FerrumIT Blog

The FCC has been moving to treat broadband Internet the same as phone services and with those moves, the FBI’s wiretapping authority might be becoming more nebulous.

The agency is lobbying the communications commission to make sure its changes in regulation do not hinder the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act which demands that telecom companies allow law enforcement to use wiretaps on phone lines and VoIP calls.

VoIP wiretapping has been challenged in court a few times unsuccessfully, but changes in regulations could hinder wiretap efforts. It seems like at this moment, however, the FCC has no plans to interfere with the wiretapping rules.

For more:
- read the Washington Post article

Irwin Lazar over at Nemertes Research did an annual research benchmark polling 200 companies about the technology they use and found some interesting stats about cloud based services and Google specifically. For all our talk about Google’s future enterprise play, it looks like it might take longer for the company to become a serious player in that respect.

The research firm found that about 50.2 percent of companies polled had reservations about using Google as a vendor. Concerns ranged from storing data in the Google cloud, the suspicion that it might get indexed by a search engines, to the company’s lack of a robust customer support arm.

Surely, Google’s office-in-the-sky applications combined with Google Voice and the hints of the Google Voice softphone are compelling reasons to consider Google as a vendor, but the concerns of this poll surely offer some legitimate barriers for Google to overcome. Entrenched UC vendors have built up customer trust and can still charge them for it where Google might offer services for free with less safety.

For more:
- read the Network World article

The FCC’s Local Telephone Competition report has announced some big news for the VoIP industry. IP communications is on the rise with 21 million end-users taking advantage of VoIP subscriptions from cable, traditional telcos or VoIP providers.

The report noted that there were 162 million wireline retail local telephone service connections as of the end of 2008. Of that figure, 141 million were traditional switched access lines while 21 million were VoIP subscribers. With numbers like that it seems VoIP still has a long way to go before it replaces all the telephones in the U.S., but with the FCC’s plans for the all-IP network, these numbers may be shifting more in the coming years.

For more:
- see the FCC release here
- read FierceTelecom’s take here

Forever is a long time as the L.A. Times observes. At one time that was the party line at Skype where they claimed that they would never be charging users for Skype-to-Skype calls. That was before they took their VoIP service mobile.

The L.A. Times article notes that although Skype once hoped to always have Skype-to-Skype calls free between users, the company has departed from its previous ideals with its future vision of iPhone 3G Skype-to-Skype calls. The company hasn’t revealed the fee-structure yet, maintaining that at the moment the calls will remain free. Skype wouldn’t comment on the fees and AT&T wouldn’t comment on whether it would be interested in splitting the fees to cut the costs for consumers. Skype only said that it was time to find ways to monetize their service.

As most industry watchers know, wireless spectrum is finite and the buildout to handle all that wireless data is expensive. The cost savings from VoIP technology will transfer to the wireless space, but perhaps not as easily as on the desktop. Perhaps AT&T is not interested in splitting fees for Skype users because perhaps the plan involves AT&T taking a cut of the fees in order to pay for the cost of the bandwidth to run all those Skype calls over 3G. Just a thought.

For more:
- read the L.A. Times article

VoIP and data provider Speakeasy is combining its business with Covad Communications Company and MegaPath Inc. to add another component to the overarching IP communications team.

Speakeasy, whose parent company is Best Buy, will be adding small business experience to the Covad and MegaPath mix. With Speakeasy’s SMB focused business voice and data services, MegaPath’s products for distributed enterprises and Covad’s nationwide broadband network the companies are charting new territory in the space. The companies are seeking to create a next-generation CLEC or an MSLEC–managed services local exchange carrier–providing a wide range of managed IP broadband services and access over a national network.

For more:
- read the release

A new Frost and Sullivan report predicts that our society’s quest for all things green will lead to growth in the unified communications (UC) market.

With our focus on carbon footprints and our business’ effects on the environment, more and more companies are realizing how teleconferencing, video conferencing and unified communication systems can cut down on travel costs and envrironmental impact. The trend is already being realized, the research firm reports, as the web conferencing services market in Europe grew by 19.3 percent in 2009.

The added bonus of going green with UC–companies are noticing–is that… it’s cheaper! Less travel costs, less electricity bills. Also, by moving to UC systems, they are finding more effecient forms of communication within their organizations and with their customers.

For more:
- read the release

With Google’s recent purchase of Global IP Sound (GIPS), the company is expanding its IP communications applications arsenal. One interesting area where GIPS comes in handy is in video chat.

Apparently, GIPS recently released a video calling engine called VideoEngine which aims to deliver high quality voice and video to PC softphones, Unified Communications (UC) applications and mobile devices. In April, GIPS announced that they were “first-to-market with GIPS VideoEngine for Android, which provides mobile developers the vital building blocks for integrating video conferencing/video chat into applications running Google’s Android mobile operating system.” The GIPS software accounts for delay, packet loss, bandwidth limitations and echo to ensure that video conversations dynamically adjust with WiFi or 3G cellular network conditions in order to deliver quality video calling.

The new software offering seems to be an excellent reason for Google to snatch these guys up when you look at where Google plans to take its Android and other communication plays.

For more:
- read the release
- read this blog post

Want to add more enterprise communications to the most popular of enterprise mobile phones? Just add WiFi VoIP calling and SIP.

That’s exactly what RIM is doing with its popular Blackberry phones. It’s latest OS 5.0 build for its phones will now offer VoIP calls over WiFi and SIP functionality which will eventually result in even more unified communications opportunities. The new offering allows users to take their PBX extensions with them through their Blackberry mobile device and track presence status depending on where they log in on various WiFi networks. Calls are routed back through the IP PBX, saving the company cash on call minutes as well as detecting an employee’s location and presenting the appropriate business extensions to callers. 

For more:
- read the article

With all the economic wreckage in the last few years, it’s nice to see that as the dust clears, VoIP has emerged an industry winner. Carl Weinschenk, a blogger over at IT Business Edge does a good job rounding up a number of articles and studies with some great facts and figures about where the industry has been over the last year, and where we are going. Did you know that by 2014, 90 percent of the Dutch people should be using VoIP? Not a bad figure to look forward to.

The basic gist of his findings is that the recession as we know it is over for VoIP and in fact we didn’t do too bad during it. In 2010 about 34 million new VoIP lines will be added, and in 2014 will see 25 percent of Americans using VoIP and according to the most recent sales studies. What this means is that old equipment needs to be replaced and the new VoIP and UC offerings are ripe for the buying.

For more:
- read his whole article and the links to his source articles

Research and Markets just released their Business VoIP Overview by Vertical report which provides details on the VoIP market by the professional services, education, government, and healthcare vertical industry segments.

One of the key findings of the report was that the government segment was one of the strongest verticals for VoIP deployment. According to an In-Stat survey, 48 percent of respondents from the government segment reported that VoIP had been deployed in at least some part of their agency. The report also found that Verizon Business had a commanding lead over competitors as the main provider of VoIP services to government agencies.

For more:
- read the release