Grandstream’s GXP1400 IP Phone and GXP1405 IP Phone offers cutting edge VoIP telephony features to small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with or without an IP PBX, at a revolutionary price-point. Phone users have access to an extensive set of best-in-class audio, visual, security, provisioning, and business features that allow the GXP1400/1405 to create a class of its own in the affordability segment of the IP phone market. The GXP1400/1405 features built-in TLS/SRTP security, secondary SIP server, best-inclass HD audio including an acoustically redesigned HD handset, improved double-talk performance, Acoustical Echo Cancellation on its full-duplex HD speakerphone, easy automated provisioning with TR-
069 or HTTPS, advanced XML customization and more.

The GXV3500 is a first-of-its-kind security, surveillance and facility management solution for SMBs that want to preserve their investment in traditional CCTV analog cameras while adding the capability to remotely display live video on a TV, or use the device as a voice/video public announcement system (PAS) over an IP network. The GXV3500 IP Video Encoder+Decoder+PAS is a 3-in-1 combo device that combines advanced single channel H.264 real time video compression or decompression functions at up to D1 resolution and up to 30fps in a single box. It also features two-way audio paging and video streaming using SIP/VoIP, integrated PoE (Power over Ethernet), serial port for PTZ camera control, microphone input, audio/video output, alarm inputs & outputs, pre- and post-event recording buffer, as well as advanced encryption for security protection.

The GXV3500 can also uniquely function as both a voice and video PAS for office floors, lobbies, shopping malls, warehouses, waiting rooms, supermarkets, public transportation stations, etc. Users can speak from an attached external microphone, or call into the device from a SIP IP phone to make voice announcements or supply digital background music to public areas through an external loudspeaker (with integrated power amplifier), or call into the device from a SIP video phone to make live video announcement or video advertisement on a TV connected with the GXV3500 from anywhere in the world.

“I am happy to grant Grandstream with two Product of the Year Awards. The editors of INTERNET TELEPHONY have verified that the GXP1400 HD IP phone and GXV3500 IP Video
Encoder/Decoder/PAS display quality and innovation plus satisfy real needs in the marketplace,” stated Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. “I would like to congratulate the entire team at Grandstream for their
commitment to advancing IP communication technologies.”

ITEXPO EAST, MIAMI, FL Booth 517 (February 1, 2012) – Grandstream Networks, the leading manufacturer of IP voice/video telephony and video surveillance solutions, today announced the release of the HT701 a new 1-port Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA). The HT701 Analog Adapter is designed for single line analog phone users – residential, small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) and telecommuters – needing a compact, inexpensive ATA that converts legacy analog telephones, fax machines, conference telephones and other analog devices to access Internet-based telephone services. ATAs allow businesses and consumers to extend the value of their investment in analog devices while migrating to richer, less costly, and multimedia IP services at their own pace.

The HT701 is the newest addition to Grandstream’s HandyTone ATA/IAD series of VoIP access devices that offer a range of SIP standard-based ATAs for mixed VoIP applications. Its feature highlights include:

• Ultra compact design (.98in H x 2.6in W x 3.38in L) and extremely affordable cost
• Support 5 REN over up to 1km on 24 AWG line
• Advanced telephony features including Caller ID for various countries, call waiting, do-no-disturb,
  3-way conference, transfer, forward, message waiting, T.38 fax, flexible dial plan, multi-language
  voice prompt, etc.
• Comprehensive voice codecs including G.711 with Annex I/II, G.729A/B, G.723.1, iLBC, G.726
• Strong security protection of voice/data privacy using TLS/SRTP/HTTPS, secure and automated provisioning using TR069, HTTP/HTTPS/TFTP and AES encryption

Currently celebrating its 10-year anniversary in the VoIP marketplace, Grandstream was founded in 2002 selling initially an ATA and IP phone model. Since then, Grandstream has rapidly grown to be a globally recognized provider of a comprehensive portfolio of VoIP communications devices including IP phones, gateways, ATAs, video phones, and video cameras.

“We are excited to announce the new HT701 ATA for the residential Internet telephony service provider and small business market,” said David Li, CEO of Grandstream Networks. “The HT701 is the culmination of our 10 years’ experience developing award-winning advanced VoIP products. Its ultra-compact design, rich feature set, and unbeatable price point will make it a very popular product in the marketplace quickly.”

The Grandstream HT701 will be on display this week at Grandstream’s booth at ITEXPO East Miami, Booth 517.

VoIPon: Broadcasting from various countries around the world using voice over IP technology, this is VoIP Uncovered — A VoIPon Solutions UK podcast.  Representing, VoIPon, I’m Kathleen Reed.

Today, we’re happy to have the folks from Sangoma, a leading provider of hardware and software components that enable or enhance IP communication systems for both voice and data join us again today to bring us up to speed on the latest developments at their company.

Joining us today is Bill Wignall, their president and CEO and Jeff Dworkin, their director of marketing. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us.

So, I’m going to jump right in with the first question. In the last year, Sangoma has undergone a lot of changes; can you share VoIPon’s listeners what’s going on with the company and why the Sangoma channel and end users should be excited about these developments?

Bill Wignall: Sure Kathleen thanks. Well, 2011 is truly a year of reinvention for Sangoma. I came in to take over the reigns at Sangoma about one year ago, and since then, we’ve completely rebuilt the executive management team and established an entirely new strategic direction for the company. Even with the reputation of the highest quality products in the industry, the company’s evolution had slowed and we had experienced flat sales for the couple of years. The new leadership team has reignited the growth engine and that’s the big change internally at Sangoma.

But frankly, customers and partners don’t care so much about that. They care about new products, more engineering talent to help support them and their applications. They care about having Sangoma staff closer to them. That’s how we’re driving these renewed growth initiatives.

We’re focused on delivering more value to those customers and to our distribution partners around the world. We’ve begun to see some results in just the first three quarters together as an executive team our quarterly sales are about 30%.

We dramatically expanded our product road map; we’ve launched aggressive new marketing programs and hired key new experienced senior sales executives in regions closer to the customers. And we have begun expanding our addressable market beyond traditional telephony interface boards into new product categories to both organic initiatives and via selected acquisitions.

VoIPon: Okay. So, speaking of acquisitions, recently Sangoma acquired Vegastream effectively entering the appliance market, which by some had been long awaited and by others might be considered controversial. So, how’s the channel responding?

Bill Wignall: One of the fundamental objectives at Sangoma is to do exactly that: Diversify beyond the telecom interface boards market, a space in which we’ve been a dominant player for a number of years. Months ago, our executive team identified they are ready to deploy appliance market as one of those areas in to which we should to expand. So, you’ll see many new appliance space products from Sangoma over the next year. And that category is where gateways come in.

We actually plan to develop our gateway products ourselves. But once we got into the development cycle planning, we decided to needed these products now. Not in the year plus that would take us to build them.

So we decided to acquire Vegastream to expand our presence from our legacy market segments, which will remain critical for us. And Vegastream gives us a bunch of advantages: great products, an office in UK to better serve our European customers, and expanded distribution network with little overlap to existing partners.

Vegastream was stuck in neutral due to problems with manufacturing and supply chain management and Sangoma has a history of being really good at doing these things.  We get new customers in a variety of geographic regions including India and Russia and we got an excellent team of both engineering and sales.

So, you could imagine with those advantages, the response from the channel is overwhelmingly positive. We have increased the options available to deliver on their customer’s needs. This expands the addressable market for those partners. Now, when a customer requires an external appliance, as part of their solution, Sangoma can deliver. We simply want it to be able to offer both solutions. Internal cards that get inserted into servers and external appliances, it’s that simple.

Kathleen: Fantastic. So, recently you announced revised pricing on the A500 BRI card and a firmware update that directly integrates with DAHDI, so the customers with lower density systems can effectively save up to 50% on the price of systems of 4 ports or less. Have you seen a shift to lower density systems in the EMEA and what other trends have come to light for this market?

Bill Wignall: Sure Kathleen. Well, Jeff, why don’t you take this one?

Jeff Dworkin: Sure. Well, since as Bill mentioned above are corporate objective for the coming years, 2012 especially, one of our goals is to build our key business in international markets. So, this was done in direct response to sort of better serve the European and generally, the entire EMEA market.

So, we recently hired a UK sales channel manager and this is one of the first things he sort of brought to the table, that we weren’t really getting the most bang for our buck with our BRI technology. We made these changes, they’ve sort of been on roadmap but they get crashed and accelerated, so we could better deliver on this very particular segment now. It doesn’t mean we’ve really seen a big shift to lower density systems. Again, it was more of just a response to what our channel manager saw: is that we were missing out on any of this lower density solutions and opportunities because we didn’t have this direct integration with the DAHDI driver for Asterisk. And, we were creating extra expense by requiring people to have hardware-based echo cancellation on these lower density systems, which is really necessary.

So, again, we lower the price, we fixed up our driver, and now we are really ready to attack this particular segment. So, this is really why it’s important that regionally placed sales people. You know, Steve came in and he really got a sense of what the local market needed and help us turn out into a product and hopefully new opportunity very quickly.

VoIPon: Fantastic. So, in terms of the market, where does Sangoma see the telephony marketing in general heading next?

Bill Wignall: Hmm, that’s a tough question Kathleen. You know, Sangoma doesn’t really focus on what the next single big thing will be. Our strategy involves selecting multiple products categories that target many of the key trends in our industry. So you will see us launch products that make use of the cloud and social networking, as just a couple of examples.

But if Sangoma had to prognosticate onto the year ahead, we’d say that perhaps 2012 will not be year, where we see a single new revolutionary technology, like tablets for instance. But rather might be a year of integration or update. We feel this way due to the fact that several new technologies have really just emerged recently, and because of the economic uncertainty, especially in Europe. When much financial uncertainty exists, companies and network operators tend to focus more on adopting efficiency improvements rather than on revolutionary technology.

So, offerings like SIP or VoIP will get fully more integrated into the fabric of business communications. Every business from the SOHO to the international enterprise will only be talking about when we will move to these technologies not if.  

Newer offerings like the cloud or the tablet usage will move out of the innovation, pilot and early adopters phase and move into the mainstream of business regular operations. We fully expect Sangoma to benefit from those trends as well.

Kathleen: Ok, excellent. Well, I want to thank both of you for your time today and for bringing VoIPon’s listeners up to speed on the latest developments.

This has been a VoIPon, VoIP uncovered podcast. For more information, please visit www.voipon.co.uk.

The beta release of the W400 board has just been announced. This is our first GSM capable telephony interface board. The W400 board allows IP-PBXs built with Asterisk to communicate with the GSM cellular network. It supports up to four simultaneous quad-band EGSM sessions enabling maximum compatibility worldwide. It includes onboard hardware echo cancellation, noise suppression and DTMF detection. The W400 comes in a PCIe configuration.  

If you are interested in joining the W400 beta testing program, please contact Julien Nephtali at jnephtali@sangoma.com.

With the release of Elastix 2.2, all Sangoma TDM interface boards (analog, digital and BRI) are now automatically detected and configured through Elastix’s hardware detector interface tool. The web interface also allows the configuration of different parameters, such as echo cancellation, the mode on PRI cards (E1 or T1), timing source, line build out, framing, and coding. Elastix is one of the leading distributions of Asterisk® and was designed to enable unified communications and VoIP systems within an Open Source solution.

                            ASTERISK-BASED SENIOR CARE SOLUTIONS DEMO                       

Xorcom Speaking Opportunity at AstriCon Featured Live Demo of ZigBee based Applications

At the annual AstriCon conference and trade show, held last week in Westminster, Colorado, Xorcom presented its “Amity” platform designed to support applications for improved senior care. Watch the video below to catch the highlights:

                             MULTI-POINT VIDEO CONFERENCING – LIVE DEMO                         

Joint Venture Integrates Video Conferencing Capability with Xorcom IP-PBX

Another exciting demonstration took place in the Xorcom booth at the AstriCon Expo. In the video below, Surf Communication Solutions CTO Avi Fisher provides an overview and live demonstration of the new video conferencing functionality while Ariel Mapelman, Xorcom’s Channel Manager for LATAM, Spain & Portugal, simultaneously translates into Spanish:

                  ADVANCE NOTICE: MAINBOARDS UNDERGOING REDESIGN                  

Improvements Will Increase Reliability

We are in the final testing stages and plan to start using the new mainboards in all of our equipment in about two months’ time. The new boards are designed to remain at moderate temperatures and include other improvements that will be detailed in a service bulletin just prior to their release.

As a useful indication for support purposes, the new boards will be printed on a blue PCB (printed circuit board) to help differentiate them from the existing (green) mainboards.

Multi-point high quality video and voice conferencing capability in open source IP-PBX brings cost-effective functionality to small and medium sized businesses

Yokne’am, Israel and Misgav, Israel – October 18, 2011 — Surf Communication Solutions (“Surf”), an industry leader in high-capacity processing solutions for real-time multimedia communication systems and applications, and Xorcom, a privately-held manufacturer of business telephony interfaces and appliances, today announced that they have collaborated to develop an integrated, multi-point video and voice conferencing solution designed for use in Xorcom’s Asterisk® based IP-PBX telephony appliances. The joint effort effectively makes video conferencing capabilities affordable and accessible to businesses of all sizes.

Video Conferencing Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) Can Afford

Today most businesses recognize the advantages of video conferencing, but many do not implement such systems because of the total cost of the existing solutions.  In contrast to other video conferencing solutions currently in the market, the Surf-Xorcom product enables organizations to conduct high quality multi-point video conferencing at an affordable price. The solution integrates seamlessly with Xorcom’s award-winning Asterisk based business telephony solutions, which support from 30 to 1000 users. SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) signaling ensures compatibility with a wide variety of endpoints, including the leading IP-based video phones as well as soft phones, significantly reducing the total cost of the solution.

Key Features of the New Product

• High Definition Voice and Video: Resolutions of up to 720p and wideband HD VoIP are supported
• Unmatched Quality: Low latency, high quality voice and video for different resolutions
• Smooth Transcoding: Transcoding and transrating between different endpoints with unmatched media quality
• Complete Control: Real time conference control via Web management or DTMF (Dual Tone Multi Frequency) codes
• Seamless Interoperability: Built on a solid media processing foundation and providing standard based SIP protocol to connect different devices
• Video IVR Support: IVR (Interactive Voice Response) flow for participants with voice only, and video IVVR (Interactive Voice / Video Response) for the complete video experience
• Intuitive Web Management: Full control provided to all levels of participants, from conference moderators to invitees

Video Conferencing Solution to be Demonstrated Live at AstriCon

The new video conferencing solution will be demonstrated jointly by Surf and Xorcom personnel in the Xorcom booth (#300) at the AstriCon event, which takes place in Westminster, Colorado from Oct. 25-27.

About Surf Communication Solutions

SURF Communication Solutions (SURF) is an industry leader in high-capacity processing solutions for real-time multimedia communication systems and applications.  Since 1996, SURF’s products have delivered the integral technology behind many of the leading vendor’s multimedia servers and gateways deployed to operators and service providers worldwide.   SURF-powered multimedia applications are delivering value added services to millions of end-users every day.  Today, SURF is ideally positioned to stimulate change in the way we communicate.  The video-ready SURF solution supports multimedia processing including full video, voice and data IP to IP communications, as well as modem and fax over IP. It is a fully converged multimedia processing subsystem that integrates easily into media gateways and servers.  Since there is no such thing as “one size fits all,” the SURF solution is available in various form factors or DSP chips affording unmatched density and optimal performance.

About Xorcom

Founded in 2004 and privately-held, Xorcom designs and manufactures business telephony solutions that support both traditional and VoIP communication. Xorcom solutions are easy to install and maintain, and are cost-effective since there are no per user license fees. Various utilities provide backup and restore, immediate recovery, and a full redundancy solution for the entire PBX to maximize uptime. Xorcom’s bundled solution for hospitality features the only MICROS-Fidelio certified Property Management System (PMS) interface for Asterisk. Xorcom sells its products via a worldwide distribution channel and OEM partners.

Combining H264 real-time video compression for analog video cameras, video decoding for displaying on TV, and voice/video public announcement systems (PAS), Grandstream is pleased to announce the new GXV3500 IP Video Encoder Decoder PAS for surveillance, security monitoring and facility management applications.

In a single, compact device, the GXV3500 extends investment in existing analog video cameras by helping businesses to easily upgrade network applications to IP while delivering higher resolution digital imagery using less bandwidth and less hardware devices. This “3-in-1” device combines advanced single channel H264 real time video compression or decompression functions at up to D1 resolution and up to 30fps in a single box. It also offers two-way audio paging and video streaming using SIP/VoIP to receive and display live video anywhere in the world on mobile phones, TV, PC and video phones. The device can also be a voice and video PAS for a variety of facilities including office floors, lobbies, shopping malls, warehouses, and more.

Announcing the availabililty of the beroNet GSM Modules for PCI and PCIe cards and Gateways.

How to sell VoIP PBX to GSM Integration in your market:

► Sell as an Add-on to any PBX in your Market and get new customers

► Earn commissions/provisions from Mobile carriers

► Save your customers’ money on fixed to mobile calls

► Guarantee your customers 100% availability and connectivity

► Free inter-company mobile calls

► Enter a new market sector with Mobile PBX

► Up-sell a Managed and Monitored service through the beroNet cloud

The Benefits of beroNet

Cloud Managed and Monitored

Remotely Monitor, Update, upgrade, provision, back-up, recover, create projects and schedule automatic tasks straight from your browser

Driver Free Technology

The world’s first driver free VoIP Card and Gateway technology running on all operating systems without the need to install drivers.

5 Minute Installations

Fast & Easy. The berofix solution is recognized as a network card in your system, it’s simply Plug & Play.

Modular Technology

Very flexible. You start with the berofix main-board and then just plug-in BRI, PRI, Analog, BRI/FXS Hybrid & GSM modules as your project needs.