INTERNET TELEPHONY — November 2011

Collateral Damage: How White Spaces Could Get Squeezed By Incentive Auctions

Various efforts at the federal level that call for the repacking of TV channels could significantly diminish the potential for white spaces. Perhaps the most prevalent effort on this front is known as S.911, which the Senate Commerce Committee passed in June. Other potential threats to white spaces, according to Stephen Coran, an attorney with Rini Coran, include a discussion draft from the House majority of the Energy and Commerce Committee, a draft from the House minority, language in the debt ceiling bill, and President Obama's jobs initiative...

Feature Articles

INTERNET TELEPHONY Congratulates Winners of the UC Excellence Awards
With the rise and snowballing expansion of mobile networks and applications, communications, connectivity and collaboration seem to be everywhere. Unified communications solutions that intelligently bring together real-time and recorded voice, IM, presence, audio and video conferencing, and other capabilities continue to improve and become available to a broader cross section of the populace.

Carrier Snake Bite. What Should They Do Now?
At the recent Metaswitch Forum 2011 in Las Vegas the company devoted considerable effort helping its carrier customers compete in this brave new world. The event was the eighth put on by the company and attracted 800 global service providers. And the carriers at the event were extremely knowledgeable - I had two speaking slots and asked them a barrage of questions, and people seemed to all be on their game.

Balancing Security, Performance and Cost in the Real World
Service providers' IT organizations are tasked with building infrastructure that can scale to meet growing network demands at a reasonable cost while ensuring fast and secure communications. Maintaining a high level of performance while applying stringent security technology has never been easy, and with the confluence of new multi-purpose security technologies such as unified threat management devices and next-generation firewalls and the changing profile of network traffic, budgeting for the correct amount of hardware is becoming a very difficult practice.

Move to Fiber Optics Leads AV Systems Integrators to Seek Single Enclosure Solutions
AV integrators face a daunting challenge when installing complex, high-definition, multimedia systems involving multiple displays and distances over 15 feet: incorporating and often converting a myriad of signal input options to high-definition formats over fiber optic cable and doing so with a relatively clean installation that minimizes potential points of failure.

Analyzing SIP's Role in Regulatory and Tax Structures
SIP is an application layer protocol in the TCP/IP family of protocols. It is utilized in the establishment, modification and termination of telephony, multimedia conferencing, instant messaging and other types of real-time communication over IP-based networks. Like interconnected VoIP and other IP telephony services before it, the industry's perception of the federal and state regulatory and tax treatment of SIP is uncertain.

Departments

Getting Vertical

M2M Offers DHL Visibility on Urgent Shipments
During his 4GWE keynote speech earlier this fall in Austin, Matt Groppe, director of global business development for DHL SAMEDAY, said that the shipping market is changing as customers are demanding more visibility into their deliverables.

Unified Communications

Susan G. Komen for the Cure Taps XO Communications for UC
A year ago this month media outlets reported that the DBS outfit had trademarked the Nomad name after having used the same term in surveys to describe the ability of users to view TV content across their various television, computer and mobile device screens.

For Unified Communications, a Future Unclouded
The IT industry is prone to get enthusiastic about emerging technologies. In many cases, this enthusiasm drives support for technologies that go on to make a real difference to business performance or, in some cases, people's lives.

Streamline Your Business with Notifications and Surveys
This is a reminder to make your six-month dental checkup appointment." "This is a reminder for your car service appointment tomorrow at 8 a.m." "Tornadoes have been reported in your area, please take shelter." "There is a power supply failure on server HSV12." "Please indicate your satisfaction with your recent repair.

The Importance of E-SBCs
E-SBCs sit at the edge of the enterprise network to provide control over the SIP traffic. They serve as a crucial element in enabling SIP deployments for SIP trunking, UC and more.

UC in the Post-PC Era
The post-PC era is characterized by the consumerization of IT. This is a time where the laptop stays plugged into the wall for the most part, and more nimble devices like smartphones and tablets take on the role of the computer on the go. People, the world over, have eagerly embraced the new paradigm of anywhere, anytime, any device communication, collaboration and digital media consumption. By 2012, mobile users will make up 73 percent of the enterprise workforce, according to Forrester Research. With so many mobile employees, ubiquitous access to network resources has become business-critical.

Mobile Mashups
Last August Skype bought GroupMe, a startup based on group messaging, the clever idea of assigning a phone number through which a group of people can exchange SMS messages (text messages). Each message sent to that number is relayed to all the members of the group, to create the effect of an SMS-based chat room.

Planning for SIP Trunking; Considerations to Take into Account
No matter where I travel in the world, telecom managers' eyes gleam when the topic of SIP trunking arises. So it wasn't much of a surprise to me as I looked at a SIP Trunking Snapshot to see that the viewpoint on adoption is still, for the most part, looked at from a futuristic standpoint, but that more and more people are expressing excitement about it.

The Channel
On RAD's Radar

On Rad's Radar: The Transactional Agent in Cloud
One is describing the transactional model as lame or broken or dying. Bandwidth is a commodity business. So are cellular and TV - both flat markets. In a commodity market, where customer acquisition is actually about taking customers away from a competitor, for a lack of value, price is how replacement services are sold via a transactional model.

Open Source

Sangoma Talks Strategy, Including Its Recent Acquisition
Sangoma recently acquired VegaStream. INTERNET TELEPHONY used that announcement as an opportunity to connect with Jeff Dworkin, Sangoma's director of marketing, to find out more about the deal and about the company's open source strategy as a whole.

Service Provider News

8x8 Buys Cloud Contact Center Vendor Contactual
In a move that likely came as a surprise to many in the communications industry, 8x8 this fall announced its acquisition of contact center vendor Contactual. In reality, the merger is more of a logical evolution of a four-year collaborative relationship - 8x8's contact center customers have actually been using Contactual's cloud-based services for some time.