VOIP Solution and Service

Swiss firm ERA IT Solutions hopes to supply the Superintendent Trojan, a spyware application, only to government agencies. It hopes this policy will leave it off malware blacklists compiled by anti-virus and anti-spyware developers. Not only does it plan to monitor VoIP calls, the software is surreptitiously turning on the built-in microphones or webcams on target PCs.

However, there are a lot of loopholes in the plan. First and the foremost being whether evidence obtained via such covert methods would be legally submittable. More over the basic assumption that the software can be successfully planted without physical access to a PC is doubtful.

Charles Gudet, the head of the Special Services Department at UVEK said that there’s no basis for using such Trojan techniques under federal wiretap laws (such as the Federal Post and Telecommunications Surveillance Act). However, local laws and federal police procedures permit the use of software wiretaps providing surveillance has being authorized by a court.

Anyways, my Best Wishes for Sup. Trojan!!

Small and medium sized businesses in Asia will spend more than 500 million US dollars on internet phone calls this year, according to research consultancy Access Markets International Partners.
(AMI defines small businesses as those with fewer than 100 employees, and medium sized businesses as those with fewer than 1,000 employees).

IP telephony rollout is strongest in areas with good broadband coverage. “Within Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan, IP telephony will be driven by SMBs in Australia, Singapore, South Korea and New Zealand,” predicted Cindy Sim, an analyst at AMI Partners’ Singapore office.

The IP telephony market will grow at a compound annual rate of more than 45 percent over the next five years, according to AMI’s forecasts.

Vendors are likely to see margins fall as smaller enterprises take to VoIP in greater numbers, according to Frost and Sullivan research published earlier this year. The firm predicts that the proliferation of VoIP devices supporting the SIP standard will lead to falling prices and a more open market.

However, the analyst warned that business decision makers may require education to convince them that IP telephony can have a significant positive impact on the bottom line.

IP telephony vendors may find managers unwilling to risk a sudden change from functioning traditional telephone networks to untried IP-based systems.

Fujitsu Services has scooped the ‘Network & Services Management & Operations’ award at this year’s InfoVision Awards for its Managed VoIP Service. Held at the Broadband World Forum Europe in Paris on October 10, 2006 and organised by the International Engineering Consortium (IEC), the awards recognise those deemed to be the most unique and beneficial to the telecommunications industry.

Fujitsu launched its Managed VoIP Service in May 2006 for medium and large companies. It provides a low cost and efficient means of complementing or replacing traditional phone systems, leading to a better range of services and greater organisational flexibility. Fujitsu’s VoIP service is offered on a Per User Per Month (PUPM) basis which guarantees predictable expenditure.

The key benefits from Fujitsu’s VoIP solution include:

* Predictable monthly cost and very low CAPEX .
* Greater organisational flexibility – With VoIP, the system holds the users’ profile so that they can remotely log on to retrieve telephone and voicemail services anywhere in a building or through any of the company’s global network connections by using a VPN link. Set-up time for the new service is minimal and uses a ‘plug & go’ philosophy.
* Services for staff – Using the new VoIP solution provides users access to a wide range of new and improved services including: voice conferencing, integrated e-mail and voicemail and softphones.
* Highly secure network – Fujitsu provides a high performance, fully integrated and secure communications network for businesses so that users receive excellent sound clarity and a highly secure working environment benefiting from Fujitsu’s history of working within Government.

One of the biggest challenges for consumers switching from a public switched telephone network (PSTN) to Voice over IP (VoIP) phone services is getting their fax machines or fax software to work reliably.

Fax over an IP network (FoIP) presents a special problem because the fax protocols rely on very precise timing mechanisms: Fax transmissions are more sensitive to the latency and delays that are inherent in a packet-based network than are voice transmissions.

There is no unevenness of the speed of transmission in the PSTN network. On the other hand, sending fax transmissions over the Internet has no Quality of Service (QoS) control.

It’s the nature of IP networks for some packets to occasionally drop or be lost. If this happens with a voice transmission, you may hear a quick “cut out” when the packet loss is small, but you’ll still probably be able to understand what’s being said. However, if it happens during a fax transmission, it can create an error in the fax transmission

One concern regarding sending documents by FoIP has to do with security. Fax transmissions over PSTN lines use a point-to-point connection over relatively private phone lines, whereas e-mail and other computerized transfer methods (and fax over VoIP, for that matter) use the public Internet.

Another concern that some fax users have is the ability to be sure from whom an e-mail document originates (fax machines are required by law to include the sending phone number on the fax). You can solve this problem by using digital signatures to verify the identity of the sender of the e-mail document.

Point Topic’s first spatial broadband forecasts for the UK show the installed base of broadband lines in the UK almost doubling in three years, from 9.77 million at the end of 2005 to 18.46 million at the end of 2008.

The forecast shows that the proportion of households with broadband will almost double, from 34% at the end of 2005 to 64% three years later. The remote rural areas where penetration is lowest today will grow fastest and catch up with the rest of the country to some extent. But the highest take-up will continue to be in prosperous areas of the South East of England. By end-2008 between 80% and 90% of homes will have broadband across a large part of the South East.

It is also said that by end-2008 the areas with the highest household take-up will all be in the South East. Waverley (South-west Surrey) is forecast to be the highest, with 91% of households on broadband, but many similar areas are close. Swindon, which was “the most broadband town in Britain” at the beginning of this year is forecast to be only number 11 by end-2008.

Despite the high penetration levels achieved in some areas, the forecast points to a declining growth rate. Net broadband adds are expected to fall from 1.9 million lines in the first half of 2005 to barely 1 million in the second half of 2008. The broadband market will find it increasingly difficult to maintain momentum as growth will increasingly need to come from winning over the groups which have low internet access today - such as poorer families, single people and older households.

It seems FCC is having a tough time taking decisions. It has put off AT&T’s proposed takeover of Bellsouth Corp, a mega merger that would create the nation’s biggest provider of telephone, wireless, VoIP and broadband internet services. Some members of the congress oppose the merger, and two FCC commissioners questioned its impact on consumers even after the justice department gave unconditional approval to the buyout on Wednesday, after finding no potentially adverse effects on competition.

Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, a democrat, called the decision a “Reckless abandonment” of the justice department’s responsibility to protect competition and consumers. Now, I find it too harsh a comment Mr. Adelstein!

FCC also is to take up the AT&T’s proposal as well as the controversial issue known as “network neutrality” which deals with whether internet service providers must provide equal treatment to all traffic on their network.

It’s a phone on a USB stick, it looks just like any USB memory stick, and it has (at last!) shipped into the UK. It’s the Vonage V-phone.

It’s the size of a Flash drive - there’s 250MB of free storage space on there - but also includes all you need to use your Vonage account on any PC, anywhere.

The Company is quite pleased about it and says, “No larger than a pack of gum, its plug and play ease and the ability to use the device at any PC anywhere in the world makes the V-Phone ideal for travellers, businessmen, students, or anyone on the go.”

The host needs to be connected to a broadband internet link.The V-Phone has a read-only sector that contains Vonage’s VoIP software and alongwith it comes a headset which plugs into a 2.5mm port on the side of the device.

The V-Phone costs £20 and includes a UK phone number so non-subscribers can call you. Individuals pay £8 a month and a £10 activation fee. Calls to landlines are free, but you pay 5-15p a minute to speak to someone on a mobile, depending on when during the day you call. Facilities like call waiting, call forwarding and voicemail are included free. The software can also be used to make ‘999′ emergency calls.

Available now, the V-Phone can be picked up from Vonage’s website and if you already have a Vonage account for VoIP use, you can configure this to use your existing account.

Data theft issue from Indian call centres has become the favourite whipping boy of the British media. A recent Channel 4 sting operation about data theft in Indian call centres is the latest in a series of highly publicized incidents about how easy it is to obtain personal financial data of Britons out of India. But has the media really exposed the entire scene?

Let me set forth some interesting figures before you.

However, Last week, at the same time that the sting thing hit the UK media, Prefix IT, a leading security firm published the results of research done by independent market research firm Tickbox.

It surveyed 1,000 UK employees in August and September 2006 and found that 37% of men believed that it is acceptable to take data base information from the office. 18% had actually done so. 11% remove confidential documents. 10% have taken a work database. And 78% own devices- ipods and pen drives- capable of stealing data. 60% of workers have removed item from office in the past.

The latest Home Office estimate is that identity fraud costs the UK economy $1.7 billion annually. One in five companies in the UK is affected by identity fraud. One in four criminals here uses a false identity. Of this, bin-raiding, stealing handbags, spoof e-mails or letters offering deals, are some of the most commonly used techniques.

In yet another survey, researchers offering free theatre tickets found that 92% of the Londoners will give a stranger all their personal information. And 98% will give enough information for anyone to start a bank account, according to Vnunet, an IT portal. Official surveys also point out that the homeless in UK are being paid an average of five per piece of personal data (like credit card statements) retrieved from garbage bins by identity thieves.

When such is the scene how much blame can really be imposed on Call Centres, and alongwith it the virtual call centres using VoIP, for data thieving??

Skype is definitely one of the biggest VoIP providers, but scrutinizing closely, there are certain areas that the Company needs to work on.

Skype uses a proprietary protocol, instead of an open standard like H.323, IAX, or SIP. This makes it impossible for other providers to interact with the Skype network. There are of course clear business reasons for this, since it helps protect the SkypeOut revenue stream from competition.

SkypeOut can be more expensive as its rates are based per minute. In some countries, many calls are charged at a specified fixed amount per call. For example in the UK, BT on its standard residential tariff charges 5½p for a 60 minute off-peak national call, whereas Skype charges 72p (€1.02).

Another criticism of Skype has been content filtering. Also, there is no Skype version for the Palm OS which is widely used in mobile devices.

A design limitation of Skype is that, if given access to an unrestricted network connection, Skype clients can become supernodes. These supernodes hold together the peer-peer network and provide data routing for those behind restrictive firewalls. Unfortunately, these supernodes can generate a significant amount of bandwidth. For this reason some network providers, such as universities, have banned Skype.

Analyzing the security and methodology of Skype, certain issues were noted:

* Heavy use of anti debugging techniques (typically found in malware)
* Heavy use of obfuscation of code
* Keeps chatting on the network, even when idle (even for non-supernodes)
* Lack of privacy (Skype has the keys to decrypt sessions)
* Heap overflow in Skype
* Skype makes it hard to enforce a (corporate) security policy
* There is no way to know if there is/will be a backdoor

Chilean VoIP company Netline Telecomunicaciones has launched VoIP mobile and fixed line phone services for the mass market.

Netline general manager Joel Bendersky told the reporters that the company aims for 30,000 clients by October 2007 and 500,000 to 1 million in five years. The mobile phone uses Wi-Fi signals to connect to other fixed line and mobile units. Its release starts a three month pilot program in Chile. The service could eventually be launched in other Latin American countries and the US.

This service holds advantages over internet VoIP carriers such as Skype because it can be used to make emergency calls, comes in a smaller package and Netline is fully licensed as a local carrier.

The company offers pre-paid services payable through the internet in either monthly packages or per minute. The phone can also be used to make long distance calls.The company also unveiled a fixed line phone that connects directly to a broadband cable, something that it believes could appeal to SMEs as well as residential customers.

Bendersky said that the phone was aimed primarily at customers interested in cost savings more than increased mobility, adding that coverage was limited.

Source: Cellular news