Author: James Chapman

Free Telephony, Mesh Networking & The Village Telco Project: VoIPon Interviews David Rowe and Elektra Aichele

Posted by | Mar 24, 2010 | , , , , , , |

Recently, we had the chance to speak with David Rowe from the Free Telephony Project, based out of Australia, and Elektra Aichele from Freifunk.net Wireless Community Network in Germany. Elektra and David came together about eight months ago to work on the Village Telco Project, a project to give low cost, Wi-Fi based telephony to people in the developing world. They’ve been working as a team to develop one component of the project, called the Mesh Potato. The Mesh Potato is a Wi-Fi router with telephony that does mesh networking. Elektra is the project’s Mesh Networking Guru and David is the telephony hardware person and actually Elektra is actually used the Mesh Potato to speak with us. Listen to the podcast or read a summary of our call, below: [VoIPon]: VoIPon has a great admiration and respect for open source projects. What’s particularly interesting about the Free Telephony Project is that it is not only based on open source software but the hardware is also entirely open, making the entire solution Free (as in speech). What made you start this project and what would you say was the most challenging part of it? [David Rowe]: Well, I started the project back in 2005. The main reason was, just like a lot of projects, I had an itch I wanted to scratch. I was fascinated by the idea of doing embedded...

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Skype Gateways for Business? VoIPon Speaks to Industry Dynamics Makers of VoiceGear

Posted by | Mar 17, 2010 | , , , , |

Recently, we had the opportunity to chat with Dmitry Baev, the Director of Product Development of Industry Dynamics and makers of VoiceGear—an integrated Skype gateway that is entirely plug-and-play and supports a variety of analog, digital, SIP, and Hybrid PBX systems. Listen to the podcast or read a transcription of our call below. [VoIPon] Please tell us why a customer would want to integrate their PBX with Skype. Is it reliable for business calls? [Dmitry Baev, Industry Dynamics] Yes. First of all let me briefly describe what are the major use cases that we’ve seen our customers using with VoiceGear Skype Gateways. And there is about five or six primary use cases that we’ve seen. And, some of the most popular ones that we’ve seen would be something that we call Skype trunking. By virtue of using the VoiceGear Skype Gateway with your PBX system, it allows all of your office staff to take advantage of cheap outgoing calls via Skype out. This can be calls made to other Skype users, which are absolutely free, those calls are made Skype to Skype, and also calls that are made to regular land lines and mobile numbers and those are charged at the minimal Skype out rates, which typically start at about 2 cents a minute, or there are some unlimited subscriptions that are country based. And there are other use...

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VoIPon Brings the Best of CeBIT to You: Sangoma, AVM, Pika, Patton, snom, Grandstream

Posted by | Mar 12, 2010 | , , , , , , , |

Last week, VoIPon attended CeBIT and had the opportunity to interview a selection of industry leaders to learn about new products and any product developments they were launching at the show. VoIPon Interviews Sangoma @ CeBIT 2010 VoIPon: Hello, My name is Alexis Argent, I’m the sales manager for VoIPon Solutions in the United Kindgom and I’m joined here with David Mandelstam, CEO and Founder of Sangoma Technologies and I just want to ask how you’re getting on with the show? David: Thank you very much Alexis. Um. The show is great for us. Here at CeBIT we’re showing our range of cards. As a new product, we’re showing this transcoding card, which is not quite released yet. It’s a card that will do up to 480 channels of audio transcoding, that’s G.711 or G.722, G.723 any of the audio codecs. It will about 140 video codecs – video becoming much more important these days. And that will do the translation from codec to codec without any load on a PC. We’re releasing this probably in a month’s time. It’s part of our commitment to total quality that we’re providing for the open source community in particular. We are beginning to supply our cards with our own commercial control and signalling stack, rather than using the open source stacks, because we believe that even on an open source system,...

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Introducing the Ceros Desktop: Interview with Rhino Equipment Corp. President, Jim Rhodes

Posted by | Mar 10, 2010 | , , , |

Recently, we had the opportunity to speak with Jim Rhodes, president of Rhino Equipment. Rhino Equipment Corp. is a USA based, global telecommunications equipment hardware supplier, whose mission is to provide customers with the most reliable, lowest-priced telecommunications equipment that can be trusted to work day in and day out. Each year the company strives to produce new and innovative solutions to technological problems. Listen to the podcast or read the summary of our call, below: [VoIPon] So Jim, what’s new at Rhino equipment this year? Are there any interesting products in development or anything recently released that VoIPon’s listeners should know about? Well, we recently released the Rhino Ceros Desktop, which is a smaller sleeker version of our Ceros line, which started with the Ceros 3U and later migrated to the Rhino Ceros 1U. And the Ceros Desktop is a little bit smaller. Obviously, it’s named after where we’d expect to see it most of the time, which is on the desktop. However, it does come with a wall mount bracket, and it does support the unique Rhino custom consumer/customer configurable display, that allows up to six lines of custom text and a bitmap graphic to be added, to instantly create a product that is credible for a VAR or an OEM. [VoIPon]  This sounds interesting, Jim. Can you tell me a little more about it, perhaps from...

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New 64-bit G.729 Transcoding Card for Asterisk and FreeSWITCH Telephony Platforms Triples Call Capacity of Competition, Reduces Costs

Posted by | Feb 25, 2010 | , , , |

Howler Technologies has expanded its Screamer transcoding product line. Today it launched a 64-bit version of its highly successful Screamer G.729 transcoder card that supports up to 425 simultaneous calls. VoIP network operators and large enterprises with IP call centres that support hundreds of agents can benefit from this high capacity G.729 transcoding solution, which has more than three times the transcoding power of any other PCI Express based product currently available. G.729 is a high-quality, low bit rate codec that saves bandwidth. Because it is not DSP based, customers can configure their Screamer cards according to their business requirements and upgrade their transcoding capacity whenever they like. By adding multiple cards to a server, companies can build thousands of channels of transcoding into their networks at a fraction of the cost of deploying expensive media gateways. “The ability to optimise transcoding between G.729 and G.711 codecs means IP telecoms operators can rationalise their infrastructure, as well as create more opportunities for revenue by routing VoIP traffic directly to and from bandwidth-constrained locations,” said Mike Vieyra, CEO of Howler. The Howler Screamer product line is compatible with many popular softswitches, such as Asterisk, FreeSWITCH, trixbox and elastix. Howler Screamer 64-bit is available to buy today from the VoIPon...

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