Mitel Archives - trefor.net

On my way in this morning I had to stop off to take this photo. It was a misty morning and the sun was barely visible. V atmospheric.

We are coming up to the winter solstice and despite the short days I actually like this time of year, far more so than January and February. I guess because we are all so busy it takes our mind off the weather¹.

Our inbound sales teams have been working their socks off. They take leads from web chats, inbound calls and emails all originating from the Timico website. These are for both existing and new customers. Businesses are trying to dot their “t”s and cross their “i”s² and get their January communications infrastructure needs in place before Christmas.

The marketing department has also been busy and with the addition of Mitel and Avaya support we now have a pretty full portfolio of Unified Communications products that complement our own hosted service and the IPCortex. As a council member of the Internet Telephony Service Providers Association (ITSPA) I get the odd raised eyebrow from industry colleagues who are by and large purely hosted players. There is an element of snobbery amongst the purist ITSPs. However the needs of the market are diverse and with 20,000 or so business customers we now have something to suit everyone.

“What do you want for Christmas little boy?”

“Oo can I have an IP Office phone system with SIP trunks please Santa?”

“Ho ho ho I’ll get the elves onto it right away”

I wonder how it would go down with our engineers if we asked them to wear elf outfits when visiting customers in the run up to Christmas. We could stick big red noses on all our vans. Probably better not. At this point I should shut up.

In case you’re interested I have asked Santa for a vice for Christmas. At home we have a lot of tent pegs that need straightening and I thought it would come in handy for that. I think I’ve been a good boy so should be ok.

That’s all for now. C ya.

¹It was sub zero in Lincoln over the weekend which was very convenient because we needed to defrost one of our freezers. The freezing cold outside meant that we could do it without worrying about the food defrosting.

²I know I know 🙂

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.