Categories
Business phones UC voip voip hardware

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 […]

Categories
Business social networking travel UC

Why would you want to commute to work?

Scene around Victoria Railway Station in Laandan. Have these people not heard of Google Hangout or Lync or Skype or any number of other collaboration & voip services? It can’t be that necessary for them to be in the office. Wtf? Lol! This isn’t a one off scene. It’s like this every time I go […]

Categories
Bad Stuff End User H/W

A peck? Nay, a bushel!

Yesterday in Apocalypse Then, I wrote that having shifted from Mac to Windows upon starting a technical writing gig with TEA (Texas Education Agency) in 1993 that for the next fifteen years I paid “…nary a thought…to Apple and their Mac OS whatever-number.” Well, memory is a cagey, amorphous, and deceitful beast — one that […]

Categories
Apps End User Mobile mobile apps phones UC video voip

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? […]

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broadband End User mobile connectivity Net

Call Me a Cynic, but…300Mbps on a Mobile?

Lindsey Annison shares thoughts triggered by an eye-opening pre-Mobile World Summit mobile broadband announcement. Just spotted a pre-announcement for the Mobile World Summit starting Monday in Barcelona. It was on a Spanish TV channel (24h) and said “Surfing the Net at 300Mbps on a mobile is no longer science fiction.” (But in Spanish, obv). 300Mbps on […]

Categories
broadband End User

W-w-w-why wi-fi works

In the last 2 years, I have travelled through 22 US States, the Caribbean, UK, France and Spain. In the last three weeks alone, I have clocked up 1000+ miles per week in 3 different countries. During 90% of that time, my phone has been on airplane mode after being hit with substantial bills for […]

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Business social networking

What’s up doc? I’ve never used WhatsApp

It’s confession time.  I’ve never used WhatsApp. Now they’ve been bought by Facebook I probably never will. I have occasionally used Skype. Since Skype was bought by Microsoft it’s probably the kiss of death for the service anyway. Probably a long, slow, lingering death1.

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Business security spam UC

Selling your contact information – who does it?

One of the things I’ve been looking forward to in life post Timico is having a cleaner inbox. I don’t get spam using Gmail and the platform very kindly filters most commercial mails in to a tab called “Promotions”. This I love. I do look occasionally and note that the mails are typically from rewards […]

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Business internet mobile connectivity social networking Weekend

No mobile network coverage but WiFi saves the day again

No mobile connectivity no longer a problem. Went to a Burns Night dinner last night organised by the “Friends of William Farr School”. A good time was had by all and I got to wear my new Irish tartan kilt (photos withheld due to health and safety reasons). The bash was at Hemswell Court, a […]

Categories
End User mobile apps

Facebook intrusion continues #privacy #sms #calendar

Normally when a droid asks me to let an App have permission to access specific functions on the phone I just blindly accept. This was the subject of a Twitter conversation before Christmas. Some people said they declined. We were particularly discussing Facebook which I naturally distrust. I woke up this morning to an offer […]

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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 […]

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Business ecommerce

Job Vacancy – WordPress Developer for trefor.net based in Lincoln

trefor.net is a technology blog that is widely read by techies in the internet networking and hosting industries. For the last 5 years the site has operated as a non-commercial vehicle and has built up a base of regular readers and commenters. trefor.net attracts over 40k page views a month is linked to from some […]

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Business fun stuff

Bit of news – Trefor Davies to leave Timico at Christmas

Bit of news for you. Friday 20th December will be my last day working at Timico. What’s going on do I hear you say? Nothing untoward. You may know that I was one of the founding directors of Timico and in the ten great years since we started the business we have taken it from […]

Categories
Business ofcom Regs

The Single Market

At the recent Eighth Parliament and Internet Conference, at which I was privileged enough to be speaking on a panel extolling the virtues of an open internet for ITSPA, one of the preceding presentations had been by the European Commission Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (that mouthful is colloquially abridged to “DG […]

Categories
Business mobile connectivity ofcom Regs

Orange avoids banana skin – Ts & Cs changed to allow VoIP

EE subsidiary Orange appears to have avoided a slippery situation by amending its terms and condition for mobile internet use The pic below is a screenshot of a YouTube video ad published by EE on July 31st 2013 to push Orange PAYG mobile. It majors on the fact that you get “a shed load of […]

Categories
Business fun stuff

Communication modes for the 21st century

Just rang to book my car in for a service. After navigating an auto-attendant and then  holding for some time I eventually got through to a receptionist who was clearly not at the department I’d navigated to. Ok. It happens. Phones get busy etc etc. She asked me if I’d like someone to ring back […]

Categories
4g broadband Business mobile connectivity net neutrality

4G adoption in UK businesses

4g for business offers backup facility for superfast broadband Why should business use 4G? Yesterday I sat on a panel discussing 4G at the Convergence Summit South trade show in Sandown Park. The audience was largely resellers of communications services. What you would traditionally call a PBX reseller. In terms of expectations of what 4G […]

Categories
Business net neutrality ofcom Regs

Net Neutrality – Pete Farmer speaks

Open Internet & Net Neutrality – both are terms that are meaningless to many and equally emotive and commercially crucial to many others. As with many things in life, there’s a spectrum of what this means. At one end, there’s a threat to civil liberties, commercial strategies, intellectual property and safeguarding against illegal content. At […]

Categories
broadband Business voip

VoIP for a home office

VoIP for home office suddenly got better with superfast broadband. I find it very productive to work from home occasionally. I have an Avaya phone in the conservatory – hangs off our Genband A2 SIP platform. I guess not every conservatory is Cat5 cabled. My patch panel and switch are in the attic but I […]

Categories
End User internet online safety security

The return of the “virus on your Microsoft PC” scam #speedytechies @TeamViewer

The “you have a virus on your Microsoft PC” scam is back. I thought they had locked up the people responsible and this was dead. Like everything related to the internet crime – spam, botnets they always find a way back. I got home from work on Friday and took a call from Anna of […]

Categories
Engineer webrtc

ITSPA WebRTC workshop at Google Campus

Chaired the ITSPA WebRTC workshop at Google Campus yesterday. It had a great turnout so there is obviously an appetite to find out a bit more about WebRTC. I’ve written about WebRTC several times before including here. The workshop comprised of presentations about the technology from Rob Pickering of IPCortex and Peter Dunkley of Crocodile Rich […]

Categories
broadband Engineer

Openreach – it’s all noise

Openreach broadband engineer finds corroded pair up pole It’s a complicated old game, broadband. Ethernet is far simpler. You connect a length of fibre to  router at one end and one way or another it gets back to a bigger router at the ISP’s core network somewhere and hooks you up to the internet/intranet/wherever you […]

Categories
Engineer UC voip

S3 SBC, rhymes with VoIP, Securitee – Session Border Controller @Genband @Timico

Yesterday I wrote about our new mobile VoIP App for the iPhone. This included a link to a press release issued by Genband, our VoIP infrastructure partner. That release covered more than just the mobile VoIP iPhone App. It is a bit of an overall solution release but an important bit covers our acquisition of […]

Categories
Engineer mobile connectivity voip voip hardware

Timico mobile VoIP app now available on Apple App Store

I started to look at mobile VoIP clients a good 8 or 9 years ago. At the time the handsets were near enough useless – battery life was rubbish and the processors lacked the oomph to properly run a SIP user agent. The advent of the modern day smart phone has changed all this, together […]

Categories
Apps ecommerce End User

How to avoid giving Apple credit card details for iTunes setup

One of my beefs with Apple has been that you have to give them your credit card details when setting up an iTunes account. For the uninitiated, the independent of mind majority, you need to sign up to iTunes to be able to download apps onto your iPad/Pod/Phone, even if the apps themselves are free. […]

Categories
Business UC voip

What’s your Lync address?

This good looking boy in the screenshot is Terry Bowers, Head of Professional Services at Timico Technology Group business Redwood Telecommunications. We are obviously engaged in serious conversation as neither of us is smiling. The client itself is a feature of Microsoft’s Lync, something we decided to play with at Redwood following the UC Expo […]

Categories
Business internet mobile connectivity net neutrality

Broadband Stakeholders Group Open Internet Code of Practice

The Broadband Stakeholders Group today released an “Open Internet Code of Practice”. This is a voluntary CoP promoting net neutrality. Specifically: users should be able to access all legal content there should be no discrimination against content providers on the basis of commercial rivalry; and traffic management policies should be clear and transparent I’m not […]

Categories
4g Engineer ofcom

O2 LTE – the game changer

4G is like lightning, it’s an eye opener and seriously enhances the mobile data experience. This post talks about the truly exciting O2 4G trials in London and thinks about how the technology is going to change the mobile game. Mobile data is already an important feature in the business communication landscape. As an ISP […]

Categories
End User social networking

Hanging out with the boys on Google+ @ruskin147 @Billt @jeffjarvis

Tried a couple of impromptu hangouts on Google+ over the weekend. The first was one hosted by BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones and was prompted by one of his tweets. This, my first hangout, was seriously easy to join. Because it was my first I had to download a Chrome plug-in but this happened in […]

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 […]