Category: voip

#VoIPweek roundup

Last week was #voipweek on trefor.net. This follows on from #peeringweek and will be part of an ongoing programme of themed weeks focussing on particular technology subjects relating to the internet.

Although we do occasionally ask for specific posts the contributors to our themed weeks are by and large left to choose their own topic. This makes for a diversity of content that we probably wouldn’t otherwise see. Diversity is indeed what we did get.

The week saw the publication of 28 posts most of which were VoIP related. VoIP content was wide ranging and included articles on Net Neutrality (in the news at the moment), security and fraud, the technology of location identification for Emergency Services, considerations in designing conference phones, the birth of a new handset, will OTT services kill off the telephony service provider and more.

We saw nostalgia and forward thinking. What’s happening in the Google UC world and will ITSPs need to embrace Lync? There was also a post highlighting a real world case study of someone trying to find a serviced office that would allow them to use their own VoIP service.

In one sense VoIP is now a boring subject because it is mainstream. People like new things. It’s impossible to talk about new things all the time – they just don’t come quickly enough. The content for VoIP week was current enough though and being written almost exclusively by CEOs or Technical Directors in the industry was pretty authoritative.

The statistics make for interesting reading. During the week we saw 6,640 visitors, 9,352 page views. Add to this an average of 296 RSS feed reads a day. Posts were shared a total of 414 times including 90 via Twitter and a 188 via LinkedIn. Google+ at 73 shares came in higher than Facebook at 63. This mix suggests a predominantly business interest in the subject of VoIP.

One post which discussed the future of Unified Communications had 54 shares on LinkedIn which has to be a record for this blog.

All in all we can say that #voipweek was a great success and we should certainly look forward not only to more guest posts from those contributing last week but to other themed weeks in the months ahead.

I’d like to thank all the contributors for helping to make it such a success. Without their authoritative posts #voipweek could not have happened.

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Invest Wisely to Get the Best from VoIP

Post author By Dan Winfield
Post date Friday, 9 May, 2014
No Comments on Invest Wisely to Get the Best from VoIP

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week contributor Dan Winfield, Co-Founder and CEO of Voxhub and 2014 ITSPA Council member.

Starting in, I want to say that this is only my second blog piece on Trefor.net (the first being The Smoking Rooms of Net Neutrality, published yesterday), so please excuse me if I state the bleeding obvious. Yes, I know this site’s readership is a refined audience, one with Gig connections, fibre thing, flashing lights and fancy equipment — the whole package — however I am aiming today at normal businesses that might stumble over here via Google.

I’ll try to explain.

VoIP is the most sensitive service that graces computer networks. It needs love and care to ensure that it performs as a telephone service should, for every call, over and over, 24 hrs a day. And to push it around, it craves low latency, as well as highly available constant bandwidth connectivity with reliable networking equipment. Ironically, for many VoIP is about saving money, yet the less you spend the less likely the chances are that it is getting the environment it needs. All of which is why you need to invest wisely to get the best from VoIP.

As a council member for ITSPA I can safely say that the vast majority of member service providers have invested well in their data centres and equipment. If you are a business that uses one of these providers and you are having quality problems, then 90% of the time (or more) it is your lack of investment that is to blame.

At Voxhub we often receive calls from people saying that they have poor quality VoIP from another provider and want to hear about what we can do better. Many years ago my first thought would have been that their problem had to do with their provider and I would have sympathised with them. Today, though, I go further and try to work out precisely why they are experiencing poor service. After all, there might be some underlying reason for the problems that we wouldn’t want them to bring over, should they opt to switch to our service. It never takes very long to realise that 90% of the time (or more) the cause of the problem is a lack of investment on their side, the most likely candidates being poor cabling, cheap routers, and single Internet connections that are shared between computers and phones.

Sadly, a lot of businesses don’t invest in their Internet connections for any type of on-line service from which they plan to draw benefit, so any advice I give from this point forward applies to investing correctly to benefit from any VoIP, cloud, or on-line service used by your business. Of course, I cannot say precisely how much should be spent, and I think that for the smallest business investing doesn’t have to mean spending very much at all. I would suggest, though, that when you invest you think about the following to help put things in perspective:

1.	Don’t cut corners. Consider your goals and be careful not to erode them by being too cutthroat or going too cheap.
	Service Provider: “We have a proven 4 minute abs program for rippling muscles, guaranteed.” You: “Can you do it quicker? I have seen that available on-line for 3.
2.	Put your VoIP outlay in context by comparing it to what you spend on other business expenses.
	I know of a company that spent hundreds of thousands on fine wood floors for their new office and still took convincing to spend any money on good network equipment. If you have no problem buying an iPhone as a business expense then you have should have no problem spending half that on a router that is used by your whole company every day of the week.
3.	Imagine you are investing in an invisible team member.
	Everyone agrees that ‘Investing in People’ is essential for good business. As such, it can really put things into perspective to consider any Internet/VoIP investment you make as an invisible team member, a “person” who is relied upon by everyone in your business for all of your essential services, telephone, mail, administration, banking, security, and even employee happiness (if you let them watch cat videos and essential World Cup events). If you don’t make the right hiring choice you will end up getting poor attendance, under achievement…in essence, a “person” that lets down your whole team.
4.	VoIP may not work on a network just because the BBC website loads quickly.
	I am sorry to say it, but at some point the finer details become important. Working out what you need to invest versus what you have already invested requires some evaluation expertise. At Voxhub we take on this responsibility for our customers, providing advice, verified equipment, and testing tools for networks that tell us our customers what kind of performance they are actually getting.

Somewhere along the line you will need expertise and advice, whether the quantifying comes from your own team, your IT company, or your VoIP provider. Once you find the right source of help, trust them and let them deliver for you…then be sure to hold onto them and don’t let them go!

VoIP Week Posts:

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Hosted VoIP/UCaaS is Going Upmarket!

Post author By Huw Rees
Post date Friday, 9 May, 2014
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Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week contributor Huw Rees, Senior Vice President of Business Development at 8×8

The hosted VoIP/UCaaS (aka cloud communications) market is growing strongly in the US and it seems that the UK market is not far behind. According to Frost and Sullivan, Gartner, and others, US CAGR is somewhere around the 25%+ mark, and certainly the results from the few pure play publicly traded companies in this space seem to be consistent with these figures. So what is really driving this growth? What is really going on under the bonnet (or hood, for those of you in the US)?

What appears to be happening is that cloud communications is being adopted by much larger businesses than it was even two or three years ago. The early adopters for hosted PBX services were the very small businesses, typically less than 20 employees. In terms of IT, these businesses were generally unsophisticated and the owner could make the decision rapidly without asking a lot of detailed questions, especially when the provider would clearly save him/her money and often offered some kind of money-back guarantee. Thus, with nothing to lose, these small businesses signed up in significant numbers. Larger business were not so quick to jump on this bandwagon, however, as they needed clear answers to such questions as availability, reliability, feature set, scalability and — of course — compliance and security. Their questions in these areas were not easy to answer in the early roll out of these services, and unfortunately some of these items (especially compliance and security) are still not being properly addressed by many providers.

As some of the vendors started to address these mid-market and even enterprise-level concerns, CIOs started to pay more attention. They began to see the clear benefits of a sophisticated, scalable service that they could subscribe to, effectively getting out of the telephone management business and concentrating their IT resources on projects that were critical to their business and part of the differentiation their business had in their markets (i.e., stop managing boxes in closets and start bringing real value to the business). Gradually at first, businesses of a few hundred employees signed up, followed by 500+, and now businesses significantly greater than 1000 employees subscribe to these services.

For the service provider, larger customers provide major benefits. For instance, they have more sophisticated IT teams, and so the ratio of support calls to deployed phones is reduced. Also, the acquisition cost is potentially less on a per-phone-deployed basis. And perhaps most importantly, the churn rate from larger customers is dramatically less, as larger businesses are generally more stable and therefore tend not to cease business with anywhere near the frequency of the very small businesses. This reduction in churn rate clearly benefits the service provider’s top line, as to grow revenue you must, of course, stem any revenue loss from defecting customers.

As we look forward to 2015, the trend of larger businesses moving to cloud-based communications will continue, to the point where the enterprise market will also start to adopt these services. Soon enough, it will not be uncommon for businesses with many thousands of employees — perhaps even tens of thousands of employees — to start subscribing, which will result in a booming business for the service providers that are truly ready to tackle such a scale.

VoIP Week Posts:

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Will OTT VoIP Apps Destroy the Telecoms Industry?

Post author By Alex Kinch
Post date Friday, 9 May, 2014
No Comments on Will OTT VoIP Apps Destroy the Telecoms Industry?

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week contributor Alex Kinch, Founder and CEO of Ziron.

As soon as the Telecoms industry came to terms with the WhatsApp acquisition and what it could mean for their SMS revenues, CEO Jan Koum dropped another bombshell: the company would be launching voice services from Q2.

For many this announcement spelled the end. Surely operator executives around the world should start packing their suitcases and call it a day. After years of racing to the bottom the industry has finally hit rock. Well, not quite. In my view, it’s high-time these doomsayers started to examine the opportunities that come with the increase of OTT voice apps (mVoiP), rather than demonising the unstoppable tide of technological evolution.

The ‘telco industry camp’ and the ‘mVoiP camp’ needn’t be enemies. There is room a-plenty for them to co-exist, at least for the foreseeable future. News reports would have you believe that the only people using landlines are rural dwelling anti-tech luddites, however Ofcom has reported that in the last statistical year call volumes from both fixed and mobile phones were in excess of 100 billion minutes. Their report states that 82% of adults still use a home landline – but only 28% of adults use any form of VoIP. The report also said that there are currently 82.7 million active mobile subscribers in the UK, but a report from Analysys Mason clarifies that only 20% of them are active mVoiP users.

It is essential to keep in mind that mVoIP isn’t new, as in recent years a host of mVoiP apps have launched, including Fring, Nimbuzz to Viber. We’ve had a long time to come to terms with mVoIP apps and adapt business models accordingly. The key is to think about how you can value, rather than trying to stand in the way of change. At least one popular OTT app has been conducting trials with traditional telcos, in which calls from the PSTN made to a user’s regular GSM number are intercepted and delivered to the app instead of via the SIM. This kind of forward progress must be embraced. We must ask, “How we can add value and work together to deliver an enhanced customer experience?”

Massive scope exists for smart VoIP operators that can act as a gateway between the old world of the PSTN and the new world of OTT apps. As someone that has been in Telco for more years than I dare ever admit, I remember similar hysteria taking hold ten years ago when Skype first became popular. Today, Skype is feeding and contributing to the Telco industry, driving a third of the world’s phone traffic. The fact is that Telecoms is evolving, and,to survive we are going to have to evolve with it.

VoIP Week Posts:

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Secured SIP Provisioning

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week contributor Tim Bray, Technical Director for ProVu Communications

Most SIP providers in the UK use auto provisioning to look after their SIP phones, with the phones calling home to a central server via HTTP to download configuration files.

Auto provisioning is an essential part of the hosted SIP and SIP PBX market in the UK, which would be unviable without it. The advantages offered are a consistent phone setup and an ongoing ability for the support team to manage and support the device.

Parts of the system

Provisioning server
Provisioning client on phone
Redirection server at manufacturer
Multicast detection (for a PBX to detect phones on local networks)
File format – usually key/value based or XML

Recent security disclosures (Cal Leeming, et al) have given the impression that all auto provisioning is insecure, the basic argument being that phone MAC addresses are predictable and thus a provisioning server can be easily scanned. I am not sure these disclosures have really brought out anything that was not already understood by the competent players in the market, but they did bring to light the fact that some people are acting in an insecure manner and probably need to tidy up their systems a bit.

SIP usernames and passwords have a value in the underworld of VoIP fraud.

I know from personal experience that security holes in phones cause more damage than exploited provisioning servers, and having the ability to rapidly upgrade thousands of vulnerable phones by way of a provisioning server is invaluable.

At Provu we run a provisioning system for many thousands of phones, and we act as a provisioning service provider for ITSPs who need it. We have always had a policy to only provision SIP passwords one time and then to immediately delete those passwords, and phones that never call home get their passwords deleted as well, all of which provides some level of protection.
ProVu logo

Authentication

It is my view that the provisioning session between the phone and the server should be authenticated. A very good way to do this is to use HTTPS with client certificates (the certificates are for client authentication, with the https encryption almost secondary) that are installed in the phones at the factory. A provisioning server can then use the public part of the Certificate Authority (CA) to authenticate the phone. Each phone has a unique certificate and the MAC address of the phone is embedded as a field within the certificate, and thus a provisioning server can know for certain which phone it is talking to simply by checking the certificate.

The main advantage of the certificate authentication method is that no setup is required on the phone. The certificates are inserted at the factory and can be validated by anybody with the CA file. Some phone vendors already support this, too, it being an idea that was first put to use by Sipura sometime around 2005. For years, I have been asking the phone vendors I deal with to add certificates as part of their manufacturing process, and I would very much like to see a world where client certificates are standard on all SIP phones. The certificates can also be used for SIP as well, serving to immediately block an avenue for fraud.

Wider Security

There are many phone configuration best practices that can be enforced by a provisioning server, including:

Enforcement of strong passwords on web interface
Disablement of dialing from web interface
Updating firmware with all the latest security fixes
Configuration of SIP on a random port number
Disablement of backdoor entry points for click-to-dial software
Disablement `hidden` web access usernames and passwords
Enforcement of long SIP passwords (much easier to provision a 20 character random password than have the end user type it in)

Provisioning Server Security

Use authentication — Must be not replayable
Rate Limits — Basic sysadmin firewall type tasks
Patched up-to-date with security fixes
No directory indexes
Use script that deletes passwords once provisioned

VoIP Week Posts:

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Provisioning, Cloud Management and Obihai

Post author By Mark Williams
Post date Thursday, 8 May, 2014
No Comments on Provisioning, Cloud Management and Obihai

The name may be new, but you’ve probably provisioned, configured or used an IP phone or ATA over the years that Obihai’s core engineering team had a hand in developing.

Back in 1999 a company called Komodo released the first ever voice ATA. The Komodo product quickly caught the attention of Cisco, the company was acquired and the Cisco ATA-186 quickly became ubiquitous in the emerging VoIP marketplace. Soon after, Jan Fandrianto and Sam Sin started a new company, Sipura, where they further evolved mass market low-cost VoIP devices and provisioning. The Sipura approach to secure, remote provisioning was quickly emulated across the industry, and Cisco acquired this business as well, after which the team further expanded the SPA product range before starting Obihai in 2010. Since that time they have been working on a new generation of voice hardware, supported by an advanced cloud management platform, and are now working to expand into global markets.

With a new company came a new opportunity — to design a voice platform from the ground up, and to innovate based on the knowledge gained over the past decade. First a new SIP stack had to be written, and Dr. Sin’s experience in writing the Komodo and Sipura SIP stacks ensured that this new stack would be feature-rich, expandable, and bullet-proof. Obihai have even used its SIP stack in its WebRTC implementation using web sockets. Next came the development of the OBiTALK cloud management platform, which is unique in that it can be utilised for HTTPS-based remote device management and provisioning in a wide variety of fashions, depending on the service provider’s infrastructure and cloud capabilities.

Customers can leverage the OBiTALK portal in a variety of ways, depending on how the OBi devices reach the end user. For example, end customers can purchase their own hardware for use via the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) service within the portal, which allows the customer to choose and sign up for IP voice services via Obihai’s “Approved Service Provider” (ASP) program. This program allows ITSPs to offer their services for provision via OBiTALK with the user selecting and purchasing the voice services, and in turn the device automatically configures for the chosen ASP. Once the ASPs services are added to the OBi device, the ASP can then check the status and change the configuration of their services on the device either via API into their own platform or via the ITSP view within the OBiTALK portal.

For ITSPs, there are a number of ways to provision and manage devices. A “Zero Touch” (ZT) approach is available, with the ITSP able to push XML-based profiles with smart adaption to the specified device. Traditional methods are available as well, including DHCP Option 66, TFTP, HTTP, and HTTPS. Profiles are sent securely to devices using HTTPS, Open SSL or by profile encryption using the OBCrypt tool. Additionally, cloud-based provisioning, configuration and management can be obtained via the OBiTALK portal. This approach allows the ITSP or their customer to purchase regular off-the-shelf Obihai devices and to add the device to the ITSP’s service by simply dialing a star code. It also allows even smaller service providers — those without a provisioning infrastructure — to offer ZT or near-ZT services to their customers. For ITSPs with a deployed provisioning infrastructure, the OBiTALK portal can be used alongside as a technical support and inventory management tool, showing all OBi devices on the ITSP’s network, their status, location and also enabling the ITSP to browse to the device’s local admin page. Additionally, all the functionality within OBiTALK can be accessed via API, allowing ITSPs to integrate the portal with their own systems. The ability to provision even extends to Obihai’s range of USB accessories, the OBiWiFI Wifi adaptor, OBiBT Bluetooth adaptor and OBiLINE FXO adaptor can all be configured by the xml profile.

Today, as evidenced by Obihai’s ATAs, and IP phones, almost anyone can securely provision and manage their devices regardless of existing infrastructure.

VoIP Week Posts:

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The Smoking Rooms of Net Neutrality

Post author By Dan Winfield
Post date Thursday, 8 May, 2014
3 Comments on The Smoking Rooms of Net Neutrality

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week contributor Dan Winfield, Co-Founder and CEO of Voxhub and 2014 ITSPA Council member.

Net neutrality is a hot topic amongst those in the VoIP industry and something all VoIP providers have had to deal with in one form or another, usually looming its head in the land of large network providers and mobile networks. Did you know, though, that there are many places in the UK where you are not free to use your favourite VoIP provider? No joke, as difficult as it is to believe, there are still places in 2014 that judge based on the protocol. And these places are on every block, every city and are allowed to openly discriminate.

Yes, I am talking about serviced offices.

VoIP services are about flexibility, and ironically this is what serviced offices are supposed to offer. So why do I put my head in my hands when I hear that a client is moving to a serviced office? In my experience, Voxhub customers making such a move typically have to leave because they are not allowed to use our service or they cannot do so due to firewall blocking. Also, much stress is generated during such ‘events’ due to customers becoming annoyed with the situation and, in the case of blocking, are often caught between two parties with no service! Of course, at Voxhub we do our best to find a diplomatic solution for any customers wanting to move to a serviced office, but it isn’t a task we like to undertake.

Before going any further I should say that I am fully aware of the financial dynamics of serviced offices, and the fact that they often have to invest in telephony for whole buildings in advance and figure out how to somehow repay this investment. The grey area in all of this — and where the real problem lies — is that all serviced offices supply ‘Internet’ to their customers. Thus, as ‘VoIP services’ are synonymous with ‘Internet’, such services should not be blocked on the grounds that they compete with the in-house telephony VoIP or otherwise.

So why do I care? Let me quote Bender, that wise robot from the much loved cartoon “Futurama”:

“This is the worst kind of discrimination. The kind against me!”

I’ll explain. I have spent much of the last 6 months looking for office space for our Voxhub team in London, and as such have been forced to enter the underbelly of the office world as a potential customer. We sought our own office, but also investigated the serviced office option. Normally I would cross the road when I see a serviced office for fear of being jeered at, but there is a disturbing new type that dress themselves up as modern, fun and ‘Internet’ savvy. They even have high ceilings, wooden floors, unfinished walls and random furniture in corners of rooms. I was fooled, enough at least to give the concept a chance.

In one case, I was actually quite near to signing up with one of these new breed serviced offices. Naturally, I had asked questions about using our own phones, but I always had a sneaky feeling that they didn’t understand. At the very end of the process, in fact, they asked me how many of their phones I would want, and they even went as far as to increase the quoted rent costs when I said they could keep their phones because I didn’t need them. They tried to concede, but then stupidly said I had to pay an extra charge based on the number of phones in the room. Anyone who has seen our desks knows that this is a dumb thing to say, as during service development or trials we often have upwards of three or four phones on a single desk! Of course, I told them to stuff it.

I decided to make one last set of enquiries for serviced offices to see if my prejudice is correct. Sadly, it only made it clearer in my mind that these businesses need to be slapped into shape when it comes to understanding net neutrality.

All advertised Internet but gave no warning that certain services were not allowed.
Many very clearly indicated that I could not use VoIP telephones.
Some said I could use Skype but not the Voxhub service.
Some didn’t know anything but told me I had to direct my question to their telecom provider.

I had a very colourful call with one lady that highlights the problem. She told me that for our service I was allowed to use a software phone like Skype, that I wasn’t allowed to use a hardware VoIP phone, that I was allowed to use a laptop with a headset (and if the headset looked like a phone handset, that was also OK), and that I wasn’t allowed to use a laptop that looked like a phone with my headset from the previous question that looked like a handset.

As you can no doubt imagine, at this point I was trying not to laugh and the woman was probably wishing she hadn’t spoken to me. I snuck in one last question about using a phone that looked like a laptop, but I think by that point she realised something was going on and made an excuse about me needing to speak to someone more technical.

In all seriousness, by the end of the process I felt that not only was VoIP effectively blacklisted, but that my business wasn’t even allowed to trade in a serviced office without using someone else’s phones or paying danger money for being there!

A serviced office, in my opinion, should be considered a service provider and be included as part of any regulatory requirements and / or best practices, especially if they have outsourced their operations to a service provider that in any other environment would not operate this type of practice.

At day’s end, I am extremely glad that we were pushed away from taking a serviced office. Voxhub has now been accepted as a member of TechHub (we love hubs) and we are moving into our new studio space in Old Street today!

VoIP Week Posts:

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Net Neutrality and Telephony

Post author By Rob Pickering
Post date Thursday, 8 May, 2014
No Comments on Net Neutrality and Telephony

Net neutrality and VoIP telephony – thorny issues the industry needs to negotiate

Trefor.net welcomes “VoIP Week” contributor Rob Pickering, CEO of ipcortex.

Most folks who work in the VoIP industry have at some point been subject to a casual horror story from a new acquaintance about evil VoIP and how they tried it once and that it nearly brought their business to its knees. My heart sinks whenever I realise that this is the direction in which the conversation is going, at which point I usually find myself wishing I’d said that I did something less controversial for a living…like writing computer networking software! I listen, though, nodding politely, already forming a conclusion — after all, it would be unlikely that the problems experienced were due to a fault in their equipment or termination provider, both of which are probably perfectly reliable. No, a lack of a suitable quality of service (QoS) between their premises and termination provider is almost always the culprit in such circumstances.

The UK service provider industry has developed lots of solutions to the QoS problem, and things are far better now than they were just five or ten years ago when the market was in its infancy. The quality and availability of last mile circuits, particularly in metropolitan areas, has massively improved with successive advancements such as LLU, FTTC, FTTP, and cost-effective, high bandwidth Ethernet IAD type circuits. There has also been a trend towards integrated providers delivering the whole service — access circuit, Internet and telephony — as a single package. Behind the scenes, this may or may not translate technically into a full end-to-end in-house QoS-managed solution, depending on the provider and sometimes the geography of the customer. It does, however, assign commercial responsibility for delivering a fit-for-purpose solution to a single party, and this can only produce a better quality outcome for the customer.

Such an approach is certainly not universal. The US market has developed differently, for instance, and most VoIP termination providers don’t get deeply involved in provision of access circuits, instead opting to rely on decent low loss, low jitter transit or peering arrangements, and their customers’ own commodity access circuits. Often they will do a bit of automated “connection testing” as part of their signup process, however in general customers on unsuitable circuits tend to weed themselves out. This does produce some benefits for customers, including more transparency with regard to costs, as well as a bit less lock-in as there is no commercial linkage between access and over-the-top (OTT) voice service. Today, in fact, several of those US suppliers are entering the UK market with this same business model.

Which brings us on to Net Neutrality. Whenever this subject comes up, we tend to think about its obvious effects on consumer entertainment services. The future development of the telephony industry is, however, intimately linked with this issue. Whilst the raw, per-consumer bandwidth requirements of a VoD service like Netflix is greater, the network characteristics required to deliver a reliable telephony conversation of at least ISDN quality are in some ways more onerous. Though buffering can always be used to counter horrible jitter on the underlying path for a video stream, and content caches are already used to reduce transit requirements, neither of these methods can be used to reduce the pain on a real-time voice conversation. If telephony providers can no longer get good, zero-packet loss, low jitter transit, or peering with many leading access providers, then an entire business model may very well be frozen out.

How do you think the industry will develop? Vertically integrated one-stop shops for network access and telephony, or universal OTT providers? I’d love to know your thoughts.

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Tags net neutrality, OTT, Telephony, voip

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Voice Technology Makes Conference Calls Sound Amazingly Clear and Life-like

Post author By Jeff Rodman
Post date Thursday, 8 May, 2014
1 Comment on Voice Technology Makes Conference Calls Sound Amazingly Clear and Life-like

Trefor.net welcomes “VoIP Week” contributor Jeff Rodman, Polycom‘s Chief Technology Evangelist. Since co-founding the company in 1990 Jeff has been instrumental in the realization of Polycom’s iconic products for voice, video, network communications, and other media.

When was the last time you used a conference phone? Today or perhaps yesterday? For a good many of us it likely hasn’t been more than a day or two. For many of businesses today, open-air voice conferencing is as ubiquitous as the traditional handheld or headset.

To ensure maximum efficiency and productivity during conference calls, it is critical for the speech to be clearly understood. We’ve all had the unfortunate experience of struggling to work out what someone is saying, be it due to noise, their distance from a microphone, or just an unfamiliar accent. Our minds are good at compensating for missing words and blurred sounds, but the more time they spend figuring out what might have been said, the less well we understand is actually being said (as seen in this short video). Therefore, it is vital that the physical “what we hear” stage be as clear and as accurate as possible.

Five aspects of speech audio work together to make or break a clear, understandable conversation: Bandwidth, Reverberation, Amplitude, Interactivity, and Noise. These five aspects, taken together, are called the BRAIN model of practical audio communications. The job of any conferencing system is to tune and balance these aspects automatically to provide the best possible hearing experience for the parties on both ends of the call.

Bandwidth: The Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) most of us grew up with carries less than half the information inherent in human speech, and this shortcoming was unthinkingly brought over into early IP telephones. However, newer system greatly enhance intelligibility through the implementation of HD Voice, making conversation much easier to follow and less fatiguing. The standards-compliant IP phones and conference phones that deliver this much higher audio bandwidth offer amazing clarity that rivals the best video systems, making it seem that you are in the same room as those on the other end of the call

Reverberation: Room echo at either end of a phone conversation makes the sound die down more slowly, thus smearing words together. While a “perfect” solution would include acoustic wall coverings for absorption, wall-mounted diffuser panels, and a personal headset or lapel mics for every participant, the reverberation problem is much more easily addressed via a multiple-microphone conferencing system that can intelligently steer and focus the pickup patterns to dynamically match the location of each talker in a room.

Amplitude: Insufficient amplitude, or loudness, can make it difficult to hear a talker. Repositioning the talker and listener are obvious solutions, but are not always practical. Conference phones are available, though, that can automatically adjust microphone gain to greatly help in these situations, and the difference in ease of understanding can be breathtaking.

Interaction: Interactive speech between distant groups can be difficult to conduct for a number of reasons, due in no small part to the absence of a true full-duplex system that allows for transparent interactive speech. A conference phone with good full-duplex technology enables talkers at both ends to be heard clearly without any delays or distractions. Beware, though, as although many speakerphones today lay claim full-duplex performance it is a very sophisticated feature that few can actually deliver.

Noise: Common noise sources share much of the same spectrum with speech and can make it difficult to understand conversations. First, try to fix noise at the source. Move the microphones farther from air conditioner ducts, overhead projectors, coffee makers, and so on. There will always be residual noise, of course, but the HD Voice technology found in high quality conference phones eliminates traditional clicking, buzzing, hissing, and other noise artefacts, and can thus make a big difference in ensuring that the voices of all participants on the conference call are clearly heard in spite of any acoustic challenges in the room.

So the next time you plan or join a conference call, consider the elements of the BRAIN model. Remember that they work together: each BRAIN component can compensate for deficiencies in others, which can be very important as some are much easier to address than others (consider the cost and difficulty of soundproofing a room compared to simply slipping in a better IP speakerphone with HD Voice and steered microphones, for example). You can learn more about the BRAIN model from Polycom’s The “BRAIN” Model of Intelligibility in Business Telephony whitepaper.

VoIP Week Posts:

Business End User ofcom Regs voip

A VoIP Spring

A regular trefor.net contributor, Peter Farmer is the Commercial and Regulatory Manager at Gamma, as well as an ITSPA Council member and Chair of ITSPA Regulatory Committee. We are pleased to present his “VoIP Week” post.

So, Trefor asked me to approach an article for “VoIP Week” from a commercial perspective as opposed to regulatory…. took me a while, but sunstroked approaching Havant cycling from Esher to Portsmouth, it dawned on me.

We’ve had our VoIP Spring. We just don’t realise it yet.

Last year, there was much furore around Ofcom’s decision (enacting an EC Recommendation) to reduce geographic termination rates to the Long Run Incremental Cost (“LRIC”). These rates were previously calculated using Fully Allocated Cost (“FAC”). Very roughly, FAC is 5x LRIC in this market, so 0.3 became 0.06 pence per minute.

All the views espoused on that subject were valid, especially as we have a diverse industry with many niche interests and many unbalanced portfolios of net termination and origination. In the same market review, however, Ofcom transferred — for BT at least — the foregone common cost (the difference between LRIC and FAC, attributable to costs such as your CEO and Finance and HR teams, etc., and not directly to each incremental unit of what you are selling) in the termination market to the origination market. Granted, this had the perverse effect of reducing the cost (through the Significant Market Power Condition that governs non-geographic out-payments), but what it did to was virtually double the per-minute cost of the origination leg of Carrier Pre-Select and Indirect Access. Granted, again, this nets off against calls to UK geographic and non BT terminating non-geographic (why BT itself is exempt is a very long story that I will tell another day), but means that calls on legacy ISDN30 estates to mobiles and international numbers increased. Markedly. We are now in a situation where the direct cost of getting a call from the Network Terminating Equipment (“NTE”) over the Local Loop to the Digital Local Exchange (“DLE”) is five times that of getting it from the DLE to a mobile in the US of A. Seriously.

If you’re an over-the-top provider, your cost base just went down. You don’t have to worry about that leg from the NTE to the DLE. Your voice traffic is ones and zeroes encoded in packets of data over broadband frequencies, not analogue on narrowband frequencies. The per minute cost of providing the service to any caller has plummeted, relative to an ISDN2 or 30 or even a single WLR line.

And that right there, Ladies and Gentlemen, was our VoIP Spring. Let’s make the most of it.

Google+ Peter Farmer

VoIP Week Posts:

Tags ISDN, Ofcom, voip

Bad Stuff broadband End User fun stuff internet Net UC voip

Vastly Objectionable Ignominious Phrase

Post author By Kory Kessel
Post date Wednesday, 7 May, 2014
3 Comments on Vastly Objectionable Ignominious Phrase

What the lone acronym in “VoIP Week” does NOT represent.

As a longtime fan of Marvel’s super hero comic books — 40 years and happily counting — I find myself quite satisfied with the persisting Hollywood trend of putting these Fantastic! Incredible! Amazing! Uncanny! Mighty! characters on the Silver Surfer…er, silver screen. And almost as much fun as seeing these wonders brought to life is the narrative means used to tie them all together, that being the oh-so-shadowy government agency S.H.I.E.L.D., which as acronyms go is one heckuva Marvel-ous mouthful (originally “Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division”, then changed in 1991 to “Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate”…both way-cool).

S.H.I.E.L.D.

So what does all of this have to do with VoIP? Well, as great acronyms go absolutely nothing, as S.H.I.E.L.D. is way-cool while V-o-I-P is decidedly not. In fact, though the meaning behind V-o-I-P — Voice over Internet Protocol — is a cause célèbre, worthy of consideration, contemplation, conjecture, and cockeyed optimism, the “word” verbalized evokes images of a thick liquid dripping onto a badly-tuned piece of tin poised alongside a carnival microphone.

Say it with me. Or better yet, don’t.

As awful an acronym as V-o-I-P is, one has to wonder how it came to stick as the most common reference term for the technology it represents. Could it be that as bad as it is, V-o-I-P is actually the best of a really bad bunch? Let’s see…

		IPT (IP Telephony)? Difficult double-consonant at the end, and perhaps too easy to rhyme with “gypped”…
		IT (Internet Telephony)? Taken.
		VoBB (Voice over Broadband? Again, like IPT, too easy to set a negative rhyme to.
		BT (Broadband Telephony)? Taken.
		BPS (Broadband Phone Service)? Proves that an ugly-sounding acronym is better than one with absolutely nothing going for it.

OK, so maybe I am no longer wondering how V-o-I-P took hold in the tech-y lexicon. After all, nature abhors a vacuum and all that (Horror vacui!). Also, sadly, nothing better was in the ether (evidenced above), and it isn’t as if the average man-on-the-street is going to say “Voice over Internet Protocol” every time they need to refer to the concept (of course, there is no way said average man-on-the-street is ever going to comfortably use the acronymic word “VoIP” either, but let’s not get bogged down in reality’s messy details). Still, it sure would be nice to be able to lay blame for V-o-I-P at someone’s keyboard, but unlike the massive majority of Internet-based whatever-and-whatsis there is absolutely nobody out there laying claim to originating — starting? envisioning? founding? — the term. Even if we could force somebody to take responsibility for this *four-letter-word* of a four-letter acronym, though, a proper punishment could never be levied as any attempt to do so would likely raise the ire of the Kids from C.A.P.E.R.^*

At this point the Marvel-literate among you might be gasping (Gasp!) for me to return to espousing on and praising the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe, for those of you not in-the-know who have hung on this far). It is “VoIP Week” at trefor.net, however, and other than their diametrically opposed acronym quality no other useful correlation can be made between S.H.I.E.L.D. and V-o-I-P (other than the fact, that is, that S.H.I.E.L.D. agents likely make extensive and heretofore unknown — and way-cool — use of VoIP technology). Still, you can’t beat a good opening.

^*The Civilian Authority for the Protection of Everybody, Regardless

VoIP Week Posts:

internet ofcom voip

VoIP and Emergency Services – Location, Location, Location…

Post author By Ray Bellis
Post date Wednesday, 7 May, 2014
No Comments on VoIP and Emergency Services – Location, Location, Location…

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week guest contributor Ray Bellis, Senior Researcher at Nominet UK and Director at NICC Standards Ltd.

UK Proposed Architecture

I’ve blogged previously on the UK Specification being produced by the EmLoc Task Group of NICC Standards regarding the thorny problem of Emergency Services determining the location of a VoIP caller who may be unable to disclose their location, for whatever reason (e.g., the caller is under duress and is unable to talk, or they simply doesn’t know their location, etc.). This work was driven by General Condition 4 (GC4) of the “General Conditions of Entitlement“, which apply to all Communications Providers:

The Communications Provider shall, to the extent technically feasible, make accurate and reliable Caller Location Information available for all calls to the emergency call numbers “112” and “999”, at no charge to the Emergency Organisations handling those calls, at the time the call is answered by those organisations.

At the time of publication these were draft specifications — they’ve since been made publicly available as NICC Document ND1638. For more details of the architecture please see the aforementioned blog posting and the NICC Document.

A key component of the proposed architecture is that it would require every Internet Service Provider and Access Network Provider (ANP) to operate a service known as a “Location Information Server” (or “LIS”). The protocol provided by the LIS is described in RFC 5985 and is known as “HELD”, short for “HTTP-Enabled Location Delivery”.

Whilst Ofcom has not (yet) carried out any enforcement activity on ISPs or ANPs relating to GC4, they have commissioned a report on the NICC Document that concluded that the architecture described therein is “technically feasible”. It is therefore to be expected that at some point Ofcom will start enforcing this requirement.

Work to update ND1638 to reflect recent changes to IETF standards is ongoing, and also to allow device-provided location (e.g., GPS readings) to be sent to the Emergency Services during call setup. However, even if device-provided readings were available, ultimately the Emergency Handling Authorities (EHAs) would trust the network-provided location as the primary source of location, with device-provided location acting only as a means to enhance the former and be used when consistent with it.

ETSI M/493 Architecture

The European Commission published Standardisation Mandate M/493 in May 2011, requiring European Standards Organisations to develop standards in support of a “Location Enhanced Emergency Call Service”. This work is being carried out under the “End-to-End Network Architectures” (E2NA) ETSI Project.

The draft architecture being devised by the ETSI working group builds upon previous work by the National Emergency Number Association, the European Emergency Number Association, the Internet Engineering Task Force and others, and many of the functional components are very similar to those used in the UK architecture.

The draft ETSI architecture has one very significant difference from the UK architecture that reflects the more complicated emergency call routing required in some countries. In the UK all emergency service calls are now handled by BT, so the VoIP operator therefore has no need to make any call routing decisions other than recognising that the called number is an emergency number and passing the call to BT via the appropriate interconnect. In some European countries, however, that initial call routing also depends on the caller’s location, and therefore the architecture requires that the IP Access Network must provide the caller’s location to the VoIP operator before the call can be passed to the emergency services! This makes the LIS an essential component of the architecture, and therefore safety-critical, with all that this entails.

With EC and ETSI backing for this architecture it seems more likely than ever that ISPs and Access Network Providers will have to implement additional services within their networks to support emergency service calls, even though they are just “mere conduits” for those calls.

VoIP Week Posts:

Business online safety security voip

Voice Fraud – You Need to Act!

Post author By Simon Woodhead
Post date Wednesday, 7 May, 2014
1 Comment on Voice Fraud – You Need to Act!

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP guest contributor Simon Woodhead, CEO of wholesale voice provider Simwood.

In February, we published VoIP Fraud Analysis, a white paper that details Simwood’s three years of operating a Honeypot, coloured in by many years of real-world experience servicing wholesale voice clients of all sizes and seeing them compromised. Our research has been very well received in official circles from OFCOM to ACPO, at industry events comprising scarily competent people, and we’ve since been able to compare notes with others in darkened rooms who study this for a living. Of course, I won’t repeat the full content of the white paper here — and it certainly wouldn’t be appropriate to do so — but I will be glad to share a few observations from it.

VoIP fraud — an estimated $46bn a year problem — has come as no surprise to anyone, and as we’ve run through the mechanism of attack the majority of people in the audience have seen at least parts of the behaviour we describe in the wild. If we were describing other kinds of crime most people would be looking in from outside, but VoIP fraud is pervasive and everyone in the industry has seen it at some level. Similarly, nobody has questioned the solutions proposed; some of which are unique to Simwood though they can be employed by any provider on almost any equipment. Despite this, people remain reluctant to act and, dare I say, a little complacent. It is somebody else’s problem until it is their problem, and by then it may very well be too late. Remember, $46bn is the estimated measure of the good guys’ incompetence…the bad guys’ intent is infinite and, as we’ve seen, can quite literally put a provider out of business in just hours.

The sad fact is that the bad guys are becoming far more professional. Gone are the days of script-kiddy intruding with such blunt force that it was apparent as a DoS attack. They are still there, of course, and can still be very effective in breaching completely unprepared networks, but the serious people — the professionals — are…well, professional. There’s no impatience or fervour to their attacks and they do their homework very very well. Their reconnaissance is unobservable to those not looking out for it at the packet level, and their early compromise testing is lost amongst legitimate call traffic for those unaware of the test numbers identified. Then they wait, patiently.

Christmas 2013 was a busy time for us with almost every night seeing one of our customer’s end-users compromised. Actually, we saw the same customers compromised repeatedly night after night, as the bad guys had identified a specific vulnerability present in the equipment they’d deployed to their end-user businesses. Where the customers were ISPs (with a defined block of IP addresses containing customer equipment) the attackers had been able to identify a list of similar targets on their network vulnerable to the same attack. This would have taken a long time and a lot of patience, before striking when eyes were furthest from the ball. On every single occasion we identified the incident, proactively made contact with our customers to advise and help resolve the incident. The attackers left quietly, knowing they had a long list of other targets and could come back later. They did, every night for the Christmas period.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is just a “VoIP” problem. Many incidents are targeted and exploit non-VoIP technologies (e.g., those present by virtue of traditional PBXs being retro-fitted with IP capability) while many others are at other levels altogether, such as the http interface of CPE or provider admin systems. The traffic may pass over VoIP as a consequence, but in many cases once the VoIP side of it has been contained it will then pass over traditional phone lines connected to the same equipment. It must be an anxious time waiting for the CPS invoices afterwards!

My point here is not to scare you, but to highlight two trends: (1) providers are becoming more complacent, and (2) attackers are becoming more professional. A destructive combination, indeed, and one that is sure to end in more tears. Attackers are not going to become less capable and less professional, so the only option is for providers to be less complacent and to — this is critical — take action. Very few if any are doing everything they could, whereas others dismissively rely on techniques that may help but are incomplete and therefore give false confidence. The bad guys can turn on an attack at any point after the reconnaissance is complete, and if you think they cannot then how will you notice and be able to react when they do?

The solutions are often simple and free, however they require a willingness to implement and generally bring many other benefits. By way of example, the vast majority of providers operate SIP on UDP 5060 because that is the out-of-the-box behaviour, whilst you’d struggle to find equipment nowadays that doesn’t support TLS. Not only are TLS endpoints far less common targets, but TLS and SRTP also give end users the privacy I think they already expect they have. Similarly, billing more frequently and getting as close to real-time as possible not only enables fraud monitoring but provides massive operational and commercial benefits too. Your carrier monitoring and enforcing fraud controls on your wholesale account, safely away from your network, is by far the most effective preventative measure, and some of us do that to varying degrees.

There are many more solutions contained in the Simwood VoIP Fraud Analysis white paper, and we urge you to implement them, and also to lean on your carrier to help you to do so. Please note that in all the “Christmas” examples it was we the carrier — not our customers — who noticed end-user compromise.

The key take-away I want to leave you with is that if you are having no trouble sleeping at night because you believe it can’t/won’t happen to you, then you really need to act now. Your network may already be compromised, with eyes awaiting your being off the ball, perhaps over a coming Bank Holiday.

VoIP Week Posts:

Business UC voip

Microsoft Lync, Embrace or Ignore?

Post author By Peter Cox
Post date Wednesday, 7 May, 2014
No Comments on Microsoft Lync, Embrace or Ignore?

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week guest contributor Peter Cox, UM Labs Ltd. Founder and CEO

As the VoIP industry continues to grow, a new and potentially disruptive force has emerged. Microsoft Lync. While not exactly a newcomer (tracing its origins back through LCS and OCS), the latest version of Lync — Lync 2013 — is clearly making an impact on both VoIP and the Telecommunications industry in general. So the question is, should VoIP service providers and users embrace Lync or ignore it?

Microsoft is clearly positioning Lync to extend their reach from data into the VoIP world. The product is understandably popular with end-users who like the features that it offers, as well as with CIOs who see Lync’s Unified Communication services as a way of getting more out their investment in Exchange and Active Directory. Lync also provides Enterprise Telephony features, albeit at an additional cost.

So what does all of this mean for VoIP service providers and users?

One thing not in short supply is opinions on the merits of Lync. The consensus is that Lync is great for Instant Messaging and for integration with Exchange, but that it does not deliver the industrial strength telephony needed by many end-users, particularly those in call centres. Mixed deployments are the result — with Lync in the back-office, and a more traditional PBX in areas with tougher call processing requirements — and these present a challenge.

One of the hurdles facing any Lync deployment is the product’s sheer complexity. Even a simple system for a small office requires three or more servers, with scaling for larger numbers of users and multi-site deployments complicating the picture still further. But the greatest challenge comes from attempting to interconnect Lync with other VoIP systems. The Lync architecture includes the Mediation Server for 3^rd party connections, which can connect to a PSTN Gateway (Microsoft’s terminology), and as its name suggests can also provide restricted connectivity to other VoIP systems. The Mediation Server does not enable callers to be identified with anything other than a caller-ID, nor does it support presence or instant messaging, and therefore it cannot provide integrated Unified Communication services across a multi vendor network.

Lync is based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the same protocol that virtually all other VoIP products and services use. Microsoft have added so many extensions to the Lync version of SIP, though, that providing the level of integration needed for a mixed Lync and standard SIP deployment is beyond virtually all end-users and many system integrators. On the plus side, Microsoft has published details of the SIP extensions they have implemented. While these specifications will not help the average end-user, they have enabled the development of enhanced connectivity solutions for Lync. It is now possible to deploy a mixed environment, for instance, with Lync in the back-office and an alternative VoIP system in other areas.

The Microsoft marketing machine will clearly continue to promote Lync, end-users will continue praise the integrated services it offers, and CIOs will continue to value the improved ROI. Also, the ability to provide true interconnection with other VoIP products and services means that there is now an opportunity for service providers to offer new services centred on Lync, and for end-user organisations to benefit from the optimal mix of Lync’s UC services and call centre grade services from other vendors. End-users will continue to adopt Lync, and thus service providers and system integrators able to provide Lync integrated with other VoIP products and services will have an edge. As such, the VoIP industry needs to embrace Lync or become a casualty of its advance.

VoIP Week Posts:

UC voip

UC Disappearing Like VoIP

Post author By Mehdi Nezarati
Post date Tuesday, 6 May, 2014
No Comments on UC Disappearing Like VoIP

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week guest contributor Mehdi Nezarati, President of EMEA, Esna Technologies Inc.

Communications, Then and Now

Old Cell Phone It was not that long ago that phone companies — and their charges for long distance calls — could not be avoided. We don’t often think about it now, but calling overseas used to be expensive and somewhat complicated. It would require a certain calling plan and a special way of dialing the traditional telephone. Then along came the ability to make calls over the Internet, and now we don’t think twice about having long conversations with friends traveling abroad or scheduling conference calls with business associates in other countries. Apps such as Skype, Google Voice and Tango have made VoIP part of how we live and work, and whether the call we are on is connected via VoIP or not is no longer relevant. And the fact that we know hav the ability to use these apps on any device — a phone, tablet, or computer — means we can talk to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Thank you, VoIP, for this seamless and standard method of communication now at our fingertips.

The same thing is happening in the field of Unified Communications (UC). What is Unified Communications, you ask? Like many people asked about VoIP in the early 2000’s. I’ll save time and let Wiki answer that. What’s important to know is that UC saves time, improves communication and collaboration, and is becoming seamless in our lives. What was once possible only by large organizations deploying a suite of tools is now quickly becoming a part of our everyday lives. Consider these likely unnoticed aspects of UC we use every day:

Visual voicemail functionality built into our smartphones

Speech recognition capability that allows us to dictate emails and texts for communications on the go

Cameras as standard issue equipment on our smartphones, tablets and computers that facilitate face-to-face communications

As VoIP replaced traditional telephony, nowadays UC is beginning to disappear into our devices and workflows, making communication faster and easier and thus improving our lives. Video calling is a natural means for communicating with one another, and talking to our phones to complete tasks is all now part of a day’s work. At UC’s maturity, where VoIP is now, we can expect to experience more benefits in the devices and cloud apps we use in everyday workflows, as both are becoming the standards for the way we work and get things done.

Tref: As a business, trefor.net does not have a landline. We primarily use Google Hangouts, and occasionally (rarely) Skype. Of course, we also communicate via mobile, though often the mobile handset is the medium for Hanging out on Google. Not to say that this would work for every business, though, as there is a massive sunk cost in Telephony equipment out there, not to mention the investment in marketing collateral that includes inbound numbers. Businesses, however, are gradually adopting Google Apps, in great part due to the powerful collaboration capabilities it makes available. For example, looking again at our own situation, last week I met with a journalism graduate who plans to put together material on the use of tech by students. I started things by creating a Google Doc in which we could jointly work, which I then shared via her Hotmail address.

Google builds safety nets into the system in the form of policies that keep staff from using Google Docs as a means for leaking company data. The point, though, is that the Google App setup is already a Unified Communication environment in every sense of the term. It is a short step from where we are now to businesses integrating Google’s functionality with their own PBX and with their existing inbound telephone numbers.

Elsewhere, the Davies family communicates mostly through Google Hangouts and Facebook, with the occasional moment of dad calling back an offspring on their mobile when they don’t want to use up their valuable credit. The Kids are mostly always on Facebook, too, where IM often initiates a move to a video Google Hangout. We have even extended this to the setting up of whole family “video conferences” (although the term is rapidly being replaced with video Hangout) with five participating laptops, three of which are in different rooms in the house, with mum flipping between these rooms. I suspect the quality of the group Hangout is driven by the uplink bandwidth available to one of the remote family members, but it is no doubt the way ahead.

IMG credits: voicemail – http://www.intomobile.com/2011/02/13/youmail-visual-voicemail-ios/ dictation – http://singularityhub.com/2009/12/14/dragon-dictation-voice-recognition-comes-to-the-iphone-for-free-video/ video – http://www.cultofmac.com/276995/snapchat-adds-instant-messaging-video-calls/

VoIP Week Posts:

Tags Esna, UC, Unified Communication

Business internet phones voip voip hardware

The Conception and Birth of a New IP Handset

Post author By John Bennett
Post date Tuesday, 6 May, 2014
3 Comments on The Conception and Birth of a New IP Handset

Trefor.net welcomes John Bennett, Managing Director snom UK Ltd

There are five mainstream manufacturers of IP handsets active in the world today, and for the business client, service provider or reseller seeking to select a handset supplier it can be difficult to evaluate the differences amongst them. Price is an obvious criteria but that reveals little about the expected handset life, quality of voice and the durability or usability of the handset, all of which contributes to the user satisfaction and the lifetime cost of the handset. Two reliable options for evaluation are (1) references from existing users, and (2) a good look at the manufacturing process.

A reliable quality manufacturer will operate an in-house research and development team. Interoperability and the ability to work with a very broad range of PBX and hosted service providers on the market are absolutely key in the specification of IP handsets.

The design, development and manufacturing guidelines for IP handsets are quality, security, interoperability, a practical and aesthetically pleasing design, and inclusion of features that meet the needs of modern communications. Products must be stable, functional, efficient, durable, and must provide a quality in which customers can have confidence.

Defining the Designer Baby

The starting point for any new handset development is with the customer, customer feedback is key to understanding what is working, what is not, and what is needed, what is liked or disliked. It is particularly important to understand the end user experience both for handset use and from a deployment and manageability point of view. A good way to develop such understanding is to process and analyse any returns or repairs working in close collaboration with development and production teams. This has an immediate benefit for the customer as minor modifications can be quickly integrated into production. It is perhaps even more important in that a constant and systematic analysis of complaints and faults allows companies to produce reports and identify trends and issues, thus allowing for continuous product quality improvement and the development of new devices that meet customers’ requirements and deliver high levels of reliably in the long-term.

It is also important to track the changing technology trends to ensure that handsets meet tomorrow’s needs as well as today’s, and to take into account the need to easily adopt new technologies into the business. In today’s business world, key capabilities are remote provisioning, support for virtual private networks (VPN), CTI solutions and integration with Microsoft Lync.

Once the specification is agreed to the next stage is the prototype build followed by market testing. Manufacturers should maintain a close relationship with key end customers that allows for market testing of new handsets, to establish they are not only fit for purpose but that they provide customers with a solution that will excite and motivate them to continue to buy their product.

The standards of the tests to which a manufacturer will submit their products are another key indicator of handset quality. Manufacturers should have very strict criteria, and before approving a handset to move to full production the phone must successfully pass various drop tests and tests on the electrical interface. One characteristic that is of particularly importance is maintaining highest standards of audio quality, not just at first production but on-going as the handset will likely be exposed to heavy use for five years or more. Products should be regularly subjected to audio tests and careful measurements taken to determine and resolve audio deterioration.

Product Birth is only the Beginning

Once the prototype has been approved the manufacturing process goes ahead full steam. Material selection and build quality has an effect on both the audio quality and the durability of a telephone handset. Developers should continuously monitor the production process, and handsets should be spot tested to ensure that quality standards are met. During the production not only should the operational performance of the handset be monitored and tested, but also the entire response frequency of each phone. The smallest difference in build quality can adversely affect the phone quality, and this can involve anything from build impacting on the audio quality to introduction of a specialist coating that prevents the discoloration of handset keys and ensures the handset durability.

Regular analysis and systematic review of problems or complaints can ensure that product quality is maintained and improved to effectively meet user needs.

So what should you look for when evaluating IP hone handsets? I recommend you consider the need for in-house testing and fault evaluation and feedback, a process of continual improvement rather than a throw-and-replace approach, and a controlled and monitored manufacturing process, all of which will ensure a high quality and durable solution.

VoIP Week Posts:

Business voip

#voipweek on trefor.net brings diverse set of posts

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 6 May, 2014
1 Comment on #voipweek on trefor.net brings diverse set of posts

I have been involved with the VoIP scene since 1999 when my employer at the time, Mitel, decided it would “get into VoIP”. In those days the discussion was very much whether SIP or MGCP would win out. Each platform vendor had its own version of MGCP so the bet was placed on SIP.

At Mitel I developed one of the earliest SIP phones. It was a variant on one of Mitel’s standard (and proprietary) Minet phones that was sold in volume with their 3300 PBX. In those days it was the custom and practice of the great and the good of the SIP world to converge each January for the Paris International SIP Conference.

I recall that at my first year at the Paris Conference I went counted three SIP clients: a Microsoft soft client (for MSN), a Pingtel Java phone (now defunct) and if I remember right an Analogue Telephone Adaptor. The following year the number of handsets increased to around five including my own Mitel SIP phone and in year three we thought we had hit the jackpot as I counted a dozen or so clients. That was the year we considered the industry to have gone seriously mainstream.

Pingtel — One of the first SIP phones which happened to be Java based

I stopped counting after that because by year four I couldn’t fit all the handset photos onto a powerpoint slide.

The problem at the time was there were very few Internet Telephony Service Providers around to buy/sell the handsets. At the six monthly pulver.com Voice On The Net conferences only a single session was given over to talks by ITSPs. There just weren’t any and the small number that did exist had few subscribers.

Had we had a blog week of VoIP posts back then it would have contained primers on what the technology was all about, debates about which protocols would win out and wistful gazes into the future looking at a networked world that consigned ISDN and the Plain Old Telephone to the science museum. All pioneering stuff.

This week we are having a week of posts about VoIP on trefor.net. A wide range of real world subjects is on offer including the problems of VoIP fraud, how to defend against this fraud with more secure provisioning, why it is important to get your connectivity right, net neutrality, number porting in the VoIP world, how to develop a VoIP phone, designing a conference phone, location services for emergency calling using VOIP, the evolving world of Unified Communications and a look at Microsoft Lync.

The world has moved on from those early days of VoIP. In the UK the Internet Telephony Service Providers Association now numbers around 70 members and the reality is that the total ITSP count in this country is probably nearer double that as ITSPA members don’t typically include those white labeling or fronting someone else’s back end service. This diverse collection of posts has been written by C Level Executives from around the VoIP world, both from service providers and their equipment suppliers who now have a critical mass of sales to be able to support ongoing product development.

We are at the point where VoIP is no longer a hard sell. People are asking for it. They all use the tech in their every day lives and want to start seeing the benefits for their businesses. It will be a long time before the Public Switched Telephone Network disappears but you sense that time will definitely come. In one sense the only thing that is stopping VoIP from taking over completely is that you still have to have a copper line with an associated telephone number in order to carry the broadband line that allows VoIP to work. A move to a world of ubiquitous data only connectivity would kill off the PSTN once and for all. At least sooner rather than later.

In the meantime the VoIP industry goes from strength to strength. ITSPA membership is growing in number and every member is growing in size. It is a good time to be around VoIP.

Please come back and read the posts as they are published each day. For many of the contributors it is their first time on trefor.net but they are all leaders in their field and their views are worth hearing. None of the posts are intended to be sales pitches although some of them do use their own company experiences to illustrate their story.

It wouldn’t have been so long ago that these experiences would have existed only on paper and there isn’t a print edition of trefor.net:)

If you want to connect you can reach me via trefor.net on Skype or [email protected] on Google Hangout. We don’t do landlines at trefor.net…

VoIP Week Posts:

Business phones UC voip voip hardware

Ten Years of VoIP – Happy Birthday!

Post author By Colin Duffy
Post date Tuesday, 6 May, 2014
No Comments on Ten Years of VoIP – Happy Birthday!

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week guest contributor Colin Duffy, CEO of Voipfone and ITSPA Council member

ITSPA and Voipfone are both 10 years old this year so perhaps it’s a good time to look back at how the industry has developed.

Back in 2004, VoIP was just becoming sexy; Skype had made a big impact on international telephony revenues and was in the public eye — particularly amongst students and those with family overseas. Perhaps more importantly for the industry in general, though, was the acceptance of two technologies: SIP (Session Initiation Protocol, which has become the international standard for VoIP telephony) and Asterisk (the brilliant open source PBX software that allowed anybody to build a telephone switchboard either for their own office use or as a Hosted Service Provider). The combination of these two technologies has efficiently killed the old TDM-based PBX and is well on the way to killing ISDN circuits.

Of course, VoIP couldn’t have been as successful as it has become if it wasn’t for the growth in broadband provision to home and office. In the early days, ITSPA was concerned that the entire industry would be strangled if the Internet Service Providers blocked VoIP, and net neutrality was a much-discussed issue. As it turned out it, ISPs have not stood in the way of VoIP and the two industries have learned to live together fairly peaceably, give or take a few issues surrounding the routers of end-users. Now, the main net neutrality issues correlate to the mobile networks, some of which are grimly determined to keep VoIP off their networks, despite advertising the Internet as a main selling point. (The Internet minus some of the services that the Internet provides is not, in my view, the Internet, it’s Internet Light.)

We also dealt with VoIP regulation worries. Ofcom seemed determined to treat VoIP as something requiring separate legislation, in a ‘there be dragons’ sort of way, whereas ITSPA took the view that this was not necessary. ITSPA lost that argument, however, and — in one of the strangest of many strange meeting I’ve had with Ofcom — we managed to convince it that VoIP Service Providers needed to provide 999 services. Burning grannies were a big thing at the time…

Engineer social networking voip

VoIP week on trefor.net and a Tweetup in Town after the ITSPA workshop on Thursday 8th May

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 28 April, 2014
No Comments on VoIP week on trefor.net and a Tweetup in Town after the ITSPA workshop on Thursday 8th May

From time to time we have technology themed weeks on trefor.net. The last one was Peering Week where we published around 20 guest posts on the very niche subject of Internet Exchange Peering. Next week is VoIP week.

VoIP is far from being a niche subject. Every man and his dog¹ uses VoIP if they but knew it. It’s VoIP week because at the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association (ITSPA) we are having a technical workshop on VoIP provisioning. VoIP provisioning is a very niche subject. Many people might also consider it to be a very boring subject.

Be assured that whilst provisioning is not every man’s kettle of fish (or words to that effect) it should be of interest to everyone involved in providing services. This is because the VoIP industry needs to coordinate how they go about providing their services so that they are not exposed to fraud.

For example if every VoIP phone was shipped with a default username and password that would be silly. It happens and people lose money when someone hacks in using said default username and password and starts running up big bills to premium rate numbers in the Philippines (or Senegal or anywhere really).

The industry needs the support of handset manufacturers in deciding how to go about methods of making their services secure that can be applied across many different brands of VoIP phone.

Details of the ITSPA workshop can be found here. The workshop and associated networking drinks will finish at 6pm. Thereafter we plan to adjourn to a nearby pub for a trefor.net tweetup.

This is open to anyone so if you are a regular reader/commenter/writer/tweeter (etc) on or with trefor.net you are welcome. Stick the date in your calendar and I’ll follow up with a venue when I’ve sorted one out. The Workshop is at 5 Fleet Place, London, EC4M 7RD so it will be around there somewhere.

Thursday 8th May trefor.net tweetup 6pm onwards.

Check out all the Peering Week posts here.

¹ Yes even the dog. Believe you me:)

Business voip voip hardware

Cisco SPA303 phone at @harbour_lights < the photographic evidence

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 14 April, 2014
1 Comment on Cisco SPA303 phone at @harbour_lights < the photographic evidence

As a wrap up the the name the IP phone competition here is the photographic evidence – taken on Sunday morning before leaving the Isle of Man for the mainland.

Also a hot chocolate as served up at the @harbour_lights – spot on I say.

Business voip voip hardware

ip phone competition @harbour_lights

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 9 April, 2014
7 Comments on ip phone competition @harbour_lights

This picture was taken at the @harbour_lights caff on the prom in Peel IoM. It shows a traditional seaside cafe but with a twist. The @harbour_lights, as regular followers of holiday blog posts will know, has free wifi and a Twitter account. It also has an IP phone which impressed me greatly.

There is a prize of a pot of tea for two at the Harbour Lights Cafe for the first person to tell me the brand of the phone and where it is in the picture. Clicking on the image gets you a full size version which should help.

A Chatty Kory

Who among the teeming throng hasn’t at some point or another had the thought, “Instant Messaging sure is a marvelous thing…no idea what I’d do without it…but really, by this point shouldn’t I be able to seamlessly carry on an IM conversation via Yahoo! Messenger with a contact using Google Talk? Or AOL AIM? Skype? And vice-versa? And do I really need to subscribe to all of these services – and lest I forget to mention Windows Live Messenger, Facebook Chat, Twitter, and so many others — to ensure real-time IM reachability?”

Yes, that is one large mouthful of a thought, but it should be easy enough to chew and swallow.

Numerous times over the past 15+ years the effort has been made to establish a unified standard for Internet-based instant messaging, and all of these efforts have thus far come to naught. Entrenched proprietary protocols die hard, after all, and with such integrated services as IP telephony, video conferencing, desktop sharing, and file transfer thrown into the IM provider mix (to name but a few) the potential for absolute and utter world communication dominance is such that no one major player is ever likely to champion a true standardization. No, “the greater good” will never be enough of a reason to hasten such a sea change. Instead, it will require either (1) a scenario in which instigating such a protocol will benefit all parties, (2) an irresistible push/pull prompted by a powerful outside party (government?), or (3) good old-fashioned fish-eat-smaller-fish empire building.

A Chatty Kory Now to be fair, there is some light in the sky these days regarding inter-network IM capability. For instance, with Yahoo Messenger you can add and communicate with contacts using Windows Live™ Messenger, and you can add your AOL AIM contacts into Google Talk. Such functionalities, however, are the result of agreements reached between the networks, agreements in which a bridging of two (or more) proprietary protocols has been put in place not to open communication up but to simply extend one IM provider’s boundaries to include those within another’s.

Business gadgets voip voip hardware

Android DECT VoIP phone from Gigaset and the all new R630 waterproof handset

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 5 March, 2014
2 Comments on Android DECT VoIP phone from Gigaset and the all new R630 waterproof handset

Android DECT VoIP phone by Gigaset is impressive piece of kit

Probably spent more time on the Gigaset stand than any other. Party because I kept bumping into people I know there and partly because they had a couple of great products being demo’d.

The first video is a demo of an Android DECT VoIP phone. It’s basically a tablet mounted on hardware that turns it into an useable telephony device with a DECT handset on the side. There is a wired version available.

The phone costs £500 but you have to consider this in relation to the cost of a high end business phone together with the functionality on offer.

Business UC voip

Report from Connected Business show

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 5 March, 2014
No Comments on Report from Connected Business show

Went along with Dan Winfield of Voxhub to Connected Business – the show formerly known as UC Expo. UC is so yesterday isn’t it? Trouble is all they have done is change the name. The content was much the same as ever. Things don’t move particularly quickly in the connected business game (there were a few interesting toys which I will expound on in a later post).

I suspect what will happen is that one day we will look up and the whole world will have changed. A gradual process that we will only be able to observe when looking back, or browsing through an internet archive somewhere (if you have time to do that kind of thing – loser).

Getting the important things out of the way first below is a picture of me and Dan with “the girls”.

Business UC voip

Connected Business – the buzzword formerly known as UC Expo?

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 20 February, 2014
No Comments on Connected Business – the buzzword formerly known as UC Expo?

The UC Expo trade show is now called Connected Business. My complaint with the former name, Unified Communications Expo, was that it was a bit of a trendy bland catch all for something that used to be known as VoIP.

I’ve been waiting for the new buzzword to come along for a while. However I can’t for the life of me believe that “Connected Business” is this new buzzword. We don’t even really need a buzzword. Marketing departments around the country will now be shouting “oh yes we do – we get paid loads to come up with buzzwords”.

The show has for the last few years just been a place to go and meet mates. There has been very little to differentiate vendors of UC systems and solutions, certainly in the feature sets. These feature sets have been built up over decades.

You might ask yourselves, other than the source of a physical get together for a beer, why bother going? Why bother exhibiting? Everything is done online nowadays. Even the selling. In my recent experience businesses exhibit at these shows because they need to be seen to be in the game – if all their competitors are there but they are not that sends out the wrong signals.

I’ll be surprised if I learn anything but I’m going to go anyway. See ya there.

Connected Business – the show formerly known as ~~Prince~~ UC Expo.

Read previous notes re UC Expo here.

Business UC voip

CTO lunches

Headed to London again for my last CTO lunch of the season. Today I have Stephanie Watson, CEO of MZA Associates as my guest speaker.
Steph is a great girl and one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Unified Communications market.

For those unaware of the nature of my CTO lunches we have a guest speaker and up to 10 other invited guests, normally director level individuals with responsibility for IT operations, around a table for a highly informed and stimulating lunchtime debate. The format works brilliantly, the key being the fact that everyone in the room knows what they are talking about.

On this occasion with Steph on attendance the topic is clearly the Unified Communications market (the PBX of old).

UC has for some time been a boring, mature market subject to widespread industry consolidation. This however is changing as the likes of Microsoft and Google move in on the space. Although I’m leaving it until the new year to sort there is a strong likelihood that the primary means of voice connectivity to trefor.net will be via google hangout and Skype. During the process of setting up the business I have made extensive use of google hangouts for video conferencing and google docs for collaborative project work such as sketching out the initial functionality requirements of a blog template refresh.

Now I’m sure that the likes of Cisco and Avaya will have something to say about who are going to be players in the UC space. Cisco has a compelling network integration case and Avaya have a huge installed base. This market is still very much a long game to play but it wouldn’t surprise me to see some real changes in 2014. The combination of Android and the still very much nascent chromebook could well be driving factors.

I doubt that I’ll be summarising the key points of today’s discussion – there are still too many parties between now and Christmas. However expect to see this subject debated extensively on trefor.net in the new year.

Tomorrow is my last day at the Timico desk. My wife briefly laboured under the impression that the new order in 2014 would see an end to, or at least significant reduction in jaunts to London for “networking” events and a corresponding shrinking of the waistline. Whilst the latter is undeniably desirable, the CTO lunches will continue in some guise or another. They are too valuable not to have.
If you are coming along today I look forward to seeing you. If not stay tuned…

Business voip

Tickets available for ITSPA Christmas Dinner

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 20 November, 2013
No Comments on Tickets available for ITSPA Christmas Dinner

The build up for Christmas has begun. Well it starts to build up in our house in January as Anne buys up cheap Christmas cards and wrapping paper in the sales. Nevertheless it really is building up now.

With that in mind ITSPA is for the first time having a Christmas lunch sponsored by Magrathea.

5th December 2013
The Swan at Shakespeare’s Globe, London
12.30pm for 1pm start

Tickets cost £65+VAT per person for ITSPA members and £90+VAT per person for non-members
To register please RSVP to [email protected]

We have a very interesting and highly entertaining guest speaker in Simon Burckhardt, MD of Vonage UK.

Get on down…

Tags Christmas, Dinner, ITSPA, voip

4g broadband Business mobile connectivity voip

4G as fixed broadband replacement? – successful case study

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 30 October, 2013
11 Comments on 4G as fixed broadband replacement? – successful case study

4g broadband can be used as a replacement for a fixed broadband service

Blog reader Mitch left a comment about how he now uses VoIP over a 4G line that has replaced his fixed broadband connection. His broadband had always been rubbish and 4G is now giving him speeds as fast as fibre broadband. I asked if he would be willing to tell the story. It makes for a very interesting read that many will be able to identify with. It may also give hope to those folk in the “final third” who are the 2nd class citizens of the UK when it comes to connectivity.

It’s Mitch from here on:

Tags 4g, fixed, line, replacement, voip

Business voip

Mobile VoIP client is a no brainer when travelling abroad

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 29 October, 2013
5 Comments on Mobile VoIP client is a no brainer when travelling abroad

This is an out and out advert for mobile VoIP services. If you haven’t already noticed I am in Helsinki at the moment.

My phone won’t pick up a mobile service. Bit irritating but not the end of the world. I dropped my wife an email letting her know I missed her already but she was probably not going to hear from me and not to worry.

The WiFi is great here, everywhere in the hotel and in the conference room. I’ve been able to carry on working. Then hey presto I remembered I had my Timico mobile client on my Samsung Galaxy S4.

I called home. The call quality was crystal clear. Had a nice chat with Anne and was reassured that everything was ok.

Not only did the call cost nothing, or worst case a local UK call charge, but the quality was much better than a cellular call would have been.

Only problem now is the two hour time shift & coordinating calls when we are both around and available.

Että kaikki ihmiset.