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Business ofcom Regs voip

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

Ofcom is currently consulting on changes to EU law applicable to Communications Providers that in theory will force providers to port numbers within 24 hours of being asked. Sounds great but fixed line providers have been chucked a get out clause that adds that a subscriber line has to be ‘ready for service’ before being […]

Categories
Business voip

HD Voice Peering Federation launches in UK

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

Categories
Business internet mobile connectivity voip

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

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

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Business ofcom voip

Mobile operators wreaking havoc with pricing

At the ITSPA Summer Forum, held yesterday at Polycom’s City offices  there was a panel of VoIP wholesalers debating the health of the market. The panel consisted of representatives from BT, Gamma, X-Connect, Magrathea and Timico (ie moi). The market it turns out is very healthy with everyone reporting growth in VoIP minutes over and […]

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Engineer internet voip

VONGA is dead – long live FVA? – Openreach

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

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Business ofcom voip

Freshtel leaves Tesco in lurch

Tesco has been using Freshtel as the underlying provider of its VoIP service. Unfortunately the Australian VoIP company announced in March that it was closing its UK operations – something to do with an operating loss of $1.25m. Tesco service is now apparently scheduled to be shut down on the 27th April. Nobody knows how many customers […]

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Engineer internet

HD voice workshop London #HDvoice

I’m chairing a High Definition Voice Workshop in London on 27th April if anyone is interested in coming along. The workshop is being organised by the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association and will be held at their premises at 111 Buckingham Palace Road, starting at 2.30.

Categories
broadband Business ofcom voip

VONGA – POTS Lite

It’s been quite an amusing afternoon at BT Central in Newgate Street. After the ITSPA council meeting I stayed to moderate the Technical Workshop which covered VONGA and Number Porting. More on Number Porting anon but VONGA, or Voice over Next Generation Access, was an interesting session. BT is, as we all know, rolling out […]

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Business Cloud internet UC

2010 is “Year of the Home Worker”

At Leicester Tigers’ Welford Road rugby ground on Thursday Timico launched “Meet Me Now”, a brand new Web Collaboration and video conferencing service with Presence and IM. I missed it due to ITSPA prize awarding duties at the House of Commons. I also had to miss out on a long planned trip to watch the […]

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Engineer voip

VoIP MOS test results are at least as good as PSTN – it’s official

The official ITSPA Awards test results make for very interesting reading. All entrants for the Best ITSP, consumer and SMB categories had their services independently tested by Epitiro. There were 16 entrants for these two categories. On average Epitiro made 400 calls per company and then took over 50,000 technical measurements. Calls were all made […]

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Engineer voip

VoIP MOS test results are at least as good as PSTN – it's official

The official ITSPA Awards test results make for very interesting reading. All entrants for the Best ITSP, consumer and SMB categories had their services independently tested by Epitiro. There were 16 entrants for these two categories. On average Epitiro made 400 calls per company and then took over 50,000 technical measurements. Calls were all made […]

Categories
Engineer voip

Thus pulls out of VoIP and leaves customers to fend for themselves

Had this link sent to me via the industry grapevine today.  Basically Thus  is closing its “Pipecall” voip service and appears to be leaving customers to their own devices.  This isn’t just a case of people going off and finding an alternative provider.  They need to be able to port their numbers. Typically only BT has porting […]

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Business ofcom voip

Ofcom market research

Had an interesting meeting with the Ofcom market research team.  This is the team responsible for the Annual Communications Market Report which is a must read if you are in our game. The meeting was arranged by Ofcom’s Chris Rowsell because the VoIP service provider  industry, via trade body ITSPA, had expressed concern that the VoIP content […]

Categories
Archived Business

Job vacancies at Timico

We are currently looking for ISP first line tech support engineers and ADSL/IP provisioning staff to join our expanding teams in Newark.  Timico is bucking the recessionary trend with a growing managed networks business. If 21CN, IP, VoIP, MPLS, co-location, Virtual Machines sound exciting then take a look at these jobs. Please contact Timico if […]

Categories
Business voip hardware

Interview with Dean Elwood of voipuser.org

Dean Elwood runs the industry leading website voipuser.org. Over the 6 years this has been going Dean has come into contact with most of the major thought leaders in the communications space. He has also seen many of the new developments in VoIP play out in the form of discussion and comment on the website’s […]

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Business fun stuff

Trefor.net first anniversary

Just like the Queen has two birthdays, “official” and “actual”, I realised over the weekend that so do I.  “Blog” and “actual” :-). My first blog post went out on Monday May 19th one year ago.  Since then I have written over 330 posts and had around 70,000 visits. The year gone by has also […]

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Business ofcom voip

Ofcom will point to huge VoIP growth in 2009 market review

What is the difference between VoIP and Voice over Broadband? In last year’s Review of the Communications Market in the UK Ofcom specified VoIP as largely PC to PC based services and VoB as a service that looked like a traditional phone line. The regulator did this because it wanted to characterize the space and […]

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Business UC video voip

Debate – Low Cost versus Productivity Features – what will get the ITSP industry through the recession?

I attended the ITSPA council meeting in London today. One of the topics of discussion was the content of the forthcoming ITSPA workshop in Town on  12th March (ask me for details if you don’t already have them). We had it down as “opportunities and threats in the recession” or words to that effect. Not […]

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Business fun stuff

Review of 2008

2008 has been a very busy year – as they all seem to be. The action started early on when Timico acquired Twang.net. This is the third ISP we have bought and the process is getting slicker every time. Soon afterwards, the integration of the Twang and Timico network infrastructures began. Twang ADSL users all saw an […]

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Business events

Party Time

I don’t know about the rest of you but by the time Christmas Day comes along I’m going to be partied out. It all started with the ITSPA Awards at the House of Commons on Thursday last week followed by lunch with customer Foxtons on the Friday. Monday I had dinner with KeConnect MD Robert Kemp […]

Categories
End User internet

Theatre Royal Update

I mentioned that I would chart the progress of the “Save Lincoln Theatre Royal” Facebook Group. The diagram below shows the membership growth over the past 12 days. I’m not saying this is a stellar recruitment campaign nor making any point other than an observation on how this particular effort is going. The Group has however been publicised […]

Categories
Business ofcom voip

999 Update From Ofcom

A customer of one of ITSPA’s members complained to Ofcom recently. He was unhappy about having to provide his address for the use by the Emergency Services in the event that he ever had to dial 999. His position was that the reason he had a VoIP service was that he was able to use […]

Categories
Business ofcom voip

Number porting

Number porting has always been a hot topic in the telecoms world. Why does it take so long? Why can I move a number from “service provider A” to “service provider B” but not from “service provider C”. In the “old” world porting was (is) an expensive process involving one provider actually forwarding calls to […]

Categories
broadband Business

ISPA

I am please to be able to tell you that yesterday I was elected to the council of the UK’s Internet Service Providers’ Association at their Annual General Meeting. You might ask why do I bother when I am already on the Council of ITSPA (Internet Telephony Service Providers Association). Well I’ll tell you. There […]