Ellen Muraskin

I attended my fifth or sixth SpeechTEK expo in New York on Monday, this time early enough to catch the 8:30 a.m. keynote. Steve Mills, senior vice president of the IBM Software Group, announced IBMs intention to foster the “speech development ecosystem” by offering up IBMs RDCs (reusable dialog components) as open source through the […]

The VOIP deployment of the Borough of Manhattan Community College was planned to start as a 50-phone trial, thrown as an accessory project into a large network conversion. When Sept. 11 took out the neighborhoods Verizon central office, that pilot turned into the colleges emergency phone system. Today, the trial IP PBX and phones have […]

The United Kingdom telecommunications industry regulator on Tuesday unveiled its plans for Internet telephony, which include setting aside a phone area code specifically for VOIP calls. In a prepared statement, Stephen Carter, U.K. Office of Communications chief executive sounded very much like a U.S. Federal Communications Commision administrator by saying that since broadband services are […]

Homestead, Fla., made news on Aug. 24, 1992, as the community hardest hit by Hurricane Andrew. Just south of Miami, its residents certainly hope to stay out of the spotlight this week, as Frances hits. Some IP infrastructure players, however, would like to direct our attention precisely there, because this city of 32,000 directed a […]

After suffering a 10 percent drop in revenue over the past quarter, the global enterprise router market is pinning its hopes on added VOIP and security features to shore up selling prices per unit, according to a report from Boston-based Infonetics Research Inc. Report author Jeff Wilson, who pointed to Cisco Systems Inc. and Vanguard […]

Worldwide spending on enterprise IP PBXes should grow by 45 percent over the next year, according to an upbeat report released Monday by Boston-based Infonetics Research. Second-quarter growth in the IP PBX market came to 3 percent and is expected to hit double digits for the year, according to the report from Infonetics Research Inc. […]

Lets review: Why is IP telephony relatively indifferent to physical location? Because the IP telephony server, whether an in-house IP PBX or the softswitch of your VOIP service provider, maps your public “phone” number to the IP address you log in with, every time you log on, or every time you activate the phone that […]

Vonage Holding Corp., the VOIP service provider with an early lead in subscriber lines at 235,000, announced an agreement Tuesday to sell its voice-over-net service bundled with adapter-equipped routers from Linksys and Netgear Inc., the two market leaders in home and home-office networking. Linksys-Vonage cobranded routers and add-on VOIP adapters will be sold immediately in […]

A new Yankee Group report predicts that U.S. carriers will increasingly promote MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) VPN (virtual private network) services in their fight to recover revenue lost in enterprise voice. The implications for VOIP (voice over IP) here are positive: Multinational corporations in particular will see uptake in VOIP as the carriers, or the […]

When VOIP vendors and service providers land contracts with big-name enterprises, their marketing departments push hard to get customer clearance to announce the win. Clearance obtained, they kick their keyboards into high gear, issuing news releases. When those same contracts suffer untimely termination, it takes someone with fine hearing and an unusually long industry memory […]

A new kind of agreement between a VOIP gateway maker and a service provider aims to take time and capital expenditure out of VOIP migration for businesses. Under a global supply arrangement announced Tuesday, VegaStream takes on the role of configuring, provisioning and shipping a ready-to-install gateway to enterprise customers of Primus. VegaStream Inc. and […]

Lingo, the voice-over-IP service launched earlier this year by Primus Telecommunications Inc., is taking the choose-your-own-area-code concept of Internet-based calling international. Starting Monday, Lingo subscribers can choose telephone numbers from 19 cities including London, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Rome, Guatemala City, and Sydney, Australia, enabling friends and associates in those cities to call them for […]