VOIP Solution and Service

According to a 2004 study of consumers by The Derringer Research Group, the number of teleworkers supported by broadband connections leapt from 4.4 million in 2003 to 8.1 million in 2004.

A number of VoIP softwares are there in the market for telecommuting. For example, the Avaya Inc. softphone. With a broadband Internet connection at the home, the telecommuter can blend in Netmeeting, The Avaya gear offers the flexibility of using the softphone or using an IP handset that connects to the corporate PBX via an IPSec virtual private network (VPN) connection. This gives end users flexibility and allows them to connect using whatever Internet connection they can get.

All the PBX features are extended to the telecommuter’s softphone or IP phone, including conferencing, call displays and call forwarding. Calls can also be forwarded to cell phones if telecommuters leave their home offices, and they can pick up voice mail and e-mail over the phone. Avaya text-to-speech software reads the e-mail. In addition, the remote workers can use speech access that listens to spoken commands to carry out calling or retrieving of information.

Recently Cisco Systems Inc. introduced VoIP phones that include VPN software, eliminating the need for a separate VPN router to tunnel calls over the Internet. This can reduce the initial cost of setup. Nortel Networks Corp. says its support for Session Initiation Protocol, while not new, is the most powerful telecommuter feature of its VoIP platforms, enabling workers to know the presence status of their co-workers and reach them by instant messaging, phone or videoconference.

VoIP technology in general lays the foundation for adding video capabilities, although these are not widely deployed yet. Voice quality over affordable broadband connections such as DSL and cable is too uncertain to trust to.

Skype PBX (Private Branch Exchange) Gateway is now becoming the fundamental core of the Skype & Enterprise Application. By adopting this solution, enterprise-users can use an office PBX/phone to make or answer incoming or outgoing calls without needing a PC. Some more powerful applications added recently by Skype include:

1. Easy Web Call is the most popular application for the majority of Skypers to provide a Web Call to service your customers globally.

2. Virtual Office is very beneficial for small & Medium Enterprise. All the users will just call regular phone-number provided by the Skype, then all the calls will automatically forward to the Office PBX, i.e., to anyone in this company.

3. Travelers’ Soft-phone is a helpful to the company’s managers & sales that are traveling a lot. By using this solution, they are able to just simply bring their laptop, installed with Skype, and have a meeting anytime with the staff in the location where Internet services are provided.

4. Inter-VOIP is the key to manage all the telephony within your enterprise. By using this solution/product, it is easy to integrate your company’s VOIP like, Skype, MGCP, H.323, SIP, CISCO (Call Manager), etc. It not only can manage all the VOIP telephony but inter-VOIP as well, which is completely free.

Nokia will find it hard to come out of its successful record sales of over four lakh phones all over India on October 19, the day when Diwali was celebrated in India. This is the highest figure it has sold anywhere in the world.

“Its more than what Nokia has ever sold on any Chinese new year,” says a dealer who has seen an Nokia internal communiqué on the matter.

The Company’s previous single day sales record was about one lakh phones. This is the kind of sales its competitors generally do over the entire year in India.

So, what has driven this buying frenzy? Blame it on Diwali mania but also credit Nokia with a smart product strategy. It has currently 38 models available on the retail shelf of which around 12-13 models can be categorized into the low-end segment.

This is also a reversal of fortunes for the Finnish company. Nokia was not too keen to focus on this area.

Microsoft aims to double the number of mobile phones running its Windows software this year from six million at the end of 2005 and to keep up its rate of growth in coming years.

Microsoft competes in the market for smartphones, which can run software applications such as email, mobile TV and games, with British software maker Symbian, owned by the world’s top producers including Nokia. Nokia has about half the global market for smartphones.

Smartphones also face competition from RIM Blackberry, the world’s largest mobile e-mail device, which has recently launched a new model, the Pearl, with additional camera and music functions. Blackberry users also number a little over six million.

Cell phone worms and VoIP fraud are among the top 10 security threats to watch next year, according to a panel of experts assembled by the SA-NS Institute.

Cell phone worms will infect at least 100,000 phones in 2007, jumping from phone to phone over wireless data networks, the experts noted.

Malware aimed at mobile phones has been seen in the past, but it has not been considered a serious problem. That will change, contends SANS Director of Research Alan Paller.

To date, only 100 cell phones that have been attacked have become infected, he estimated.

Hackers have also begun penetrating VoIP servers and selling dial tone as if they were a phone company, noted Paller. “The hackers collect the money from the people that use it, while the company operating the servers gets the bill,” he said.

“A lot of medium-sized companies are putting in Voice over IP,” he observed. “They are doing it without any sense of security, so they’re easy pickings.”

In addition to cell phone viruses and VoIP attacks, other trends SANS recommends watching next year include the following:

* Laptop encryption will be made mandatory at many government agencies and other organizations that store confidential data.
* Targeted attacks will be more prevalent, in particular on government agencies.
* Congress and state governments will pass more legislation governing the protection of customer information.
* Spyware will continue to be a huge and growing issue.
* Zero-day vulnerabilities will result in major outbreaks resulting in many thousands of PCs being infected worldwide.
* The majority of bots will be bundled with rootkits.
* Network Access Control will become common and will grow in sophistication.
* Theft of PDA smartphones will grow significantly

It is harder to monitor VoIP calls because servers and connections often sit in foreign countries, commonly the US, and a country’s law enforcement agency can not exercise the same power of discovery that they can over a phone provider’s records. Calls can also be harder to trace when they are free, since there is no billing record.

A report from a Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung says that the Swiss Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications is examining the use of a software to listen to VOIP conversations.

The software being assessed comes from Swiss company Era IT Solutions. The software is placed on to a user’s computer by that person’s internet service provider, but only on the orders of a judge, according to current plans.

The software records ongoing conversations and sends the recordings in broken up data packets back to a server controlled by the authorities. The software is also capable of monitoring what is going on in the room in which a computer is located. It can switch on a computer’s microphone so that the room itself can be eavesdropped on, according to the report.

The Swiss Surveillance Act does not allow for Trojan horse-type surveillance but federal criminal regulations do allow software-based wiretaps as long as they are controlled in the same manner as other surveillance equipment.

Troubleshooting network connectivity problems can be an irritating and time-consuming task. Fluke Networks has put an end to this problem with the NetTool Series II Inline Network Tester. NetTool combines powerful NetProve diagnostics, inline Gigabit vision, digital IntelliTone technology and network, IP Phone and PC configuration testing in one palm-sized tool, so you’ll have everything you need to quickly resolve even the toughest connectivity problem.

You can verify, isolate, and document network connectivity and application port response problems faster than ever before with automated NetProve diagnostics. Suppose you receive a call from a user blaming the network for slow application performance. Armed with a NetTool Series II, in seconds you can prove whether the network is truly at fault by seeing connectivity to key network devices and services. If the network is at fault, NetProve will isolate the source of the problem so you can fix it fast. If it is not the network, NetProve will identify which application port is slow to respond so you can dispatch the appropriate resource to correct the problem.

This provides you a front-line VoIP management tool for verify link readiness during pre-deployment planning, as well as troubleshoot problems on active networks by monitoring real-time VoIP traffic. Simple inline connectivity provides visibility into VoIP calls to quickly diagnose both IP phone boot-up and call control problems, and to measure key call quality metrics. Series II adds H.323 to existing SIP and SCCP support.

Highdeal, the world’s leading provider of pricing, rating and charging solutions has chosen Budget Telecom to price and rate its new VoIP services. In a second phase, Highdeal will replace Budget Telecom’s existing pricing and rating infrastructure for all other IP services as well as future fixed-mobile and MVNO services.

Budget Telecom provides a variety of low-cost telephony and broadband services, including VoIP, to customers throughout Europe. Budget Telecom is today the leading low-cost telecoms operator in Europe. The aim is to reduce their customers telephony bills for a wide array of communications services they offer: Carrier Pre Selection, prepaid cards, international mobile calls, e-commerce and soon to come, ISP and mobile services.

Highdeal is the world’s leading provider of Pricing, Rating and Charging solutions. By delivering unconstrained pricing and packaging flexibility coupled with real-time transaction management, Highdeal solves the billing problem in the multi service world.

Microsoft Corp released Internet Explorer 7 on Wednesday, the first major upgrade to its Web Browser since 2001, with its new features aimed at preventing online fraud and improving ease of use.

Internet Explorer 7 is available immediately to Windows XP users and it will eventually serve as the default browser for Microsoft’s much anticipated Windows Vista Operating system, due to the consumers in early 2007.

Internet Explorer registered an 86% global share in October, Mozilla Firefix 11.5% and both Apple Computer Inc.’s Safari and Norway’s Opera Software, less than 2%, according to onestat.com.

Engin is the leading Australian broadband telephone company that has committed itself to providing VoIP technology.

Engin allows any broadband user to make and receive calls using their existing telephone at a very low price. It offers a unique experience to the phone user by giving him a greater ability to control where, when and from whom he receives calls.

Using SIP technology (session initiation protocol) with a Voice Box, your calls are directed through the Internet rather than the plain old telephone system. The Engin Voice Box can be attached to an analog, cordless or DECT telephone, allowing you to make and receive calls as you normally would.

Now Engin is on its way to strike a deal to embed its Softphone technology inside Intel PCI cards that ship with selected HP desktops and notebooks. HP’s Nx and Dx computers will be VoIP-enabled as a result of an agreement between the three companies.
Intel and Engin signed a similar deal with local PC builder Optima in May this year.

Matt Farmer, sales director of Engin said the contract would give the company a broader reach into the SOHO and SMB market.

The Nx and Dx notebooks and PCs are distributed through Ingram Micro, Dicker Data and Cellnet. Synnex will carry the notebooks only.