Ellen Muraskin

I saw some high-end, feature-rich, browser-directable SIP phones at Supercomm last week, those exploiting the favored Session Initiation Protocol for VOIP. They all made use of presence awareness, and integrated with IM, conferencing, and other applications. Ill get around to describing them, seen at Siemens Information and Communication Networks Inc.s and Alcatels exhibits. First, though, […]

Vonage Holdings Corp., the much-publicized consumer VOIP service provider, has won another, temporary round in its fight to avoid telecom regulation by the states. On Wednesday, the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, overturned the New York Public Service Commissions determination regulating Vonage. Magistrate Judge Douglas Eaton will consider the merits of a […]

A lot of IP telephonys productivity-enhancing applications face an uphill adoption battle. They must wean users away from a lifetime habit of using handheld receivers and then drag them, kicking and screaming, over to their PC screens. Not so for the application prototype I saw demonstrated at last weeks Supercomm conference by Fred Spulecki, director […]

After spending four days among the true believers of IP telephony—virtually every vendor who spoke at Supercomm—I can envision a world in which telephone service over dial-up lines becomes as clear a sign of technical backwardness as dial-up Internet connectivity is today. Voice over broadband data networks could become that pervasive. Market research says IP […]

CHICAGO—Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell gave VOIP service providers more reason to relax Tuesday at Supercomm 2004 here. In an on-stage interview in McCormick Places grand ballroom with Matthew Flanagan, president of the Telecom Industry Association, Powell reiterated his well-known aversion to regulating developing telecom technologies like voice over IP, while acknowledging the federal […]

Push-to-talk technology is a prime area for expansion of the Session Initiation Protocol in 2004, one of its authors said Tuesday at the SIP Summit. The summit, a conference-within-a-conference produced by Jeff Pulver of Vonage fame, kicked off Tuesday at Supercomm in Chicagos McCormick Center. Frequent industry speaker Jonathan Rosenberg, who coauthored the text-based VOIP […]

CHICAGO—Supercomm, the four-day annual telecom show, opened here Monday with a day of conferences and workshops that reflected the industrys long-heralded embrace of voice over IP. The event, which attracts telecommunications carriers and vendors from all over the globe, has widened its scope this year to include more sessions of interest to the enterprise, including […]

In a report issued Thursday, telecommunications market research firm Insight Research found that VOIP phones in the enterprise will not outnumber the installed PBX base until 2009. The study also found that as of 2003, incumbent PBX vendors such as Nortel Networks Ltd. and Avaya Inc. are shipping more IP PBX phones than rivals Cisco […]

Some VOIP service providers are now getting big play out of the Web-based phone control they offer to subscribers. That control lets a user see call logs with a browser, click to dial from the logs or from speed-dial lists, set call-forwarding numbers on a whim, set up conference calls through drag-and-drop and even assign […]

Add Hitachi to the ranks of VOIP gateway manufacturers. The NT-4S from Tokyo-based Hitachi Communication Technologies Ltd. is a SIP (RFC3261) gateway with four CO-facing ports to packetize the voice traffic coming out of conventional PBX equipment. /zimages/3/28571.gifRead more here about companies touting VOIP gateways as a way to switch to IP telephony. The compact […]

IP networking company Level 3 Communications Inc. and 8×8 Inc. have announced an agreement to use Level 3s (3)VoIP Enhanced Local service to enhance 8x8s residential voice-over-IP offering in more than 50 U.S. markets. 8×8, an early name in IP voice and videophones, supplies subscribers with its own terminal packetizing adapter, through which regular analog […]

For six years at my old magazine, we proclaimed that VOIP was exploding—to 120,000, then 60,000, then finally 36,000 or so free-riding readers. VOIP carriers and the vendors who supplied them were crawling out of the woodwork. CLECs (competitive local exchange carriers) and BLECs (building local exchange carriers) were installing DSLAMs (DSL access modules) in […]