VoIP Gains Ground With Bank of America Deal
628092
The largest Voice-over-IP business deployment revealed to date presents new opportunities for both the bank that&#39;s using it and the services provider that&#39;s implementing it.
1404
The move follows a string of similar deals between Ma Bell and cable operators, as it looks to aggressively market VoIP.
35996
Telephone giant partners with electronics retailer to market voice over Internet Protocol offering.
658972
Vonage and Netgear have teamed up to develop broadband telephony products due in time for the holidays, according to sources familiar with the deal.
319240
(InfoWorld) - Verizon Communications Inc.'s Business unit has expanded its service-level agreement (SLA) options, allowing customers to invoke their SLAs on the last mile of their network connection, even in cases where Verizon doesn't own those pipes. Verizon Business' "customer edge to customer edge" SLA option is available at no additional cost for the company's Private IP (Internet Protocol) customers based in the U.S., with the service planned for other Private IP customers by the end of the year. The customer edge SLA covers network facilities that Verizon Business leases from other telecom providers to gain last-mile access to business customers. Verizon Business offers a 20 percent credit of the customer's monthly recurring charges if it fails to meet the SLA. Verizon Business is expanding its SLA options because many customers are moving voice, data and video onto Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks, said Mike Marcellin, the company's vice president for global product marketing. "The customers we're working with are looking for as robust guarantees as they can get," he said. In any month, a Verizon Business customer can invoke either the traditional provider edge SLA or the new customer edge SLA. The two SLAs differ in some details, with the provider edge SLA offering stronger guarantees in some areas. For example, the provider edge SLA guarantees jitter rates of no more than five milliseconds, and the customer edge SLA offers jitter rates of less than 10ms one-way voice over IP traffic and less than 20ms one-way video traffic. "If it goes off of our private IP network, we lose some level of control, but we're still able to stand behind the overall end-to-end SLA," Marcellin said. "We're giving the customer the best of both worlds." The customer edge SLAs also offer guarantees on packet delay and packet delivery ratio, as well as time-to-repair guarantees. Verizon Business has announced other enhancements to its SLAs in the past year, including a voice quality SLA and an enhanced time-to-repair SLA, that did away with the standard average time-to-repair metric in favor of guaranteed time-to-repair in every outage. The expansion of SLAs are important for customers as they move more applications to wide area networks, said Courtney Munroe, vice president with IDC. "It's a bid deal in the sense that a lot of [customers] keep asking for more and more tangible SLAs," Munroe said. "A lot of [providers] shy away from giving these SLAs." Verizon Business' SLAs are among the best in the telecom industry, Munroe said.
68674
Bank of America has unveiled plans to eventually put an IP phone on every employee's desktop -- a three-year, corporatewide IP telephony rollout that involves about 180,000 phones.
667340
Internet-based calling is moving beyond the PC and into the mobile realm, as  Boingo Wireless and  Vonage join forces to provide voice over Wi-Fi service as a complement to traditional VoIP.
596173
The VoIP deal is the type of technology outsourcing and service agreement that has become an increasingly large and profitable part of IBM&#39;s overall business and the sort of development that
45186
Vonage has teamed with NETGEAR Inc. to develop a suite of broadband telephony devices incorporating the latest version of Texas Instruments&#39; VoIP and WLAN chipsets.
301624
Making unlimited phone calls for a fixed monthly price has proven to be a key selling point for Internet phone services like Vonage and AT&amp;T CallVantage.
642416
Lloyds TSB is gearing up to roll out one of the largest converged networks in Europe, a Â£500m 70,000 phone VoIP infrastructure linking all the bank&#39;s branches and cash points.
323093
Vonage and AT&#38;T, still locked in a price war, are separately planning new features in a battle for VoIP customers.
472734
(InfoWorld) - Verizon Business on Monday rolled out a nationwide WAN service, allowing large organizations to use Ethernet to connect offices spread across the U.S. Verizon's Virtual Private LAN Service, or E-VPLS, is the first such service from large telecom carriers, the company said. The service, delivered over Verizon Business' existing converged packet network, allows customers the flexibility to adjust their networks' bandwidth from 1M bps (bits per second) to 1G bps, Verizon said. The new service is aimed at companies that want the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of Ethernet service paired with a nationwide WAN, Verizon said. "We have extreme coverage," said Michael Volgende, Verizon Business' director of Ethernet services. "We're not starting from scratch in terms of network deployment." In addition, the new service, available throughout most of the U.S. Monday, comes with service-level agreements that guarantee on-network Ethernet access 100 percent of the time, and 99.99 percent for off-network Ethernet access. The agreements include a mean time to repair of two hours for on-net Ethernet access. By using Verizon Business' current packet network, Verizon can offer a "very strong" service-level agreement, Volgende said. "It kind of demonstrates the confidence we have in the service offering," he added. E-VPLS allows customers to maintain control of their routing, instead of sharing it with Verizon, said Verizon Business, part of Verizon Communications Inc. E-VPLS will allow customers to set priorities for applications through four classes of service: real time, priority, business and basic data. Real-time service is aimed at VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) and digital video applications, while applications like e-mail can get a lower priority. In addition to commercial applications, the U.S. General Services Administration requested the service as part of its Networx program, designed to help federal agencies make the transition to next-generation networking services, Verizon said. The service will cost about $48,000 a month for a typical Fortune 100 customer using E-VPLS to connect six sites spread across the U.S., Verizon said. That price includes bandwidth ranging from 10M bps to 100M bps. The same network would cost more than 25 percent more using traditional leased lines in a hub-and-spoke network, Verizon said.
769309
Israeli start-up Fringland is offering a mobile phone client that enables free VoIP calls, not only to other users of its technology, but also to fixed-line VoIP clients for internet telephony, such as MSN, Googletalk and Skype.
253817
Carriers are pleased with system that will allow consumers to transfer fixed-line numbers to their Net phone service.
664060
Boingo Wireless and Vonage are teaming to provide voice over Wi-Fi service as a complement to traditional VoIP. Initially, the companies will collaborate on a service bundle that combines Vonage&#39;s
502322
AT&amp;T is attracted to Voice over IP because Internet telephony is cheaper to offer to businesses and consumers and requires less upfront investment than the old copper wire and traditional switching networks.