Ellen Muraskin

SBC Communications Inc.—which is a partner with fellow RBOC (regional Bell operating company) BellSouth Corp. in owning U.S. cellular carrier Cingular Wireless—is planning a combined Wi-Fi and cellular phone service for business customers in 2005. In an interview Wednesday with Reuters at the U.S. Telecom Association trade show in Las Vegas, SBC chief technology officer […]

Jeff Pulver, president and CEO of Pulver.com and a leading spokesman for VOIP (voice over IP), is using his companys Voice on the Net conference and expo in Boston next week to launch a new SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) voice and instant messaging application, pulver.Communicator. A beta version of the new client, running on Windows […]

GlowPoint, a major provider of on-demand IP videoconference bridging and networking services, made two announcements Monday that take the model of telephony carriers and apply it to video in ways weve not seen before. GlowPoint Inc., based in Hillside, N.J., is determined to make IP videoconferencing–which, of course, includes IP voice—as natural and intuitive as […]

BroadVoice is one of the many VOIP service providers now offering a $19.95, all-you-can-dial monthly calling plan to those with broadband. Like all of them, the plan also offers very low per-minute rates to destinations beyond the unlimited-calling North American perimeter. My experience with BroadVoice confirms a reliable dial tone, and a fine-to-better-than-PSTN (Public Switched […]

Im damned if I can figure out what Microsoft Corp. is going to announce with the first, most prominent keynote of all at this months Voice on the Net show, if not telephony links to its LCS (Live Communications Server). The keynoter is Anoop Gupta, corporate vice president of Microsofts real-time collaboration business unit—the one […]

Toshiba America Information Systems Inc.s Digital Solutions Division has announced its first IP PBX, the Strata CIX. Previous telephone switches have been “IP enabled” through gateways; this is the first to actually switch calls between IP extensions over a LAN or WAN. Like its circuit-switched Strata predecessors, the CIX demands as little new hardware as […]

The red-hot competition for the VOIP residential consumers dollar got hotter on Thursday, when AT&T and Vonage both lowered their prices for consumer service. AT&T dropped CallVantage domestic, all-you-can eat service in the United States and Canada from $34.99 to $29.99, and Vonage followed up immediately with a similar drop from $29.99 to $25.00; a […]

Artisoft Inc., maker of the TeleVantage open-systems PBX, has acquired Vertical Networks Inc., a maker of distributed IP PBX systems for vertical markets, primarily in retail. The deal combines two separate customer bases and builds a sales footprint that better ables Artisoft to compete with traditional PBX entrants to VOIP. Cambridge, Mass.-based Artisoft, among the […]

Market research firm International Data Corp. says in a new report that VOIP adoption is growing fastest among U.S. businesses opting to outsource the switch. IDC pegs the size of a market called “hosted IP voice” or “IP Centrex” at $7.6 billion by 2008–representing a compound annual growth rate of 282 percent. The study finds […]

The challenge gathering critical mass over the VOIP landscape concerns interoperability. As chip, software and hardware makers build their IP PBXes, phones, terminal adapters, carrier softswitches, media gateways and application servers, how do they ensure that they support calls consistently? The goal is to send calls, as the PSTN does, from enterprise to network to […]