Posts Tagged ‘SIP’

#VoIP SNOM #SIP and the Football #WorldCup

Friday, June 18th, 2010

When I first started looking at SNOM phones, perhaps 9 years ago, they were not very impressive. The handset was easy to knock off its cradle and the voice was tinny.

The phone firmware was impressive and the fact that SNOM was a very early runner in the SIP market is to their great credit.  SNOM is an entrepreneurial business.

The fact that SNOM is still around is also hugely to their credit and their handsets have come on in dramatic leaps and bounds. The quality of the plastics has improved and their expertise in software still comes clearly to the fore.

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What are ISPs doing about Voice?

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

The question is being asked “what are ISPs doing about voice?” This is particularly relevant as the market consolidates and B2B ISPs not only seek economies of scale but additional sources of revenues.

Timico was founded as a fully converged ISP from the outset. Early on we had to decide whether to simply white label services from other ISPs and ITSPs or do “get into manufacturing” and do it all ourselves.

At the outset there were no real white label VoIP options. You had to do it yourself. However there were plenty of ISPs providing Virtual ISP services.

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Job vacancy for VoIP network operations engineer – please retweet

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

I’m looking for a VoIP network engineer to join our expanding VoIP team.  The job entails assisting with the running of our Nortel A2E SIP platform, the development of new services, interoperability testing with vendors and other service providers, 3rd line support and, I’m sure, a plethora of other interesting and challenging tasks as we think of them.

VoIP is an important string to the communications bow these days. Timico is a VoIP operator rather than a White Label service provider reselling soneone else’s proposition. We probably don’t lead with VoIP in a large percentage of deals but the ability to provide VoIP services is becoming an important part of winning corporate Wide Area Network business.

For example it is fairly typical for a company to outsource the management of a few hundred sites’ connectivity to us.  They will then take advantage of the fact that  they now have an MPLS network and run VoIP between sites and to all their homeworkers.

If you want to join a company that is going placesdrop me a line with your CV or take a look at the Timico website.

PS it is always a risk posting a job ad on the blog – I get inundated with calls and emails from recruitment organisations! It is the cheapest way to advertise though.  Please retweet :-)

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IETF 74 and SIP

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

10 years ago this month saw the publication of RFC2543 which was the first proposed version of the SIP standard that is now used an almost all internet telephony services.

This is being celebrated this week at IETF74.  The Internet Engineerng Task Force is the body that maintains standards  for internet related technologies.

SIP was initially championed by a small number of people that included it’s inventor Henning Schulzrinne, Jonathan Rosenberg, Jiri Kuthan, Henry Sinnreich et al.

At around that time I was being asked by my then employer Mitel to set up a product line that was based on open standards.  There was quite a choice to chose from.

MGCP was adopted by the cable community in the USA and by a number of ITSPs.  However the problem with MGCP was that it had a relatively small feature set which meant that service providers had to develop their own extensions to provide saleable services.  Thie meant that MGCP quickly became non standard as any venbdor would have to support multiple flavours of the protocol.

Then there was SGCP, or skinny. This was a Cisco proprietary protocol.  Whilst potentially this had initially the largest market opportunity it did tie you into Cisco.

So SIP was the obvious one but it took a long time for the market to appear, particularly as the turmoil around 9/11 hit the dot com intustry.

I spent 4 years service on the board of the SIP Forum from around this time.  Being around during the early days of a technological revolution was exciting and I am fortunate enough, with Timico, to be able to continue the ride.

Check out the Facebook event surrounding this anniversay here.

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Standardisation Brings Choice

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Most of the Timico staff who have been subjected to my technology staff intro presentation, which is practially all 130 of them over the last 4 years, will have had my spiel regarding the competitive benefits of standardisation (eg IBM PC, GSM phones, SIP). Basically standards increase choice and reduce costs.

Our position regarding the support of VoIP handsets has however been very conservative on the basis that it is impossible for a service provider to provide a quality level of support for a huge range of handsets. Actually this applies in the mobile world just as much as in VoIP although to a lesser extent because GSM is a maturer technology.

I have to say though that as SIP becomes seriously mainstream as the signaling protocol of choice for VoIP my attitude towards handset support is changing. This is bolstered by the availability of a wider range of quality products from market leaders such as Nortel, Cisco and Polycom.

The picture below shows the handsets that we have either already been providing or are in test for production in the near future.

Its horses for courses.

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September 11th

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

It is 7 years to the day when the 9/11 tragedies happened in the USA. The event has different memories for us all.  I was attending a SIP Summit VoIP conference in Austin Texas and Tuesday 11th September was the first day. The conference was abandoned after the first day and most Americans hired cars and drove home. In some cases it was a 3 day drive.

The experience of overseas attendees was a strange and highly stressful one as noone knew when they would be able to go home. I eventually made it out on the Saturday on a very nervous flight. The barman at the airport hotel where we were staying said that we were the first regulars he had ever had.

The event was quite significant from a technology perspective. The mobile networks in New York stayed working although it was virtually impossible to get a line. The fixed line network did not work – the Central Office (telephone exchange) in the area had burnt to the ground.

What did remain up was the internet and students at Columbia University, which is where Professor Henning Schulzerinne did much of the development of VoIP signalling protocol SIP, were able to call home using their University VoIP accounts.

Internet Protocol, the IP in VoIP, was designed to run over networks resilient to nuclear attack. 9/11 was a good, if terrible, real life test bed for this. 

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Nortel carrier strategy

Saturday, July 26th, 2008

Had a really good meeting with the Nortel Carrier team on Wednesday – I’ve not really had a chance to write it up and post before now. The meeting was held to discuss their SIP/multimedia product roadmap. The Nortel Enterprise Division has been making a lot of noise in the multimedia/Unified Comms space (SCS500 – I’ll write a piece on it soon) but I had been afraid that the Carrier side had sold its soul to Microsoft.

This turns out not to be the case. The Nortel AS5200 platform, which is the SIP platform used by Timico, has been adopted by a number of major Tier 1 operators and is benefiting from what seems to be a large amount of attention and investment. This to me is a very sensible thing for Nortel to do as the 5200 represents a leading edge platform for them – one which is streets ahead of any competition in the hosted VoIP/Unified Comms space.

Timico has been selling services on the back of the 5200 for 2 – 3 years. We are talking hosted VoIP, video, IM, presence, collaboration – perfect for small offices and homeworkers. The Nortel developments look to be adding more PBX type features that fill in some holes in the 5200′s repertoire. Whats more it seems to me that this switch is moving in the direction of becoming Nortel’s main carrier play. After all the CS2k, which gives Nortel its huge lead in the market, is a platform designed to emulate legacy services but in a much cheaper way than its DMS 100 TDM swich.

What’s more, new features such as federated presence, FMC, links to external directories and better support for SIP Trunks will keep Nortel at the forefront of the business communications space and allow tight integration with its Enterprise products – something that we haven’t seen before.

This is reinforced by the movement of Enterprise staff to the Carrier to aid the process.

Lastly but by no means least Nortel is moving the 5200 to Linux which will have a huge impact on the cost of rolling out and supporting 5200 based services and which I whole heartedly welcome.

I look forward to growing our Nortel relationship.

 

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How will 21CN affect my telephone line?

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

We had an enquiry from a customer this morning:

“I am persistently being contacted by David from ***** who has advised me that with 21CN BT are changing every business line from Analogue or ISDN to a SIP network and that there is no choice in the matter”.

David was trying to get the customer to move to a SIP service by telling her that she would need to do it soon in anycase so she might as well preempt it by doing it now. As a SIP provider I am not averse to selling SIP services but this has to be approached ethically.

From the customer’s perspective BT aren’t getting rid of analogue lines or ISDN. What they are doing is changing the connection at the exchange so that all calls will run over voip between exchanges. This will make the network more efficient/cheaper to run and potentially allow for the introduction of new features in the future.

So any kit the customer has should still work and they will still be ordering new lines as they do now. They needn’t worry about having to re-equip their office.

Potentially there will be new products such as the ability to order broadband and voice as a single line. This is effectively what LLU operators do today though some may sell it as a free broadband line (comes with notoriously “cheap” quality and customer service etc).

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