Tag Archive
Fonality Serves up 1 Billion Cloud VoIP Calls?
Today, Fonality announced it has served up its 1 billionth cloud call on their hosted VoIP platform called UNBOUND. UNBOUND is Fonality’s fully hosted cloud phone system and VoIP service solution and starts at $24.99/mo. Of course, Fonality also offers fully premise-based IP-PBX solutions as well. I like Fonality and the Fonality team, including Chris... »
Avaya Reveals Roadmap for Nortel Enterprise Assets at ITEXPO
Rich Tehrani and I are both excited to hear the future roadmap Avaya has in store for Nortel’s enterprise assets that Avaya recently acquired. Will Avaya slowly phase out these Nortel enterprise products, continue the product line with the Avaya brand, integrate best-of-breed technologies from Avaya and Nortel and offer new SMB products? The... »
Halloween in VoIP Land
Check out Fonality’s “corporate culture” in this pic below. Apparently, things must be financially good in Fonality-land, since they’re pretty relaxed enough that the co-founders (Chris and Samy) wore these outfits to the office for Halloween. Fonality co-founders Chris Lyman (Pink Ape) and Samy Kamchar (Bruno) While we’re on the topic of... »
IBM & Digium Join Forces on Asterisk for Smart Cube
In a fascinating deal, IBM and Digium announced today that they are teaming up to offer Asterisk for Smart Cube, a customized version of Asterisk Business Edition. IBM’s Smart Cube is very similar to Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS), a pre-packaged bundle of various IT & business applications – except in this case Smart... »
10 Things IT Should Be Doing Today to Get More Resources
Information technology is critical to the success of any business. It’s the heart and soul of most organizations. Ok, maybe I’m a bit biased since I’m in IT and maybe it’s not the “heart and soul” of the company. But it certainly is the “engine” that helps the company going. Without good IT staff... »
Avaya Buys Nortel
Avaya has agreed to purchase Nortel’s enterprise business for $900 million, which is much larger than the $475 million ’stalk horse’ bid put out last month by Avaya. As part of the deal, Nortel will sell the assets of the Enterprise Solutions Business, and shares of Nortel Government Solutions and DiamondWare to Avaya. Avaya... »
Using monit Tool to Monitor Asterisk
Your IP-PBX is one of the most critical pieces of corporate infrastructure. It cannot afford any downtime, which is why the fives 9’s (99.999%) of reliability was coined. While Asterisk is a pretty stable open source IP-PBX platform, it it still in its infancy, so it hasn’t had the same time that the... »
AsteriskNOW 1.5.0 Released
AsteriskNOW 1.5.0, which launched as a beta in October 2008, is now available for download at http://www.asterisknow.org/downloads. Of course, existing AsteriskNOW users can simply run “yum update” to update to the latest release. I love ‘yum’ for Linux systems – it’s like Windows Update on steroids, but without the Internet Explorer GUI requirement. According... »
44,000 deployments is pretty impressive
Word out of Fonality today is that their for-profit VoIP phone system offerings have been deployed 44,000 times. That’s pretty impressive. Especially since Fonality has only been in business since 2003. And the first year (I believe) was spent as a residential VoIP service provider. Further proof (if you needed more) that open source and open source... »
Google Voice Meet Asterisk
Nerd Vittles has another cool Asterisk recipe that combines Google Voice, voicemail transcription (via Google Voice), free calling, and of course Asterisk. Nerd does some packet sniffing and determines that Google Voice, powered by Grandcentral, is using SIP. What’s most interesting is that Nerd determine that your SIP connection and your Google Voice phone... »
MFC/R2 support added to Asterisk 1.6.2
Asterisk has just added ‘official’ MFC/R2 support for chan_dahdi. Here’s the commit. The modifications to chan_dahdi, and the supporting library, LibOpenR2, were both written by Moises Silva. According to the commit: Many users are using this code, or a variant of it, in Asterisk 1.2, 1.4 and 1.6 in Brazil, México and Argentina. An unknown... »
44,000 deployments is pretty impressive
Word out of Fonality today is that their for-profit voip phone system offerings have been deployed 44,000 times. That’s pretty impressive. Especially since Fonality has only been in business since 2003. And the first year (I believe) was spent as a residential VoIP service provider. Further proof (if you needed more) that open source and open source... »
SpinVox Transcribes Skype Voicemail & VoiceScribe does the same for Asterisk
Skype users can now have their voicemails converted into text via SpinVox. Today, SpinVox announced that your Skype voicemails transcribed and sent to you via SMS for €0.20/£0.17/25 cents plus the cost of the SMS. SimulScribe, now PhoneTag, is a similar service, that Rich Tehrani uses regularly. GotVoice is yet another... »
PIKA WARP Appliance Adds BRI Support
PIKA Technologies announced today the release of a BRI expansion module for the PIKA WARP Appliance. The PIKA WARP Appliance is a very flexible hardware telecom appliance that can run various flavors of Asterisk, including native Asterisk, Schmooze, trixbox CE, and others. They even support FreePBX, the popular front-end GUI for Asterisk. They support... »
EZCallerID.com Hosted CNAM for Enhanced Caller-ID on any IP-PBX Launches
EZ Call, Inc. today announced the launch of EZCallerID.com, a new service that provides enhanced Caller ID, also known as CNAM, for VoIP calls. The hosted CNAM service gives you not just the phone number, but the name of the person calling. Most SIP trunking providers do not provide the caller’s name with Caller ID... »
Want to Make Some Sick Money in VoIP?
Garrett Smith over at VoIP Supply has an interesting post titled ‘Sick of not making money on VoIP hardware?’ He’s seeing the glass half empty. I see it half-full, which is why my article is titled ‘Want to Make Some Sick Money in VoIP?’ Garrett writes: Remember the good ‘ole days? When you actually... »
Gizmo5 builds (yet another) bridge to Skype
The company behind SIPphone has deployed a way to gateway between its service and Skype. The OpenSky service is a neat trick, but not novel by any stretch of the imagination. OpenSky offers free web-based or Gizmo5 client calls up to five minutes. Longer calls are going to require you to buy some annual credits, starting... »
ContactQ Enhances Asterisk’s Call Center Functionality
ContactQ is a new call center application server created by Braxtel Communications designed to run on Asterisk that brings advanced call center functionality to the Asterisk platform. Their aim is to handle any sort of contact method and put it into their advanced multi-media queue. For instance, they plan on queuing video calls, text... »
U.S. Social Security Blows $300 Million on Nortel VoIP system
According to CNN: Nortel Government Solutions, a U.S. company wholly owned by Nortel completed the core network for the massive new U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) VoIP system within 180 days of initial purchase orders, an aggressive requirement of the 10-year, US $300 million Telephone Systems Replacement Project (TSRP) award. Now I’m all for Social Security... »
Switchvox SMB 4.0 launches at ITEXPO
I just got into Miami for ITEXPO headed to the convention center around 12pm and I’ve already learned some exciting news launching at the show. Digium has released Switchvox SMB 4.0 with some new Unified Communications features. Matthew Nickasch, a writer for Considering Convergence on NetworkWorld.com covers the news extensively in his ITExpo East... »
Avaya acquires Nortel rumors
With today’s news of Nortel’s potential bankruptcy flying, my fellow TMC team members have been trading emails back-and-forth about Nortel’s future. (See also Rich’s overview). Brendan Read had an interesting take that I thought I’d share: This could cause a political firestorm in Canada: Nortel being a Canadian company, Avaya being American, expected... »
56 Reasons to Attend Digium Asterisk World in Miami
Bill Miller over at Digium today blogged 5 reasons why you should attend Digium Asterisk World in Miami taking place just a few short weeks away from February 2nd-4th, which is co-located with TMC’s Internet Telephony Conference & Expo (ITEXPO). Left-to-right clockwise: Steve Sokol, John Todd, Russell Bryant, Dave Rodriguez (TMC), Greg... »
Broadsoft Acquires Rival Sylantro
In what could portend several acquisitions in the VoIP space, Broadsoft has acquired rival competitor Sylantro Systems, both makers of softswitches and both heavily involved in carrier infrastructure, IMS, and converged services. TMCnet’s Greg Galitzine has the full details on the acquisition. With the global slowing economy, even the VoIP industry which has had exponential... »
trixbox CE vs. Asterisk Downloads
As you may have read, Digium announced a sharp rise in Asterisk downloads for 2008 registering in a whopping 1.5 million downloads for 2008. That got me thinking just how does Asterisk & AsteriskNOW compare with Fonality’s trixbox CE distro? Arguably trixbox CE is the either the #1 or the #2 downloaded Asterisk-based distribution.... »
Toktumi Device Offered On Web By Dell
Toktumi recently announced a partnership with Dell to distribute its small business VoIP service through a co-branded site on Dell.com (www.dell.com/voip), which also features Fonality, Nortel, and Bandwidth.com. Related Topics: 2008, agent, Asterisk, AT&T, Avaya, bandwidth, business, call, calling, Canada, Channel, Comcast, Dell, Fonality, free, FreePBX, Google, home, IP PBX, LEC, Microsoft, Nortel,... »
When Phone Systems Become UC Systems
Today, systems from the likes of Digium and trixbox are no longer phone systems, they are really unified communications systems that offer a “phone system” as one of the many features of their product. Related Topics: 2008, call, Digium, LEC, Microsoft, phone, software, telecom, Trixbox, unified communications, VoIP »
Nortel Makes Additional Job Cuts
The Toronto networking equipment giant said Monday it would trim 1,300 jobs on top 1,200 cuts previously announced. Related Topics: 2008, agent, Asterisk, Avaya, call, Channel, Digium, equipment, Fonality, free, home, Internet, IP PBX, LEC, Microsoft, networking, Nortel, PBX, PNG, server, SIP, SIP Trunk, SIP Trunking, telecom, Trixbox, trunk, trunking, VoIP »
Aastra 57i and 57i CT Review
The Aastra 57i is one of my favorite VoIP phones. The 57i and its sister, the 57i CT (cordless telephone adjunct), offers some unique features and is undoubtedly one of the most flexible IP phones you will find. The 57i and 57i CT sport a large 144 x 128 pixel graphical backlit... »
Fonality Beats Avaya and Boasts 3,000 Call Centers
Fonality’s CEO Chris Lyman spoke with me earlier today to talk about the strong inroads Fonality has been making in the call center market. Chris said, “Fonality has become a big player in what I like to call the micro call center market. We launched our call center product in 2005 and we... »