL, next week, I’ll be part of two presentations on Monday, September 21, 2009. The full abstracts are outlined on a Voxeo events page, but the titles are:10 – 11:15am, Beyond Boxes: The Future of the PBX 11:30 – 12:30pm, The Apps Race: Building a Developer Community in the New Telecom World
The second one should be fun as it’s with my good friend Thomas Howe (who also has a spiffy new website). It’s just Thomas and I and a moderator, talking about developer ecosystems. Good stuff!
I’m only there at VON on Monday. That evening I’ll be driving up to Orlando where I’ll be spending Tuesday through Friday at Voxeo’s corporate office. But if you are down at VON, please do say hello.
P.S. And yes, this is the “new” VON put on by Virgo Publishing after they purchased the VON name and tradeshow from Pulvermedia. It will be interesting to see how it is as a show.
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I’ll be out at ITEXPO this week in L.A.
Continue Reading: I’ll be out at ITEXPO this week in L.A.If any of you are heading out to ITEXPO tomorrow through Thursday in Los Angeles, I’ll be there on Wednesday. As I note on a Voxeo events page, I’ll be speaking twice, pretty much back to back:9:30 – 10:15am, Exploring Applications in the Cloud
11:00 – 11:45am, SIP Trunking and Security
The first is a panel discussion that should be quite interesting. The second is another version of the VOIP / SIP Security talk that I’ve been giving at Ingate’s SIP Trunking Seminars for the past few years (and that always seems to be popular). More details and session abstracts on the events page I set up.
I’m looking forward to catching up with many friends at the show, including Andy Abramson, who I haven’t seen for a while.
If you will be out there, please do say hello.
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Silicon Alley Insider: How Comcast Ate Vonage’s Lunch
Continue Reading: Silicon Alley Insider: How Comcast Ate Vonage’s LunchFascinating chart out of Silicon Alley Insider today showing the incredible growth Comcast has had in terms of IP phone subscribers versus that of Vonage:I doubt the chart is a huge surprise for anyone following the industry, but it still does make for an interesting graphic. Despite all the advertising money that Vonage can throw out there, Comcast and the other cable providers have the inherent advantage that they can easily offer powerful “triple-play bundles” of cable TV, Internet access and phone service.
Comcast is no longer my provider (Time-Warner services Keene, NH, where I live.), but when I lived in Burlington, VT, we had Comcast for Internet access and Verizon for phone (and we didn’t have anyone for TV, since we don’t watch it). The offers that Comcast kept sending us, though, encouraging us to switch, were quite compelling. The amount I paid for Internet access would have been lower if I had either phone or TV with Comcast, and even lower if I had all three.
If we actually watched TV and therefore wanted cable TV, the economics of the “triple-play” would be very hard to beat… so it’s no surprise at all to me to…
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For a brief bit – Skype video calls from 30,000+ feet on Southwest Air WiFi!
Continue Reading: For a brief bit – Skype video calls from 30,000+ feet on Southwest Air WiFi!Upon entering the Southwest Airlines plane this morning on my flight to Orlando to visit Voxeo’s headquarters, I immediately noticed a “WiFi zone” sign on a column by the entry door. Naturally, I had to pull out my Macbook Pro and give it a whirl… and, given the issue of Skype-blocking last summer… try out Skype.To my great surprise and pleasure, it worked great. (For a little while – see below.) Here’s Bruce Lowekamp:
As you may or may not be able to see in the graphic, our call had been up for 3 minutes and 33 seconds when I snapped the picture.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have easy access to my headset, so I couldn’t really have a great conversation. The ambient background noise in the plane was really too much for my voice to be heard unless I bent down toward the microphone… and likewise even with the MacBook Pro volume up all the way it was a bit hard to hear Bruce unless I bent down toward the laptop.
And, of course, I didn’t really want to annoy my fellow passengers. 🙂
You can see on the right the technical stats for the call. Packet loss was…
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Digium takes on the “fax issue” with Fax For Asterisk…
Continue Reading: Digium takes on the “fax issue” with Fax For Asterisk…I can’t stand fax. I can’t. It’s a technology that I just wish would go away. It kills me that fax is one of the main reasons I didn’t drop my landline in my move. Yet the reality is that fax usage is everywhere… and probably will be for quite some time if for no other reason than the complete and utter simplicity of fax usage. Print out your message, or write your message (you know… that thing we all used to do… take a writing tool (pen, pencil, crayon, charcoal, etc.), grasp it in your hand and make marks on some writing surface…), just stick that message in your fax machine, punch in the number and press Send. It’s hard to get much simpler than that.But the lack of fax has been a barrier to many a premise-based IP-PBX deployment. Everything’s going great… people are looking at all the great things they can do with VoIP and Unified Communications, etc. They are figuring out distributed architectures that are all IP-based. It’s all looking really cool technically and will save money, too. All is going well and then someone asks “What about the fax machines?” And so people wind…
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Skype on the iPhone: Some initial thoughts…
Continue Reading: Skype on the iPhone: Some initial thoughts…Unless you remained under a rock last week, you know that Skype was released for the iPhone, somewhat predictably rocketed to the #1 downloaded iPhone app, shot past 1 million downloads in two days and then just today went past two million downloads. As Skype’s Peter Parkes’ writes:I’m back with an update – and it’s no surprise that we’ve stormed past the 2 million download milestone. This means an average rate of 2-3 downloads per second since the app first appeared on the 31st March.
2-3 downloads per second! You have to think Skype’s got to be rather happy about those numbers. Jim Courtney had a good post rounding up some of the Skype for iPhone coverage.
The good news, for me, was that Skype for the iPhone did include support for persistent group chats, which I noted was my one big desire for the iPhone client.
I’ve been using the client now off and on for the past week, and thought I’d write down a few initial impressions:
- Audio quality – I’ve not actually used it for too many calls, but when I have the audio quality (over WiFi) has been great. I’m looking forward to trying it…
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Skype tears down more walls with “Skype For SIP”
Continue Reading: Skype tears down more walls with “Skype For SIP”NOTE: I have a few updates to the post that I am putting at the bottom of the text.
Would you like Skype users to be able to call your business’ phone system? Would you like to connect your phone system to Skype’s network and make use of their cheap calling rates? If you have an IP-PBX or other call server that supports the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), you may now have those options.
For a company that only a bit over a year ago was saying that customers weren’t asking for interconnection, today Skype has done something rather dramatic and lowered their walls a bit more with the announcement of the beta program of “Skype For SIP“. With this announcement from the “Skype For Business” group, companies with SIP-enabled phone systems will be able to receive calls from Skype users – and make calls using Skype’s network at Skype rates. The news release (and blog post announcement) highlights these four aspects:
- Receive and manage inbound calls from Skype users worldwide on SIP-enabled PBX systems; connecting the company Web site to the PBX system via click-to-call
- Place calls with Skype to landlines and mobile phones worldwide from any connected…
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IETF 74 starts next week in San Francisco…
Continue Reading: IETF 74 starts next week in San Francisco…The 74th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) starts Monday morning out in San Francisco. As usual there is a packed agenda with a lot of great discussions going on. This one is particularly interesting for those of us involved in the “Real-time Applications and Infrastructure (RAI)” area – which is all the various working groups related to SIP and other real-time communications protocols – as there are some proposals moving forward to rather fundamentally restructure the ways in which SIP-related work moves through the IETF. I expect there will be many involved conversations going on out there next week.As much as I would like to be there, I won’t be physically out at IETF 74. It’s not my new role at Voxeo keeping me away, but rather this… oh… wee minor little detail that my wife is now five weeks from giving birth to our second child! 🙂 At this stage of things I’m severely limiting my travel – and flights across the country are definitely out.
Instead I’ll be participating remotely, listening to the audio streams and joining in the Jabber chat rooms. Probably writing about some of it over on the “Speaking…
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The Park Bench Manifesto – text coming soon, video and slides now up
Continue Reading: The Park Bench Manifesto – text coming soon, video and slides now upThis week out at the Emerging Communications Conference in San Francisco, I gave a 10-minute talk called “The Park Bench Manifesto: Why We Want To Kill Off The PSTN”. In the talk, I mentioned that the text would be available here soon… And it will be.
In the meantime though, I have put up both the video and the 54-slide deck over on <a href=”http://blogs.Voxeo.com/ett/”>blogs.voxeo.com/ett/</a>
More soon….. (need to fly home…)