VoIP News & Information

eBay’s Skype VOIP telephony business adds some improvements to the second beta of Skype 4.0 for Windows, including the return of the compact screen and group contact capabilities. Reintroducing features from Skype 3.8 seems retro, but Skype needed to make the moves to keep its over 300 million users happy. Such improvements could lead new VOIP and telephony customers looking for free messaging and collaboration apps to Skype in a time of financial distress.

Skype on Oct. 1 will launch the second Skype 4.0 beta for Windows with improvements to the way users view and access their VOIP conversations, as well as better instant messaging alerts. Skype 4.0 Beta 2 will be downloadable here beginning Oct. 1.

Nokia Nseries is committed VoIP services as part of its offering. That is why we have included SIP stack and improved the developer VoIP offering in S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 by enhancing the VoIP APIs to improve the call quality, as an example.

A Nokia VoIP client is not included with the Nokia N78 and the Nokia N96 and VoIP solutions based on this particular client such as Gizmo will not work. However, Forum Nokia will cooperate with third-party developers to support them in porting their applications from S60 3.0/3.1 releases to S60 3.2. One example is Fring, whose popular application will be offered via Nokia’s Download! service for the Nokia N96.

more info here

So VoIP is pretty mainstream now with all the major cable carriers offering a voice over IP service.  Here are a number of reasons why people are loving VoIP!

1.  Low Cost! -   VoIP tends to be 15-35% less expensive then traditional telephone service plans especially with nation wide and international calling plans.

2.  Added Features - With most VoIP plans you get many more added services for no additional cost such as voicemail, three way calling, conference calling, call waiting and video conferencing.

3.  Online Billing - Almost all VoIP providers provide online billing and account management

4.  Online Voicemail - The ability to check you voicemail for free online from anywhere is super convenient.

5.   Complete Portability - Bring your usb phone with you where ever you go and make calls from any Internet connection.

I am officially online in the sky. Boy, does it feel good. As soon as I got the go ahead from the American Airlines’ flight attendants with the “use of electronic devices are now permitted” announcement, I fired up my Lenovo x200.

Below are updates from my experience of using Aircell’s Gogo in-flight Wi-Fi service on an American Airlines from San Fransisco to New York’s JFK. The newest updates are on bottom and are listed in EST time. The video is at the very bottom.

7:15 p.m: Vista’s Network Center is telling me that there are “available networks.” Listed is a network with SSID  “gogoinflight.” I am connected to the network in less than 30 seconds. I have a full signal!

read the whole encouter here at laptop magazine

To learn more about voip check out the products on our main voip page

CallCopy, Inc., a leading provider of call recording and quality monitoring software, today announced the availability of CallCopy Essential, the company’s new VoIP call recording solution that will help small businesses to quickly and easily capture and archive inbound and outbound calls. CallCopy Essential was developed specifically for the small office to help companies improve customer service, increase productivity and meet compliance regulations.

Companies that worried about loading down their WLANs with the overhead of voice over Wi-Fi are seeing the equation change as 802.11n enters the mainstream. The attraction of Vo-Fi is clear: By integrating voice over IP, cellular telephony, and Wi-Fi, a new age of mobile voice and data services becomes reality. So what’s the holdup?

According to our most recent InformationWeek Analytics reader poll on voice-over-Wi-Fi adoption, the No. 1 perceived barrier to deployment is a concern that reliability will not measure up to a traditional wired phone system. IT realizes that users will accept some network downtime and e-mail unavailability as normal, but let the phones go down and there’s panic in the lunchroom. Also high on the list of worries are security, high systems cost, and a foggy ROI picture that is unlikely to clear until the legacy TDM PBX reaches the end of its life.

Still, it’s not as if the status quo is any better. VoIP systems work well on wired networks, where quality of service can be provisioned with relative ease, but they also tie users to their desks. Cellular carriers do a much better job of enabling mobility, but the cost is high, data capacity is limited, and service availability inside buildings is often problematic.

more information here

Intel’s remote wake-up chip could finally turn PCs into phones.

One of the biggest drawbacks of current PC-based Internet phone services like Skype, which allow people to make phone calls from their computers over the Internet for free or for reduced fees, is that you can’t receive calls when the computer is turned off. But that is changing with a new chipset introduced by Intel Thursday that allows computers to wake from “sleep” to accept calls and do other tasks like accept downloaded content.

Intel has teamed up with JaJah, a California-based voice over IP start-up, to allow JaJah users to receive calls on their PCs when their computers are in “sleep mode.”

Full story here

Global IP Solutions is rolling out an SDK for developers to create Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications for the iPhone.  Don’t ditch your AT&T talk plan just yet as VoIP only works over Wi-Fi and not the 3G or Edge network.

But one thing you won’t be able to use VoIP for on the iPhone is talk, thanks to Apple’s exclusive agreement with AT&T. VoiceEngine mobile will only be available at Wi-Fi hotspots.

VoIP users have been finding ways around Apple’s restrictions for some time. The Germany company, Shape, released a Web-based solution for Skype users last year, and jailbroken iPhone’s can reportedly use mobile clients like Fring.

But until now VoIP has been restricted to stand alone uses. It will be interesting to see how far game developers take the VoIP capabilities. I don’t think we will see an iPhone Live environment for gamers any time soon, but with a such a wide range of capability the iPhone might compete with Nintendo DS or Sony’s PSP.

Read more about it here.

Eight of Westwood College’s Cisco Networking Academy students will reportedly help install and support the vast communications infrastructure for the Democratic National Convention that takes place later this month. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, Westwood College is a private for-profit provider of post-secondary educational services.

By working alongside Cisco engineers, Westwood students will install more than 700 VoIP telephones, a wireless service canopy and the routers and switches. The equipment is expected to transform Denver’s Pepsi Center into a global hub for collaboration and communication, company officials say.
These students are from Westwood College–Denver North’s Computer Network Management’s three-year bachelor degree program. The chosen eight will work before, during and after the convention to install Cisco solutions, conduct monitoring of those solutions, and staff the I.T. help desk, according to the company. Westwood College students will lend support to the Cisco engineers from July 28 to Aug. 31.
The installation will enable political reporters and bloggers to post the latest news from the convention floor to the Internet in real time. The students will also help provide the communications backbone for thousands of conventioneers, delegates and political operatives.

Clay Chandler, national program adviser for the Cisco Networking Academy, Westwood College sees this as a-once-in-a-lifetime learning opportunity for their Computer Network Management students. Even though most people take for granted that the telephone, Internet access and secure data networks are always available, the technologies behind those tools are extraordinarily complex. Chandler said the fact that Westwood students were selected by Cisco after a rigorous selection process demonstrates how capable their students are.

Mags Doty, DNC project manager, Cisco said that providing DNC participants with a fast, reliable and secure network is a great example of the kinds of connections that they try to facilitate in the Networking Academy program, according to the company.

According to Doty, by applying the lessons learned in the classroom to relevant, real world experience and collaboration, Westwood and Cisco are helping to educate the next generation of networking talent.
Cisco enables people to make powerful connections. Cisco was in news yesterday when Deviscape Software announced that their newly releasedWiFi technology features support for Cisco Compatible Extensions, version 5. Deviscape Software said that this certification indicates a high level of device security and interoperability with the Cisco Unified Wireless Network for business mobility applications.

more info here

I will, for one, be waiting inline for a wideband voip application to hit itunes - below is an excerpt of the story.

SPIRIT DSP, the world’s leading provider of voice and video software engines, announced today that its innovative award-winning TeamSpirit(R) 3.0 Voice Engine Mobile enables high quality wideband VoIP applications on Apple’s iPhone 3G.

VoIP has already significantly reduced the costs associated with traditional telephony. Now the voice quality becomes a major differentiator both for end-users and as a consequence for service providers. This offers VoIP applications developers a strong incentive to go wideband and iPhone 3G enhanced data transfer capabilities lay a solid foundation for the wideband VoIP quality.

TeamSpirit Voice Engine Mobile gives iPhone 3G applications developers an exciting possibility to create wideband VoIP applications and offers iPhone users the highest multimedia and social networking experience.

SPIRIT is the only vendor who has voice and video engines that span all communication devices and all market segments (PC, mobile, IPTV/set-top) and has a great experience in delivering high quality, real-time voice and video on mobile devices over 3G and IP networks.