INTERNET TELEPHONY — May 2014

What Time is It? The Future of Legacy Networks, Regulation & Competition

Copper, TDM, and wireline networks in general – all three remain important parts of our public networks today. At the same time, all three are vestiges of the past that continue.... More>>>

Departments

Getting Vertical

Cornell's Statler Hotel Checks Out New IP PBX, Wiring, Wi-Fi Technology
There's a hotel in the center of campus at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., but this isn't just any lodging facility. The Statler Hotel has a history dating back to the 1950s, when it was opened as a test bed of sorts related to Cornell's School of Hotel Administration.

Network Infrastructure

iM to Build Modular Colocation Facilities Along Allied Fiber Routes
A few years back a company called Allied Fiber set out to build a nationwide dark fiber network in an effort to bring more affordable and efficient fiber to a variety of customers. The New York-based company is selling dark fiber and neutral colocation along various railroad rights of way around the United States.

Unified Communications

Choosing the Right Voicemail Solution for Your Business
It's been said that voicemail is becoming a parity technology that only keeps an enterprise equal with its competitors. So if voicemail is dead, why should you worry about replacing it? The simple answer is that while use of voicemail, fax and other legacy communications technologies are declining, they are still essential business applications that no business can currently do without.

The Channel

On Rad's Radar: Misunderstanding the Channel
Both Verizon and AT&T announced that they were committing millions to the channel. CenturyLink announced that channel had delivered big revenue last year. Telx said that more than 40 percent of new logos came from channel partners. Google has 10,000 channel partners.

The Cloud, Microsoft, and Channel Eclipse
Microsoft kicked off 2014 with the news that it would make deep cuts in the commissions of service providers selling its Office 365, Exchange Online, and the company's other cloud services. The cuts, which were instituted to the Online Services Advisor Incentive program in late January, ranged from 15 to 50 percent, according to reports. Also in January, Microsoft joined forces with web hosting giant GoDaddy, which as a result is selling Office 365 to the small business community - yet another move many service providers selling these products view as an assault on their livelihoods.

Roundup

Session Border Controller Roundup
SBCs have long been a staple in carrier networks to enable secure carrier-to-carrier interconnectivity, and now many enterprises are using session border controllers as well. According to an Infonetics Research report issues in March, the E-SBC market grew a whopping 42 percent last year, to $255 million.

Edit Series

What Do Aviation and Telephony Have in Common? Power Failure is Not an Option
Communication is essential to the success of any business, and customers need support when they want it. Should a businesses' phone system go down and a customer be greeted with radio silence during a crisis, that customer might ultimately decide to take his or her business elsewhere. With this in mind, it is imperative that businesses do all they can to ensure their phone systems remain online at all times.

Special Focus

SDN Excellence Awards
Software-defined networking is considered to be one of the most important, and potentially disruptive, developments in networking since the rise of the Internet. To date, networks and connectivity have come first, and applications have followed. SDN turns this model on its head, approaching networking from an apps-first standpoint.

Product Review of the SmartBox by PanTerra Networks
PanTerra Networks is probably the most innovative unified communications and file sharing cloud-based service provider you've never heard of, until now. TMC Labs was somewhat familiar with PanTerra Networks, but even we were surprised by the sheer number of UC and file sharing features built into its WorldSmart product suite when we took it for a test drive. WorldSmart's unified cloud services deliver just about every form of file sharing, communications and collaboration - voice, video call, IM, e-mail, desktop sharing and fax. The WorldSmart suite includes two major components, CloudUC and the just launched (January 2014) SmartBox, which PanTerra calls, "the world's first file sharing service that communicates."