Research
You are currently browsing the articles from the VoIP Digest matching the category Research.
That's notable, considering that Vonage doesn't make their own equipment.
So what's the deal?
Vonage's service comes with literally dozens of equipment options, from routers and adapters to Vonage-branded portable devices. But as frequent posts to the non-Vonage-operated Vonage Forum tells us, sometimes these devices and set-ups don't play nice with the Vonage service, or each [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 7th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Vonage and General and Products and Research.
The VoIP Girl kicks off a rapidly morphing discussion about HD VoIP. "HD," as in High-Def."
"Is HD VOIP something that consumers should consider when choosing a VOIP service, or is it more marketing lingo to work through?," she writes. "As I understand it, HD, high definition, or wideband VOIP refers to voice sampling at 16 [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 6th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and trends and Research.
Yesterday at the Internet Telephony Conference & Expo in Fort Lauderdale, I was privileged to be on a panel entitled: Quo Vadis? An IMS Industry Round Table.
OK, basics first. In this meaning, IMS refers to IP Media Subsystem, a type of next-generation architecture for mobile communications providers and carriers that, as best defined by Wikipedia:
Want [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 26th, 2007 with no comments.
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I've stumbled on a Vonage Forum thread that explains how it is possible to configure your TiVo to display your Vonage voice mail messages.
Intrigued, I did some clicking around and found some code, which will display when you download and then Unzip the TiVonage file from the Martian Software website.
This app, which relies heavily [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on October 19th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Vonage and General and Research.
Fellow blogger PhoneBoy offers a detailed but quite comprehensible explanation of why the decidely improved NAT (Network Address Translation) capability of Internet calling proivder SightSpeed's SightSpeed 5.0 (shown above) is so noteworthy.
First, he defines NAT, which is a technology that lets hosts transparently talk to each other with mutually agreeable addresses. He correctly mentions [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on October 17th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Software and Security and Research.
In a private note to several his colleagues (including your truly) Dave Burstein of DSL Prime reports this morning he has found out that Verizon is about 12 to 18 months away from executing a plan to open the set-top box to all Internet video. This woud be done by means of Verizon FIOS, [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on September 27th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and trends and Research and Streaming media.
A newly published U.S. Patent and Trademark Office application describes a way for online poker players to "physically interact" with real, in-casino poker games. The process would involve sophisticated RFID technologies embedded in the casino poker cards, and a broadband connection powerful enough to be able to deliver the tactile sensations involved in touching these [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on September 18th, 2006 with no comments.
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At Fall VON in Boston, the SIP Forum took what I believe to be a big step in the advancement of the SIP protocol by releasing SIPconnect.SIPconnect, the Forum explains, stipulates detained instructions and architecture-related specs necessary for delivery of consistent quality-of-service and low cost SIP-based VoIP calls.The functionalities in the SIPconnect draft encompasses SIP [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on September 13th, 2006 with no comments.
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There's some sort of a super-secret Apple event scheduled for San Francisco on Tuesday September 12. Some of us think that a wireless, cell or even WiFi-enabled iPod (maybe a bit like that patent sketch I show you up there) will be one of the announcements.But according to a survey of 3,000 people by [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on September 5th, 2006 with no comments.
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When MySpace got knocked off line a little over a week ago due to heat-related power shortages, it pointed out what few in the Internet community have focused on.Not only is technology power. Technology uses power, and lots of it.VOIP-enabled broadband homes and offices where the PCs need to stay on 24/7. Power-hungry video server [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on July 30th, 2006 with no comments.
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I am not a technical expert on Asterisk, but being fully aware of its gathering momentum as an is a free software / open-source software implementation of a telephone private branch exchange (PBX), I decided to hang out with some Asterisk code jocks for the better of an afternoon. I was much looking [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on July 30th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Research and SIP and OSCON 2006.
Interesting set of findings from an Interop Labs' test of VoIP gear run on the Interop Las Vegas show's earlier this month.Network Address Translation, or NAT, for short, (as shown on th Cisco site, above) can break VoIP. NAT does this by its nature as a procedure that masks private IP addresses from public view. [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on May 17th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Research and SIP.
Now here's an idea that is needed, and may already be in the works.How about a bot that crawls YouTube videos for apparently unauthorized, copyright violations? The type of violations that given the ease of tv-to-PC digital transfer are easy to commit?Such as video clips of tv shows, such as "Lost?" Speaking of, that's a [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on May 17th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Regulatory and Research.
Infonetics Research is out with User Plans for VoIP, North America 2006, a new study that among other findings, quantifies why enteprises are deploying VoIP. In other words, the drivers.conducted in-depth interviews with 240 small, medium, and large organizations that use VoIP products and/or services now or will by 2007, as well as 450 shorter [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on May 10th, 2006 with no comments.
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Behold the futurists among us, for they have hope.They see a world where the IEEE 802.11n standard is ingrained in all portable communications devices, and allows "Warp Factor 5 Mr. Sulu" communications.Well, maybe not Warp Factor 5, but 540 MB a second- more than 100 times faster than 802.11b and 10 times faster than g. [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on May 3rd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and trends and Research and WiMAX and WiFi.
Earlier today on my BBHub BlackBerry blog, I broke an exclusive that BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion is working on technology that will automatically sense the background noise present when a caller is on the line, and automatically adjust the call volume to compensate. At the top of this post, [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on April 26th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on News and General and Products and Research and BlackBerry.
Stand-alone fax machines are so 1980s. And fax modems are so 1990s.VoIP is so now.But what happens when they meet, i.e., you want to send a stand-alone fax or a fax modem transmission over a VoIP line?QualityLogic is touting its new TSB-85 standard test suite, and has bundled the utility in its FaxExpert test product. [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on April 24th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and trends and Products and Research.
This isn't a Microsoft blog, or a Mac blog, but since some of the apps bloggers AirmanPika, alexoughton and grabberslasher describe here involve converging media applications on a Vista platform pushed to a Mac, thought you might be interested.In the Mac Dual Booting_Vista Installed thread AirmanPika has started on the OSx86 Project Forum site for [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on April 12th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Research and Case Studies.
I remember one transcontinental flight that I took back in 2004. We were at 35,000 feet, somewhere over Iowa, and we were approaching a fearsome thundercloud. So I am thinking maybe the captain is on the radio talking to Minneapolis or Chicago flight control, trying to figure a way around the big gray boomer [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on April 10th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Regulatory and trends and Security and Research and Images and Case Studies and BlackBerry.
At CTIA I attended a presentation on next-generation E911 for mobile VoIP.Two of the presenters were Tim Lorello, SVP, Chief Marketing Officer, TeleCommunication Systems, Inc., and William Clay, Vice President E-911 Product Development at Level 3 Communications.In one of Bill Clay's slides (shown at the top of this post), he stressed that a fully deployed [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on April 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Regulatory and trends and Research and CTIA.
You can find the darndest things on the Office and Engineering Technology section of the FCC website. Like, for example, communications and networking hardware that vendors have tested, and have submitted to the OET for approval.In many cases, the stuff that you'll find here has not been announced to the public. Because of that, and [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on March 30th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Products and Cisco and Research.
After years of fits and starts, most of the leading consumer electronics manufacturers have announced they will use a faster version of Bluetooth wireless technology to move video between devices in the homeThe technology will also govern how televisions, PCs and video recorders will be connected. Up until now, the feuding Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group) [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on March 28th, 2006 with no comments.
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Earlier this month at BlackHat Europe, a couple of French researchers (one person's "researcher" is another person's "hacker") released a white paper entitled "Silver Needle In The Skype."The 115-page PDF document lists Skype security and access difficulties, and how they might be fixed.There's quite a list. I will illustrate the top-line issues in this post. Here's [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on March 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and General and Security and Research.
Reuters reports that BellSouth is investigating Wi-MAX technology as an inexpensive (to them, that is) way to provide high-speed Web services in areas where its wired network has been damaged, degraded, or not yet built-up.Testing efforts are scheduled for various BellSouth labs in the coming months, with live testing likely in the fall. BellSouth vice-president for [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on March 20th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and BellSouth and Research and WiMAX and WiFi and SBC-AT&T.
We hear lots of praise of how Broadband over Power Line (BPL) technology holds promise as a route for signals into the home that can get around the cable-telecom duopoly. And how BPL can also be a conduit for broadband in rural areas that are too far from switching offices for DSL to work right, [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on March 20th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Regulatory and trends and Research.
Acoustic shock happens when loud or unannounced sounds travel through phone lines, and hit your ears.Your ears may not know what hit them. As a result, they can suffer the auditory version of a panic attack.We're talking some nasty stuff- ringing in the ears, inordinate sensitivity to sound, and difficulty in processing the details of [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and General and Softphones and Research.
There's a mythology out there, spread by the uninformed, that since 90 percent of broadband fiber is sitting in the ground and we getting exponentially better at sending massive amounts of bits through the air, that fiber's time has come and gone. Not so. As the demand for rich broadband and high-definition television is increasing- [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and trends and Products and Research.
Image is from the Mobile & Portable Radio Research Group at Virginia Tech. At an Internet telephony conference last month, I wound up talking to a guy about mobile devices."What would be your ultimate handset," I asked him.He said something to the effect of a device that could seamlessly switch call and transmission modes to the [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 21st, 2006 with no comments.
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Emmanuel Proulx is a SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) developer who has written an excellent tutorial on the signaling protocol that is widely used in VoIP to initiate communications sessions between callers and respondents.If you want to learn the basics of SIP but don't want to take a course or invest in a book full of [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 10th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Research and Tips.
Most every time that a corporation files its intent to publicly trade its stock- as Vonage did yesterday- the company has to include a "Risk Factors" section in its Securities and Exchange Commission filing.Think of "Risk Factors" as a type of disclaimer- not unlike the ones you see on those 60-second pharmaceutical ads where a [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Vonage and News and General and Research.
Leading mesh network vendor BelAir Networks has formed a technical advisory board consisting of cable system broadband Internet service providers. The goal is to involve these operators into BelAir's future mesh network development plan.Planning for mesh networks that would look similar to the mesh at the top of this post.Once a reality, mesh networks provided [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Providers and Research.
CableLabs, the research arm of the U.S. cable television industry, is preparing an updated standard that would enable its members to enhance their current VoIP offerings with video telephony, TV-based instant messaging, and integration of VoIP service with wireless.This would be done via the forthcoming PacketCable 2.0 communications standard,an upgrade of the PacketCable 1.5 standard [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on News and General and Providers and Research.
A report by the Yankee Group released on Tuesday, states that the business VoIP market will reach $3 Billion by 2010.
In the recent DecisionNote(sm), Business VoIP Services Poised for Dramatic Growth, Yankee Group defines the fragmented VoIP market in three divisions: VoIP over VPN, VoIP real-time QoS bandwidth and hosted VoIP. Large multinational companies leverage VoIP over VPN to eliminate long-distance toll charges for communications between sites. Verticals such as broadcasting and healthcare use VoIP real-time QoS bandwidth, which provides real-time voice, data and video applications and can carry on-net or off-net traffic. Hosted VoIP enables enterprises to save on capital expenditure on equipment and infrastructure upgrades, as well as on management contracts. Through 2010, Yankee Group predicts growth for these segments; the DecisionNote details the revenue breakdown for each.
The study states that the tremendous growth of the next five years will be the result fromt he growing consumer demand for IP Centrex (Hosted) business solutions and the popularity of toll-bypass or VoIP over VPN capabilities.
Given this study, one can predict that the VoIP business market will see the most dramtaic growth in the 5-15 “seat” market and in the large enterprise market.
Garrett Smith
Written by Garrett Smith on February 1st, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on VoIP and trends and Research.
If you do multi-participant audioconferencing - VoIP or not, you've surely run into this problem.Say you have eight people, each from one of your branch offices. The conference moderator throws out a question, and then four people talk at once. Or, you, the speaker, pause for 2 seconds mid-sentence to collect the rest of your [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 25th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and trends and Research and VOIP 2.0.
Fixed WiMAX had its big coming out party on Thursday at the Wireless Communications Association Technical and Business Symposium in San Jose.I wasn't physically there, but I did the next best thing. I monitored it for you.On Thursday the WiMAX Forum announced its first four fixed (say that fast five times) wireless broadband network [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 19th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and trends and Research and WiMAX.
This morning, I noticed a Vonage Forum thread entitled "311 Service In The City of Los Angeles.The thread's author, spdickey, writes that on a regular land line or cell phone placing a call to within city limits gets the "One Call to City Hall" service. From Vonage, I get a "311 is not available from [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 18th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Vonage and General and Regulatory and E911 and Research.
That's part of an E164.org configuration.I admit, what I just showed you there won't qualify as eye candy. But it is something you should care about. I would like to explain.Remember the old days when one phone company - the regional Bell or local company serving a given area, was all you needed for directory [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 16th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and trends and Research.