Ellen Muraskin

Atlanta-based BellSouth, one of the United States four remaining regional Bell operating companies, has added more weight to its VOIP portfolio this week with announced trials of a business-class IP Centrex offering. The trials will begin in Columbia, S.C., and Miami, with more Southeast rollouts later this year, the company said. BellSouth Corp. a month […]

AT&T will soon begin trials of a global voice-over-IP service aimed at multinational corporations that want to configure worldwide, single-PBX-like dialing. The service, with an expected launch next year, should also appeal for its ability to link up remote or roaming workers with broadband connectivity and IP phone or softphone. It follows on the heels […]

Add Atlanta-based Cox Communications—the third biggest U.S. cable carrier, with 6.4 million basic cable subscribers—to the list of carriers ramping up VOIP offerings. The difference here is that the IP voice expansion is a way to grow its total voice market, which is presently overwhelmingly circuit-based. Cox is planning to roll out VOIP services in […]

Primus Telecommunications Inc. on Monday launched a VOIP service that sets a new low-price mark for consumer IP telephony offerings. The all-you-can-talk service, called Lingo, costs $19.99 per month and extends to Canada and Western Europe. Primus, of McLean, Va., is also including a free three-month trial as part of the promotion. The new service […]

Cellular phone industry pioneer Craig McCaw announced this week that he and other telecom veterans are launching a new fixed wireless broadband venture called Clearwire that will offer voice-over-IP services as well as data access. Clearwire will begin rolling out service in Jacksonville, Fla., and St. Cloud, Minn., this summer. The company will extend broadband […]

I met Mitel Networks officials at a West Side hotel in New York last year to see demonstrations of the companys new 3300 Integrated Communications Platform (ICP), Your Assistant desktop application, collaboration software and IP phone sets. At the time, the demos were impressive but kind of disjointed, with each new aspect at its own […]

AltiGen Communications, an early and dominant name in PC-based PBX alternatives, has announced version 5 of AltiWare, the underlying software that runs its AltiServ IP PBX. Fremont, Calif.-based AltiGen Communications Inc. caught onto the IP wave about four years ago, fitting its PC PBX with a trunk-facing voice gateway card. It has also climbed up […]

Four years into its IP telecom offering, Equant, an IP VPN data networking subsidiary of France Telecom, is lowering its off-net international calling rates and expanding the range of IP PBXs with which it can integrate. Customer sites with traditional, circuit-switched PBXs can join Paris-based Equants IP network and pipe voice through supplied Cisco voice-enabled […]

One of the simplest, clearest cases for VOIP Ive ever heard was made in the retail environment and had to do with distributing the customer-service workload among physically separated personnel. Its a case study Ive written up many times, featuring many different vendors. It goes like this: A chain of stores/restaurants/beauty salons is spread across […]

Lucent Technologies has agreed to acquire Telica, which makes the PLUS line of high-capacity voice-over-IP (VOIP) media gateways, signaling gateways and softswitches, aka media gateway controllers. Telica Inc.s line in some ways complements, and in other ways overlaps, Lucents own Accelerate portfolio for large-scale, carrier VOIP networks. To enterprise IT and telecom managers, Lucent Technologies […]

Sales of IP PBXs have risen 10 percent over last quarter, according to a quarterly study compiled by Infonetics Research. Worldwide revenue in this category totaled slightly more than $87 million in the first quarter of 2004. The San Jose, Calif., market research firm expects this figure to top $899 million by 2007. Worldwide IP […]

Tandberg ASA, an Oslo, Norway-based maker of videoconferencing endpoints and conference bridges, announced this week that it is acquiring Ridgeway Systems & Software, based in Reading, England, for $16 million. Ridgeway Systems & Software Ltd., which had offices in West Long Branch, N.J., and Austin, Texas, before waves of downsizing in 2003, sells servers and […]