PBXes Now Supporting HDVoice
A post over at the VoIP Tech Chat forum at DSL Reports points out that PBXes, a service of the German company I-P-Tel, has recently added support for HDVoice in the form of G.722. Apparently this is just a trial…
iNum Gaining Ground With Traditional Carriers
Voxbone’s iNum service this week announced that Verizon, British Telecom and Belgacom are now supporting their +883, the country code for “planet earth.”
From the companies press release:
“Gaining recognition of iNum from traditional, non-VoIP carriers is critical to iNum’s long-term success and, more broadly, is a major industry milestone, signaling a pivotal change in the thinking of the world’s national carriers,” said Rod Ullens, CEO of Voxbone. “With short- or long-term IP conversion plans of their own, most incumbent operators are no longer fighting but rather embracing Internet-based communication services.”
You can read the entire press release here.
I would hope that if Verizon gets in the game that other North American carriers will eventually do likewise.
Evolving The Mobile Data Billing Model
Earlier this week AT&T has its quarterly earnings call. Normally I would not give it any notice at all. It’d just be another bunch of noise in my Google Reader in-box. This week they did something that simply jumped out at me; they called for an evolution of the current billing model for mobile data plans. Oddly enough…I agree…sort of.
Of course, their perspective on this is not quite the same as my own. AT&T want to be rid of the $60/mo for all-you-can-eat billing model and charge based upon actual usage, perhaps in some sort of tiered fashion.
Literally everyone knows that the current billing model is badly broken. Their flat rate “unlimited” plans are not really unlimited at all. My Sprint 3G service was pretty plain about it being capped at 5 GB/month. Beyond that I’d guess that it gets costly. Moreover they claim performance levels that almost no-one ever achieves in practice.
Amazon Responds About SIP Attacks From EC2
On April 18th Amazon finally responded publicly with respect to the SIP attacks recently suffered from hosts within their EC2 service. Their response comes in the form of an informational security bulletin posted to their AWS Security Center.
There have been some recent discussions about SIP brute force attacks originating from Amazon EC2. We can confirm that several users reported SIP brute force attacks originating from a small number of Amazon EC2 instances about a week ago. It appears these attacks were designed to exploit security vulnerabilities in the SIP protocol. There is nothing specific about this attack that requires Amazon EC2. It was a brute force attack that could be launched from any computer on any network.
Video Conferencing & Volcanic Ash
The volcanic eruption in Iceland, and its associated ash cloud, has certainly been a major topic of discussion this past week. My brother and his wife were caught in France on vacation. Their two week skiing vacation has become three weeks, quite unexpectedly.
Further, while we were focused on the NAB convention in Las Vegas three of my UK-based associates ended up extending their stay in the US by over a week, unable to get flights home. I suspect that I’m not the only one wishing that we had pushed forward with our plans to install room type video conference systems in Cambridge and Burbank. Those systems would certainly have been very handy this week.
Gigaset’s New DX600A Small Business Phone
Earlier this month Gigaset launched the DX600A, a new model of desk phone targeting the small business and home office. In North America this went largely unnoticed as the DX600A is currently only available in Europe, and specifically in an ISDN capable model.
Since ISDN lines are extremely uncommon in North America the DX600A in its present form doesn’t apply to that market. However, I’m told that there’s a chance that a SIP capable version of the device could be introduced in the US if there are signs of demand. On that basis I think that the DX600A is worth a closer look.