VoIP Gateways

Around this time of year it’s nice to relax and find out a bit more about the people we work with, and all who work with VoIP gateways have certainly heard of Gaithersburg, Maryland’s Patton (News - Alert) Electronics.

The Washingtonian recently ran an interesting feature on the family who founded Patton, noting that it’s quite large -- the founders, three brothers, have seven siblings, and the extended family consists of 52 grandchildren.

And the Patton parents, Bob and Barbara, married 59 years, can name every single one.

The clan’s patriarch, Bob Patton, an engineer, moved with his young wife and family to Washington from Pennsylvania in the early 1950s to take a job selling electronics. In 1984, according to The Washingtonian, Bob helped three of his sons start a family business, Patton Electronics Company in Gaithersburg. Some grandchildren now work there, as does Bob -- 82 years old, and he goes into the office every day.

“I’m hanging around young guys with a lot of energy, and that’s good for me,” he told The Washingtonian.

Hardly a poky Mom-and-Pop business, Patton continues finding success in its competitive field. Recently TMC’s (News - Alert) Juliana Kenny wrote that at November’s elastixWorld in Mexico, Patton and PaloSanto, a vendor of open source innovation in Latin America teamed up to reveal a built-in system management tool that fully integrates SmartNode VoIP equipment with Elastix (News - Alert) unified communications tools.

Patton brings extensive experience to the VoIP market, Kenny wrote, adding that that the fully-integrated element management tools offer Elastix value-added resellers and system integrators increased productivity and higher profit margins by providing automatic discovery and streamlined, intuitive provisioning of SmartNode VoIP devices.

This summer TMC’s Rajani Baburajan wrote that Patton announced the launch of two new SmartNode product series for ISDN BRI VoIP users and service providers.

The new SmartNode 4120 Single/Dual-Port BRI VoIP gateway and the SN-DTA Singe/Dual-Port BRI VoIP Digital Terminal Adapter expand the range of NT/TE port combinations available from SmartNode. They include features such as PSTN fallback, phantom power, and a high-precision clock that solves VoIP interop issues with DECT, PBX (News - Alert), and FAX.