Category: UC

Unified Communications

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End User social networking

The Train – an unfolding drama starring Twitter @EmmaFirth @JamesFirth #swt and a cast of characters

Last night I was chatting to a friend on Twitter and suddenly found myself watching a real life drama unfold. Emma Firth The leadinglady was EmmaFirth, journalist with the Daily Telegraph and also heavily pregnant. Her husband JamesFirth played the part of the 7th Cavalry and the cast of characters included #swt (South West Trains) and other Twitter users too many to mention.

The tweets below represent an abbreviated history of the story in which dozens of commuter trains were stranded for hours with no apparent plan to rescue them. In the end some of them, including our pregnant heroine, broke out of their carriage and made a daring and adventurous dash down the railway line to safety in the arms of her man.

This incident has today made major headlines on the BBC and I present for you below the action as it James Firthhappened on Twitter. Some of the tweets are absent but you can easily follow the story line.

The curtains open and we find EmmaFirth in a crowded railway carriage somewhere outside Woking:

EmmaFirth Bloody stupid trains. Been stuck outside woking for 40 mins on second delay of evening. Grr

tref @EmmaFirth oh dear. You need to relax – try some breathing exercises etc.

EmmaFirth Now 50 mins not moving. At least cavalry of @jamesfirth charging to woking on his ford focus on off chance i ever get to station!

tref @EmmaFirth @jamesfirth If I strain my ears I can hear the bugle sound the cavalry charge

EmmaFirth @tref sods law says his charger breaks down. I’m so going for pizza if that happens!

Continue reading “The Train – an unfolding drama starring Twitter @EmmaFirth @JamesFirth #swt and a cast of characters”
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End User social networking

Lincoln – jewel in a sea of tweets #BBCLincolnshire @thelincolnite

sundial on Lincoln Cathedral's South Face represents the "old order"

Lincoln, for those billions1 of you that have never been, is a beautiful romano-medieval backwater towards the right hand middle bit of England, on the way to Skegness.

During the middle ages it was an important financial centre but the bridge across the river Trent at Newark put paid to that as all the traffic shifted eighteen miles to the West. It’s the same old story – people head West to where the money is.

In recent times the good citizens of Lincoln have tried to rectify that centuries old mistake and have built a high speed dual carriageway connecting them with Newark. Also we now have a fine new University that is attracting both money and talent into the heart of the city.

It can truly be said that today Lincoln is a gem set in the rich agricultural heartland that is the county of Lincolnshire. This gem, however is not one content to sit still, to bask in the glare of the flash of the tourist cameras. Lincoln wants to shine out beyond its natural boundaries of river, sea and Great North Road (A1).

Lincoln is now on the digital map and even has a list of top ten local Twitter users (for 2011). This list, which was assembled by the LINCOLNITE, represents a collection of the finest thought leaders2 the city has to offer and despite the author’s claims to the contrary, must surely be an authoritative and conclusive voice on this subject.

Please take some time to ponder on this list and to absorb its undoubted wisdom3

1 I realise the billions bit might give the wrong impression regarding visitor numbers to this blog.  Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and French versions of the site due soon – I’m just waiting for that multi-million pound sponsorship deal.

2 In this case for thought “leaders” read “people who waste considerable amounts of their lives online – the idle Twitterati”

3 I come in at a modest fifth place which of course I am delighted with – just high enough to be noticed but not so high as to give the impression that I spend all my time on Twitter 🙂

Categories
Business voip

Microsoft to pay a lot of money for Skype? – back to dot com bubble days?

Rumours abound this morning on the Twittersphere that Microsoft is about to announce the acquisition of Skype for $8.5Bn. That’s 10x 2010 revenues, a year in which Skype reported a loss of $7m! That loss itself was a dramatic reduction on the previous year but Microsoft is still betting on big growth ahead.

This is all very good news for entrepreneurs who invested in private communications companies way back in 2003/2004 and whose businesses are actually profitable :).

I’m not sure however how the Skype brand fits with Microsoft. Skype is associated with free or very cheap. Microsoft is expensive although not as expensive as Apple. Microsoft is desperate to improve its web offering which Skype does for it.

Skype has a big overlap with MSN. Is this a problem? Do people still use MSN? Skype also overlaps with Lync. How will that fit? Lync for medium and large enterprise, Skype for small? Or will they just run Skype as a separate entity in which case where will the leverage come from? Note that only 2% of search engine traffic to this blog is from Bing!

I don’t have the answers. Also I’m sure there are many more questions than this. What I can say is that life is far from boring when it comes to the internet and the world wide web. More, I’m sure, in due course.

PS I don’t normally indulge in rumour mongering but this seems likely to break today and I will be out and about and not in a position to post to the blog. So I’m getting in early!

Categories
Business internet online safety security social networking

Consumerisation of the workplace – part 2 #TREF @EmpireAve

This morning I joined Empire Avenue and got the ticker symbol TREF – v important I’m sure you agree. I did it because people I interact with on Twitter have done so and being a sheep I followed. I hooked my Empire Avenue account up with Linked In, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and then bought 100 shares in eBay.

Whether this was a sensible thing to do I know not – the account hook-ups not the eBay purchase which I don’t care about either way. I am really trusting the application.

After a bit of a browse I decided not to waste any more time and left. TREF was secured. At this point the responsiveness my wireless keyboard and mouse began to slow down significantly and I was hit with anti virus messages on my screen. Uhoh.

To cut a long story short thanks to Michael our IT guy I eventually got rid of the screen and am running full system scans using AVG and malwarebytes.

The last time I picked up a virus it wiped me out for a week and we had to rebuild my machine. That was the week I really road tested the iPad and found it deficient. So this time you can imagine what was going on in my mind. I can’t afford to be without a PC for any length of time.

I write all this because I am also currently thinking about device security

Continue reading “Consumerisation of the workplace – part 2 #TREF @EmpireAve”
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End User mobile connectivity social networking

Location – Foursquare, the Isle of Man and Apple #deappg

harbour lights in Douglas IoM

Last week as the Isle of Man Steam Packet ferry approached Douglas harbour I “checked in” on Foursquare to a location called the “Sea Terminal”. I also uploaded a lovely picture of the watery reflections of the multicolour harbour lights. Beautiful it was.

Then as I got into the car to drive off the ferry I received a text message telling me I had just run up £17.02 (ex VAT) on data roaming charges. Ooo! That was before I had even set foot on the Isle of Man. The notion that I might leave data roaming switched on for the week was out of the question.

I was fortunate in having free WiFi where I was staying. I did however occasionally switch on roaming in order to check in at various Foursquare locations and am now proud to announce that I am Mayor of Peel Breakwater, Fenella Beach and The Grove.

Uhuh! So what do I hear?

Continue reading “Location – Foursquare, the Isle of Man and Apple #deappg”
Categories
Engineer ofcom Regs voip

Ofcom study into location determining of VoIP callers to emergency Services

Consultants Analysys Mason are conducting a study on behals of Ofcom into determining the location of Voice over IP callers making calls to emergency services. It is is easy to determine the location of a caller is in the old fixed line world because a phone number is recorded based on the location of a piece of copper “plugged” into the local telephone exchange.

This is not the case with VoIP.  A VoIP number could be anywhere on the planet. Anywhere there is a connection to the IP network/internet that is.  Ofcom recognises this and wants to understand whether there is a practical solution.

UK technical standards organisation NICC has published (Jan 2010) a potential solution to the problem though this is complex and also limited to VoIP users using UK ADSL connectivity.

This solution stems really from network architectures familiar to large telcos and my first reaction is that it is very expensive. One might ask what price a life? This is a reasonable question. We all have grannies and nobody wants ours to

Continue reading “Ofcom study into location determining of VoIP callers to emergency Services”
Categories
End User internet video

Japan Earthquake – live as it happens on the internet

Japan earthquake

I watched the news of the Japanese earthquake on iPlayer on my iPad. I watched it in bed, whilst having breakfast and then whilst in the shower (the iPad wasn’t in the actual shower cubicle). Coming out of the shower room I bumped into one of the kids  who said he had been watching it his room on his PC.

On my way in I listened to it on the car radio and then the iPad 3G connection kicked and the video started  in my bag in the boot (actually in the Jeep it is called a “trunk”). This was a bit disconcerting. The newsreader said that people on Japan had been standing in the streets in Tokyo watching the news streaming on their mobile handsets.

Coming into the office by 9am the video bandwidth usage on our network had doubled over the norm and I have iPlayer playing in the corner of the room.  We live in a totally connected world.

Our thoughts must go out to the people affected by the Earthquake. It is unbelievably amazing to be able to watch the destruction happening in real time broadcast live from a camera in a helicopter.

Categories
Business voip

ITSPA Awards -Timico wins Highly Commended Best Business ITSP – Large Enterprise

ITSPA Awards Best ITSP Large Enterprise

I am pleased nay thrilled to report back from last night’s ITSPA Awards that Timico received the Highly Commended Award for Best ITSP (Large Enterprise).

The ITSPA Awards were held at the top of the BT Tower (Post office Tower to those over a certain age) which is a wonderful venue and all thanks to BT for hosting.

A couple of years back Timico won the best Unified Communications Award. Last night was a particular milestone for us as we have been expanding our horizons to work with larger businesses and this Award really reflects a lot of hard work that has gone into developing our proposition for that market.ITSPA Best-Business-ITSP

Most ITSPs in the UK plant themselves firmly in the SMB space. Timico is able to play in a bigger market because unlike many ITSPs we are a fairly substantial ISP in our own right and an established MPLS networking business brings with it many opportunities to service the voice requirements of larger customers using our Genband A2 VoIP platform. The Genband platform coincidentally also won an award last night for best VoIP infrastructure.

The winners of the Large Enterprise Category were Virgin Media Business. We’ll beat them next year 🙂

Details of other ITSPA Awards cateorgy winners can be found here.

Categories
Business UC voip

ITSPA talk at UC Expo, SMB – the forgotten majority of the Unified Communications market?

I’ve just been preparing a talk I’m giving on behalf of the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association (ITSPA) at UC Expo in London on Tuesday. When I was asked to do this talk a few months ago I proposed the title “SMB – the forgotten majority of UC?”

The title held an element of provocation intended to attract punters to hear me speak. However when I dug in to the market numbers on the face of it this is very much the case. SMB represents roughly 15.% of the total market for Unified Communications equipment. This is despite the fact that his sector represents over 50% of the PBX market and, according to the EU, 99% of all businesses in Europe.

I guess this is down to two factors. Firstly most UC vendors provide the functionality as part of a bolt on to big PBX systems, presumably as part of their added value sell. A small business might not necessarily have the expertise or be able to afford to implement UC. A vendor may also not be able to afford the cost of selling these systems in to SMBs.

Secondly when I looked into some old market research into the use of individual components of UC, (Instant Messaging, presence, Unifed Messaging, collaboration , conferencing etc) the benefits of these functions when used by a business were expressed in time savings and moreover the bigger the business the greater the compound benefit.

So by and large UC remains the domain of big business.

There is no real reason why this should be the case. Many of the features mentioned above are openly available as low or zero cost somewhere on the internet. Some even have an element of integration, which is how UC is sold to bigger companies. Skype for example has integrated voice, video, IM and an element of conferencing. There are very few service providers that provide a true UC experience on a hosted basis (Timico is one).  An experience that matches the functionality  of expensive systems bought by large enterprises.

In fact ITSPA dropped the UC category from its Awards because Timico was the only service provider entering in that category (bit of a shame 🙂 ). Timico today does a lot of business with companies with between 250 and 500 staff but when we started selling VoIP we were firmly in the game of selling mainly to small business. As small business owners become more internet savvy I think their responsiveness towards the use of technologies such as Instant Messaging is changing. This has been recognised by the likes of Cisco who have been introducing new products into this space, albeit at the upper end of the spectrum.

Because UC market share statistics are gathered largely from traditional voice equipment vendors I doubt that the true level of penetration of UC features into the SMB market is known. The fact is that due to the cost of selling to SMBs UC services for this market will have to be cloud based and not based on a piece of kit in the corner of the office. I would expect that over the next few years, as SMBs grow comfortable with outsourcing services into the cloud, we should see a change in the penetration of UC into this market which will redress the balance of market segmentation to be more along the lines of the PBX market. This has to be a large opportunity.

Categories
Business voip

Timico Shortlisted for Best ITSP (SME) and Best ITSP (Large Enterprise) for ITSPA Awards

ITSPA Awards

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to blow your own trumpet on occasion and I am please to say that this time I can use the full register of that particular instrument.  Timico has been shortlisted for best Internet Telephony Service Provider in both SME (Small and Medium sized Enterprise) and Large Enterprise categories at the annual ITSPA Awards.

This is very pleasing as it fairly reflects the evolving nature of our business. A large percentage of our customers, as business demographics might suggest, are indeed SMBs. SMBs have represented the heartland of the hosted VoIP industry during its formative years.

Large Enterprises have traditionally opted for big PABX solutions, quite possible hosted. As Timico has grown we have won more and more business from the Enterprise sector and have found that this is an area of the market very willing to embrace hosted VoIP but also to mix and match premises based PBX and hosted using SIP trunks as the unifying factor. 

The biggest influencing factors here have been a combination of the maturing technology and the reduced cost of bandwidth across Wide Area Networks.

The Awards are at the BT Tower next Monday evening and are usually a great opportunity to network. Good luck to all the other finalists 🙂

Categories
Business ofcom Regs voip

New EU rules on number porting has get out clause for fixed line providers

Ofcom is currently consulting on changes to EU law applicable to Communications Providers that in theory will force providers to port numbers within 24 hours of being asked.

Sounds great but fixed line providers have been chucked a get out clause that adds that a subscriber line has to be ‘ready for service’ before being appropriate to port.

This means business as usual for the likes of BT whose archaic manual porting system requires a complete overhaul anjd which often leaves business custoemrs in the lurch.

Coincidentally the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association, ITSPA has recently commissioned an independent report outlining the options for the UK Communications industry in respect of number porting. It isn’t just a technical issue. There are contractual bottlenecks as well with each CP having to independently negotiate separate porting contracts with every other CP.

I will share the output when I get is sometime in March. In the meantime Ofcom seems content to let sleeping dogs lie and accept that as long as the letter of the EU law is met, (but not the spirit) then that is all fine and handy. This might make Ofcom’s life easier but is a disservice to UK business that has to put up with lengthy delays with porting their telephone numbers.

Details of the Ofcom consultation, scheduled to last 6 weeks, are available here. Interestingly CPs are also required to offered disabled access to Emergency Services via sms text service. I will need to investigate this further but if applicable to ITSPS this is certainly something very new for them to get to grips with.

The new laws have to be in place by 25th May 2011.

Categories
End User social networking

Nokia 97 twitter bot retweets negative Nokia PR

twitter screenshot from @tref showing careless retweet

Amusingly the post I wrote this morning, which basically said that people I knew were by and large moving away from Nokia to Android or Apple, was retweeted by a bot from an account called @luv_nokia_n97. I don’t know if this is an official Nokia twitter account but it certainly shows that there is a lot to consider when treading the social networking path.

Clearly the post was not checked out and brands need to either be careful how they implement such “tools” or how they police others’ use of their name on the internet.

PS I’ve left the Nokia N97 name in the post title again – I’m not averse to some free retweeting 🙂

Categories
End User social networking

Quorsum Quora? – first experiences

The trendy ubergeeks amongst you will have heard of Quora. Most will not.

The Google meta description suggests that “Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it.”

According to Wikipedia “Quora is an online knowledge market, founded in June 2009, launched in private beta in December 2009, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Quora aggregates questions and answers to many topics and allows users to collaborate on them. Quora was co-founded by Adam D’Angelo (Facebook’s former CTO) and Charlie Cheever. In March, 2010 Quora received funding from Benchmark Capital, valuing the start-up at a rumored $86 million.”

The site is used by a number of high profile techies and there was a flurry of activity on my twitter stream a week or two ago that drew it to my attention.

The nature of these things is that you have to get in early to bag a good username – tref, for example, so I did. You can look me up.

I also tried asking a question. It took me several attempts to get the question in a format that Quora would accept.

My question was “How doth the friendly crocodile improve his shining tail?” The 19th Century grammar was unacceptable to Quora so after a number of attempts to understand the issue I negotiated replacing doth” with “does”. Not as good in its dumbed down form I’m sure you will agree but at least it doesn’t lose the basic tenor of the question.

It wasn’t long before someone came up with the right answer to the question – which is part of a Lewis Carrol poem.

Yesterday I got an email from Quora admin:

“This question is possibly more appropriate for a dedicated poetry website. It currently does not fit within the Quora policy and guidelines. Please modify. See Quora Question Policies & Guidelines: What are the guidelines for questions on Quora?”

Rather than compromise the fundamental philosophical nature of the question (at least in my mysterious mind) I decided to delete it. Turns out I couldn’t or at least I couldn’t within the amount of time I was prepared to spend finding out how to do it

I left Quora a note telling them this and suggesting that I was happy for them to do it on my behalf. They have now changed the question to

What did Lewis Carrol mean by “How doth the friendly crocodile improve it’s shining tail?”

I doubt that Lewis Carrol meant anything by it.

I guess my point is that I have probably wasted about an hour of my time with Quora. Quora hasn’t been the best of experiences though I imagine it has enough high profile supporters to keep hyping it for a while and I wish them luck.

This reinforces my belief that there are so many new things happening all the time that it is virtually impossible to keep on top of them all. It is better to wait and see which ones get established.

Hmm – that way I might miss out on the good username though…

PS one wonders how scalable Quora is? I realise that my question didn’t necessarily fit within the spirit of what the platform is trying to achieve but if it gets scale it won’t be practical for a Quora admin to police each question for appropriateness. There is a flag that allows users to question questions but whether this will be good enough only time will tell.

Categories
End User social networking

social media – have you got your uniform yet? #twitter #facebook #linkedin #blog

twitter,LinkedIn,Facebook,blog

I’ve been involved at first hand in a couple of revolutions. The first was VoIP which took 10 – 15 years to develop into full scale engagement. The second is social networking which has covered the same ground in about 3 years.

Today I went to a social networking master class conducted by Pirate Glenn @lesanto. People attended because this revolution is happening so quickly. Today felt like a WW1 recruiting session with volunteers standing in line to take up arms. Everyone needs to know where they fit in – it is unpatriotic not to be seen in uniform.

The biggest challenge for businesses is that social networking represents a totally new discipline to embrace. It covers sales, marketing, customer service, tech support, PR and more I’m sure. There may be some overlap in this list but it gives you an idea of the scope.

I’m not about to expound on how each of these disciplines should use social media but one of the problems for a business is deciding exactly how to go about it. This is new territory.

The skills required can be learned and in most cases will have to be because there aren’t many people around that might be called social media experts – witness the fact that Tesco is willing to pay £60k for someone with the right experience.

Most businesses can’t afford to take on more people just to handle social media. They have to reuse existing staff that are already working on something else.

For example a marketing department might have a team of people working on print media production. It takes a serious decision to change the way you work to stop doing one activity in order to concentrate on another but diverting resource from print media to social networking might be one of these.

I picked an easy one there – print media is on the way out but the same issue applies to other areas. Customer service for example. Big businesses are already known for the amount of effort they put in to engaging with customers using twitter. Dell supposedly had 50 people on their virtual social media team.

It’s all very well for a giant multinational but if you are a small business doing this from scratch there has to be an element of faith involved – you will be betting some of your scarce resource on the effort.

I think I’m going to explore this a bit more. If anyone wants to come along to a “workshop” I’ll happily host one and provide refreshments. Drop me a line or leave a comment. I think we can aim for a February get together. Look out a date/announcement next week.

Exit to the sound of “Two Tribes  – Frankie Goes To Hollywood”…

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blog

Categories
Business security UC voip

#ITSPA winter workshop tomorrow – life beyond POTS and #VoIP #security Gigaset Magrathea

If you can you should make it to the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association (ITSPA)Winter Workshop being held tomorrow at The King’s Fund, 11-13 Cavendish Square. Sponsored by Gigaset and Magrathea two main topics are being discussed:

  1. Life beyond POTS and
  2. VoIP security

Both are interesting areas. The first looks at whether we really have moved beyond just using the telephone for simple voice conversations. The second addresses the wave of VoIP fraud that has been going on in 2010, directed in the main at unsecured open source PBXs. We will be discussing an ITSPA developed position paper on the subject which will include advice on best practice for securing your VoIP service.

The event is between 2 and 5 pm tomorrow with drinks afterwards. If you want to come please contact the ITSPA secretariat at [email protected] or 020 7340 8733. I am moderating both panel sessions.

Categories
broadband Business UC voip

The View from My Window is All White #uksnow #voip

snowy view from our back window

With snow being today’s theme I thought I’d stick some pictures up.  The header photo (click to enlarge) is the view from my upstairs landing window into our back garden.  The kids were off yesterday and trashed the pristine snow. I was chairing a panel session at the ISPA conference in London.  The show must go on.

The conference was remarkably well attended considering that some people from “up north” were completely snowed in.

The point of this post, much as we like snow when it is at its pretty stage,  is however to show the picture of the Timico car park.  This is normally chock full with cars but we are in one of the areas heavily hit (the Lincoln Christmas Market has been forced to cancel for the first time ever). Not a problem though. Staff have been able to work from home using their VoIP accounts and broadband connections.  Sorted.

There is also an interesting story concerning one of our customers who has just recently installed VoIP in a couple of pilot sites. Because of travel to work problems and staff shortages they have shut a number of offices and wanted call diversions put in place by BT to direct traffic to their open offices. The offices piloting VoIP did this in a matter of seconds.  Those relying on BT to manually perform the divert have been told that it isn’t going to happen due to the huge demand caused by the snow! This certainly shows the right and wrong ways to perform Disaster Recovery.

I don’t normally use this blog to plug Timico but this one was too topically and relevant not to and really I’m just plugging the technology.

Here’s the view from the office window.  It has since started snowing again. The picture right at the bottom is my jeep when I got back to the trains station last night. Snow? Bring it on 🙂

timico carpark in the snow

snow covereed jeep at Newark Northgate railway station last night
snow covered jeep at Newark Northgate railway station last night
Categories
Apps End User social networking

Facebook use at work on the increase

Our tech support teams tell me that there is increasingly a trend for business customers to call in and ask for Facebook to be blocked in their offices.

I wondered whether there were any stats showing how much Facebook use there is in the workplace but there don’t seem to be any – not that I can find anyway.

It does pose the question as to what level of freedom is acceptable in respect of the use of social networking tools at work. There are arguments both for and against which have been well debated elsewhere.

Continue reading “Facebook use at work on the increase”
Categories
Business voip

VoIP number porting – telecom industry needs to sort it out

VoIP number porting as a problem has been brought to the fore this year as Cable & Wireless and Tesco closed down their services. In the case of the former it was the service of one of its acquired businesses and Tesco were let down by Australian provider Freshtel who retrenched to their home market.

Both sets of customers had a torrid time trying to find new homes for their services and numbers. This was because there were no porting agreements in place for either service provider.

At the recent Parliament and Internet Conference a C&W/Thus customer Gareth Jamie of eoffice turned up to tell the audience of the problems he had had. It took him 45 days to find a new home for his VoIP and £10k of credits for unhappy customers of his managed workspace business.

This is a measurable effect of the problem which is that whilst the larger telcos will happily port numbers between themselves there are a further 300 or so small operators with their own number ranges with who they don’t have

Continue reading “VoIP number porting – telecom industry needs to sort it out”
Categories
Business UC voip

ITSPA Awards move to BT Tower in 2011

BT Tower (source Wikipedia)I was at a busy IP Expo yesterday for an Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association (ITPSA) council meeting and launch of the ITSPA 2011 Awards. ITSPA is sponsoring sister event UC Expo which is being held at Olympia on 8/9 March 2011.

The ITSPA Awards have attracted growing interest in the VoIP community since their inception 3 years ago. We have traditionally held them at the House of Commons – in one of the members bars. The venue has been a big part of the attraction.

Unfortunately (or fortunately – depending on how you look at it) the demand for space has meant that the room we have used in the past is not big enough so a move is called for.

The 2011 Awards ceremony will be held in the BT Tower. I am lucky enough to be a frequent guest of BT at the tower and it must be said that this is a terrific venue. The quality of the catering is also outstanding and I think this a very suitable new home for the event.

The awards, renamed this year “ITSPA Awards in association with UC Expo” will be promoted by event organisers Imago and will be held the evening before the start of the show.

We have in past recognised equipment vendors and service providers for their achievements this year the categories have been extended to cover real world implementations.  These include Best Public Sector UC Implementation, Best Private Sector UC Implementation and Best Small Business UC Implementation.

If you want to know more or to enter the 2011 ITSPA Awards you can visit the website here. Whether you enter or not if you have an interest in VoIP you will want to come along.

Video of the view from the top.

There is more on YouTube of you look for it.

Categories
Business voip

HD Voice Peering Federation launches in UK

Next Gen interconnect carrier XConnect has in the UK today launched The HD Voice Peering Federation, a High Definition Voice initiative. This is something that was discussed at the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association (ITSPA) HD Voice workshop I chaired back in June. Whilst it is still early days should provide a good breeding ground for high quality voice interconnects amongst VoIP service providers.

Without such an initiative HD voice services would forever be high (quality) walled gardens with no contact with the outside world.

The initiative is supported initially by vendors Polycom, Broadsoft and Dialogic and has signed up Simwood,

Continue reading “HD Voice Peering Federation launches in UK”
Categories
End User social networking

best use for Ping is on the golf course

When I was a lad I used to sit around listening to music, chewing the fat with my pals. Nowadays I hardly listen to any music other than on the rare occasional night in on my own with a steak and a bottle of red wine.

It may be a generational thing but I don’t actually have time for it. I don’t often watch TV so in the evenings I am on my laptop doing whatever I am doing. Most of the time music would break my concentration so I don’t have it on.

I use twitter a lot in the evenings. That’s instead of Facebook which I now only dip into every now and again. Sometimes I note that people I follow on twitter are listening to music. @jobsworth for example commutes into London and often tells us what he is listening to.

So when Apple announced a new TV service and Ping, a new social network based around music I found it difficult to get excited.

Continue reading “best use for Ping is on the golf course”
Categories
Business internet mobile connectivity voip

Orange HD voice – when will the whole world go HD?

Mobile operator Orange has hit the headlines today with the launch of its HD voice service. Trials for this service, which uses the Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband codec (AMR-WB – otherwise known as  G722.2), began in June this year in the south of England.

The service is initially only for Orange HD handset to Orange HD handset.  This is quite easy to do as “on-net” HD calls using the same codec don’t require transcoding and also do not therefore enter into the black art world of interoperability. 

HD voice has been the subject of discussion amongst the VoIP community in the UK this year.  A fair few vendors

Continue reading “Orange HD voice – when will the whole world go HD?”
Categories
End User voip voip hardware

SPA525G VoIP phone by Cisco gets thumbs up

Cisco SPA525G VoIP phone
Cisco SPA525G phone with colour display

Cisco SPA525G VoIP phone gets thumbs up – find out why.

The SPA525G VOIP phone is the flagship model in Cisco’s small business range of IP phones. trefor.net takes it on a road test, kicks the tyres and gives an opinion.

Look & Feel

Cisco SPA525G phone
Cisco SPA525G phone with colour display

If you think the SPA525G VoIP phone looks familiar it’s because this phone and the other models in the range are the direct replacements for the popular SPA900 series, inherited by Cisco as part of the Linksys acquisition in 2003.

There is, however, a considerable uplift in the quality of plastics used throughout and the receiver itself appears to be lifted directly from Cisco’s higher priced 7900 range.

The general impression is of a very solid device that will survive the rigours of office life for many years to come.

Once you power the unit up you can admire the full colour screen which you only get on the 525G. The other models in the range make do with a monochrome display. You can set the background image from a number of pre-loaded files or import one of your own by using the integrated USB

Continue reading “SPA525G VoIP phone by Cisco gets thumbs up”
Categories
datacentre End User internet social networking

@tref on Twitter…Two Years, Ten Weeks, Two Days and Counting

I joined twitter 802 days ago on 17th May 2008. Since then as @tref on Twitter I have sent 2,623 tweets, an average of just over three a day. Not too bad for anyone who thinks I spend too long on the site.

In June, according to twitter COO Dick Costolo twitter had 190 million users, growing by 300 thousand a day. These users were generating 65million tweets a day – that’s enough for twitter to be building its own brand new datacentre to handle all the traffic.

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Categories
Business Regs voip

Voice over IP – a techno-regulatory view

Here is an article written by Trefor Davies and Louise Lancaster in the Institute of Telecoms Professionals’ Journal and published this month.

It covers a bit of the history of VoIP technology, where it has evolved to today and some current issues such as number porting and naked DSL.

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For more information on the ITP you can visit their website at www.theitp.org/journal

Categories
Business internet video

Polycom Telepresence impresses ITSPA

I’ve only seen a single screen telepresence demo before and that was on a noisy exhibition floor.  At Polycom’s City Executive Briefing Centre yesterday I was treated the to a full blown demo and boy was it impressive.  The quality was astounding.

Attendees at the ITSPA Summer Forum sat on one side of an oval conference table that was mirrored on 4 large screens in front of us. A Polycom representative (sorry didn’t catch his name) did the spiel from the other room located in Slough.

It was as if he was in the same room and he could even hear the side conversations going on on our side of the table.

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Categories
Business ofcom voip

Mobile operators wreaking havoc with pricing

At the ITSPA Summer Forum, held yesterday at Polycom’s City offices  there was a panel of VoIP wholesalers debating the health of the market. The panel consisted of representatives from BT, Gamma, X-Connect, Magrathea and Timico (ie moi).

The market it turns out is very healthy with everyone reporting growth in VoIP minutes over and above old fashioned TDM minutes. We also debated number porting – a large subject in its own right that has already featured on this blog but is going to be a lot more visible over the next few months.

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Categories
Engineer internet voip

VONGA is dead – long live FVA? – Openreach

BT has killed off VoNGA. Bit of a shame really because I was kinda fonda VoNGA. Voice over Next Generation Access or VoNGA was BT Openreach’s initial stab at voice over fibre and initially at least notionally aimed at new developments where it didn’t make sense to put legacy voice infrastructure into an exchange.

Now BT has strangled VoNGA in the womb. We never really heard it’s first cry.

Don’t get me wrong. It was only the acronym I liked – I thought it sounded good. The product itself, a reduced feature

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Categories
Business voip

ITSPA AGM and Summer Forum at the v plush Polycom offices in the City

Just stepped into the Polycom offices at 69 Old Broad Street in the City. I am here for the ITSPA council meeting, AGM and Summer Workshop.

The offices are super plush and impressively I didn’t have to sign in at reception. The receptionist pushed a button on a panel and a lift door opened to take me directly to the 16th floor. There were no buttons inside the lift to press other than “door open” and “alarm”.

I was whisked straight to the 16th floor and the lift door opened. The receptionist on the 16th floor said “welcome Mr Davies” and showed me to the coffee lounge.

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Categories
Business ofcom voip

Scandalous delays by Openreach harming consumers and competition

If you want to port your existing telephone number to a VoIP provider (Internet Telephony Service Provider/ITSP) you can do, by and large. If this number is the number of the analogue phone line that carries the broadband connection that the VoIP service runs over you are knackered because the minute the number is ported the analogue line is ceased and therefore the broadband will stop working.

Of course you can’t run VoIP on a broadband connection that isn’t a broadband connection because it isn’t working. How good is that?

If consumers want to move away from an incumbent telco (for incumbent read slow moving, lacking innovation

Continue reading “Scandalous delays by Openreach harming consumers and competition”