Business VoIP’s New IT Factor

Alteva, Others Join Forces to Peer, Advertise Quality Service

By Paula Bernier

Alteva and about a dozen of its peers have banded together to ensure and advertise under a single name their high quality of service.

The group is also working to create “a peering environment that expands the capabilities of HD voice and video calls,” Alteva CEO Bill Bumbernick

recently told INTERNET TELEPHONY. And it sounds as if the effort also may involve leveraging the combined members’ size to get better deals for SIP peering with companies not in the group.

Bumbernick declined to publicly disclose the names of the other member companies as this issue was going to press in late September, but said that an announcement about the group is planned for this fall, likely following the BroadSoft (News - Alert) Connections 2009 event Oct. 25 to 28 in Scottsdale, Ariz. He explained that many of the group’s original members got to know one another through such BroadSoft events, but adds that the group isn’t limited to BroadSoft users.

“We believe that a rising tide raises all boats. So the more we help each other, [the more we] push the industry forward,” he said.

“By bringing quality companies together with quality services we can debunk some of the fly-by-night operations that bring up crappy services and then damage the reputation of the industry,” he said. “It’s about bettering the industry.”

As for the peering aspect of the group’s work, Bumbernick said there are companies out there that offer SIP peering services to carriers, but when you get into peering for profit, you create a relationship that has a lot of restrictions around it. But when peers have a common goal, he added, “it’s very open.” IT

FMC by the Book

PosTrack Brings Converged Services to Higher Education

By Paula Bernier

PosTrack is an interesting study in hosted telephony.

The company’s current telephone effort evolved from its point-of-sale division, which sells solutions to companies in the food service sector. Sodexo, the owner of Marriott, is its biggest customer. In addition to hospitality, Sodexo caters to cafeterias at institutions of higher education.

While serving up its solutions on college campuses, PosTrack got an education on the telecommunications habits of students. It became clear, says Chad Schumacher, director of marketing at PosTrack, that students were shifting to mobile and away from wireline telecommunications services. So PosTrack saw an opportunity to deliver a hosted telephony system with fix/mobile communications capability, he says.

Today PosTrak offers a solution for which each line of service can be assigned up to five devices. That can include an IP on a user’s desktop or within a home, an ATA or a mobile handset, says Schumacher.

Within the PosTrack network is a firewall management gateway that allows a SIP proxy server to manage endpoints for things like moves, adds and changes. The solution also ensures high-quality voice, and allows mobile devices to move seamlessly between wireless and wireline networks.

But while PosTrack’s telecom division attends to the higher education vertical, the company is focused on the large enterprise market, including large franchises and big hospitals.

PosTrack uses the Siemens (News - Alert) OpenScape Voice application as its centralized software-based VoIP solution, forming the basis of three services offered to corporate enterprises. PosTrack Trunking provides SIP trunking directly to customers’ legacy PBX systems. The PosTrack Desktop service extends SIP service to the desktop phone, delivering the enhanced features and unified messaging services enabled by the OpenScape Voice application, all at a fixed cost. PosTrack Mobile leverages the HiPath MobileConnect solution to provide FMC.

PosTrack recently began rolling out the FMC service to 6,000 students and faculty at a large university, equipping the users with dual-mode phones.

“We’re currently certified for FMC on the Nokia Symbian operating system,” says Schumacher.

PosTrack expects to certify for FMC on the iPhone (News - Alert) short order. Certifying on the BlackBerry is its next assignment. IT