UK Cities to get Wi-Fi Coverage.

The United Kingdom has unveiled plan for a city-wide Wi-Fi access in the following cities: Birmingham, Cambridge, Edingburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Oxford and the London boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea, Camden and Islington. This will give resisdents and visitors of those cities broadband wireless Internet access from laptops, PDAs and mobile phones. The project is being executed by European wireless provider The Cloud. The first phase of the project is expected to be completed by March 2006. The system will be made available to ISPs to offer services.People who want to use the wireless network will pay one of the ISPs for access, and revenues will be split between The Cloud, the local council and the ISPs. With the increasing popularity of Wi-Fi mobile phones, this is a good news for VoIP users and service providers. Also people can now use there favourite voip applications on mobile devices anywhere within those cities. I think the announcement of Skype-Netgear Wi-Fi mobile phone couldnt have come at a better time.

Send and receive SMS with Skype

You can now receive sms on your skype client using “sms to skype” and you can send sms to any GSM phone using “skype to sms”. Sms to skype and skype to sms are services offered by connectotel. Your skype username has to be approved by connectotel to be able to use the service and this normally takes about 24 hours. Check out http://www.connectotel.com/ for information about how to setup your skype and GSM mobile phone for these services.

Virtual Phone Lines and DID (Direct Inward Dialing)

For those interested in virtual phone lines that they can integrate with their sip or iax clients as a call-in number, such can be obtained from www.virtualphoneline.com. They have phone numbers for so many countries around the word and they are actually acting as the retail arm of didx.net which is whole sale only DID (Direct Inward Dialing) solution. This is particularly useful because most of the popular voip applications that we use have call-in numbers for some few countries only. Want to know more about DID ? Check out this article at http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-DID

Global Crossing Now Avaya SIP-Compliant

Global Crossing announced that its enterprise Voice over internet Protocol portfolio is fully compliant with Avaya’s Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) telephony products. SIP is an open signaling standard that allows carrier and enterprise voice equipment to interoperate over an IP network via SIP trunks. SIP trunk services are an enterprise networking category that uses new efficiencies in network design and capabilities via SIP-enabled applications. “We’re proud to be the first global service provider to receive SIP interoperability compliance certification from Avaya, “said Anthony Christie, Global Crossing’s chief marketing officer. GlobalCrossing is a member of the Avaya DeveloperConnection Program, which develops, markets and sells third-party products that interoperate with Avaya technology. Eric Rossman, vice president, developer relations and technical alliances, Avaya called the announcement “a big step towards establishing SIP as an open standard for all signaling across both enterprise and service provider networks.” Global Crossing currently runs more than two billion minutes per month of VoIP traffic over its private, global backbone. Avaya’s Converged communications Server 3.0 and its SIP Enablement Services module works with Communication Manager software, the company´s flagship IP telephony software, supported by Avaya media servers, gateways and SIP telephones.

Configuring VoipBuster on X-lite

This post is to give information about how to configure VoipBuster on X-Lite softphone. In X-Lite open ‘menu’ and select ’system settings’ then ‘sip proxy`, from the list of proxies deplayed select the an available proxy. You should then enter the settings below: Enabled YES Display Name (VoipBuster user name) Username (VoipBuster user name) Authorization User (VoipBuster user name) Password (VoipBuster password) Domain/Realm sip1.voipbuster.com SIP Proxy connectionserver.voipbuster.com Out Bound Proxy sip1.voipbuster.com Leave all other settings as default. This configuration is working for me. I am still working on configuring VoipStunt on X-lite as soon as it start working I will post the configuration settings here.

Benefits of Business Ethernet For a Wide Area Network (WAN) Design

The choices today for Wide Area Network (WAN) design are wide and varied. No pun intended. Relying on the same old legacy options is no longer necessary with the maturation of Business Ethernet interconnectivity. Your voice/data transmission deserves better.
Too often businesses looking to upgrade an existing voice/data network infrastructure... or install a new network for whatever reason... tend to gloss over the advantages a Business Ethernet backbone may present. This may be due to a simple lack of understanding, or perhaps a rush to judgment relying on "what you know" for the final decision.
This is unfortunate as Business Ethernet today presents potential benefits over legacy systems such as TDM (e.g. DS3 bandwidth) and SONET (e.g. OC3 circuits) when the right conditions are present. Upon closer examination these improvements are marked and include the most obvious one. That being a significant cost savings in most cases.
Some benefits of Business Ethernet you should be aware of include...
1.) provides unlimited reach over Wide Area networks (WAN).
2.) enhances network performance by providing predictability, service guarantee, and management capabilities that previously were given only in SONET/SDH or ATM networks. This is done by the five carrier-class attributes: standardized services, scalability, reliability, Quality of Service, and Service Management.
3.) there are potential benefits of upgrading to Business Ethernet *if* the sites that can be upgraded are reaching their capacity limits (i.e. average around 70-80% link load for extended periods of time).
4.) typically cost per megabit of a Business Ethernet service is lower than of an equivalent legacy service, which allows getting larger amounts of bandwidth without increasing the overall service cost. By doing so, the congestion levels can be lowered and application performance improved.
In saying this it must be stressed that Business Ethernet is just another data transmission technology (rather than a universal "silver bullet"), and each individual migration case needs careful consideration and cost/benefit analysis.
Approaching this from a non-technical position, when setting out to design a solution you first need to ask what are the types of networks and applications you need to support? For example, are the network topologies linear or ring, and point-point or multipoint? If you are trying to connect pairs of sites with point-point circuits in a single metro, the choice of technology and equipment would be different than if, say you need to interconnect multiple customer sites in a point-to-multipoint or multipoint configuration.
SONET ADMs (ad-drop multiplexer) that support Business Ethernet interfaces could be utilized in the first instance to provide Ethernet Private Lines (EPL). For large complex networks, an MPLS core (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) may be required, although there are Business Ethernet platforms that can provide the necessary interconnectivity at Layer 2. If you are trying to interconnect multiple locations over a SONET ring, RPR (resilient packet ring) solutions are another alternative. Finally, you also need to take into consideration whether you have customer applications that require specific QoS (quality of service), especially if voice and video traffic are to be mixed with data application traffic in any topology other than EPL.
Once you have defined the requirements for Bandwidth, scaling, latency, coverage and inter-connectivity... you can then plan your aggregation and core network. Obviously resiliency, scalability, manageability (network and service) and some aspect of network intelligence play a part in the design.
Now that you have a basic understanding of the possible benefits of Business Ethernet... don't overlook that potential in the final decision on your WAN network design. Although this process may seem to be complicated it really doesn't need to be. Plus, you can always take advantage of the no cost assistance available from Network Solutions to walk you through step by step.

Michael is the owner of FreedomFire Communications....including Network Solutions. Michael also authors Broadband Nation where you're always welcome to drop in and catch up on the latest BroadBand news, tips, insights, and ramblings for the masses. For quality Business Ethernet service, protect yourself and your investment by comparing amongst 30 first and top tier carriers where you have a Low Price Guarantee. For more information about Business Ethernet and finding your best deals and options,

Hosted IP PBX's Enterprise Solution For Samll to Medium Size Businesses

With all of the different flavors of VOIP in the marketplace today, products like Vonage do not bode well for an office with more than a few employees. The other route is purchasing a VOIP enabled key system. Well, I would like to mention a third option that is often overlooked, the Hosted VOIP PBX.

The Hosted IP PBX is a great solution for many mid-sized companies looking for the advantages of an enterprise type of phone system but not wanting to spend the capital to acquire one. Plus you get many more inherent advantages a traditional phone system can not offer you. Let's look into detail what these advantages are in comparison to a traditional key or PBX phone system.

First, let's do a comparison of features between the different solutions. Typically, when buying a traditional system you are limited by the expansion of how many cards and ports the unit can acommodate and when making any changes like moves or adds, you need to pay a technician to come out and service the unit. With a hosted system the technology resides in the phone companies network, so any type of adds, moves or changes can be done easily by you through a web browser and a secure login website, this removes the cost of hiring someone to do this. It also adds tremendous power for redundancy and backup situations. For example, you have an awesome weather event such as a snow storm (which being from Buffalo is my point of reference) and most people can not make into the office, you can get on your broadband connection at home, login and forward all of your calls to any number in the world, like your cell phone or home phone. This way you still will be able to be productive.

Additionally, with a traditional phone system, you have to purchase additional software to get added features. In a hosted environment the upgrades are automatically propagated down to your phone giving you things like unified messaging (getting voicemail files on your computer and using your address book to dial phone numbers), hot desking (being able to go between offices and logging onto any phone and it will not only route all of your calls to you automatically, but will also bring over your speed dials and all of your custom phone settings to that other office phone) and any new enhancements that the software developer creates.

Finally, cost. A traditional system purchase includes phones, separate phone cabling, the box in the phone closet, a voice mail system and any additional cards or software you need to give it the features you want such as auto attendant, IVR functionality, etc. A hosted system only requires data cabling, the phones, a switch and a router. This allows approximately a 40% reduction in upfront expense versus traditional phone systems and at least a 60% reduction against a VoIP system that resides on site.

In summary, a hosted VOIP system is an excellent choice for the mid sized business due to the fact that they can achieve enterprise functionality at a fraction of the cost while also inheriting redundancy not heard of in this market segment. But, you should always consult with a professional to help guide you through advantages and disadvantages of the choices currently out there and find the solution that best suits your businesses current and future needs.