Linksys, Verizon team on Net telephony
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Verizon will use Linksys phone adapters for its VoIP service, as the market for placing calls over the Net picks up momentum.
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Verizon Communications Inc. yesterday launched a new $7.95-a-month messaging and call-forwarding service that lets people get many of the benefits of advanced Internet phone systems, even if they have only conventional telephone lines and dial-up Net access -- or no computer at all.
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Starting in mid-October AT&amp;T, in partnership with industry-leader Linksys (a division of Cisco Systems (Quote, Chart)), will begin offering Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to home users across the country.
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Linksys will provide broadband-to-phone adapters and, eventually, Wi-Fi equipment.
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Microsoft Corp. and conferencing technology maker Polycom Inc. are teaming up to develop ways for people using PCs and other devices to hold virtual meetings with those using more traditional conferencing equipment.
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NewStep Networks, Inc., the leader in convergence solutions for carriers  and enterprises, was named by NetworkWorld as one of 10 companies to  watch as VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) overtakes traditional  telephony.
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(InfoWorld) - Verizon Communications' Business unit will expand its business-level data platform to parts of Europe and the Asia Pacific region this year, the company said Tuesday. Verizon Business' Converged Packet Architecture (CPA) combines IP (Internet protocol) and traditional data onto one common network-access interface, with the goal of allowing customers to more easily order bandwidth or make other changes. CPA is "broadband on demand" for businesses, said Joseph Cook, Verizon Business' vice president for global network engineering and planning. With the CPA interface, customers can order bandwidth ranging from 512Kbps to 1Gbps, he said. Verizon is pushing into Europe and Asia-Pacific because many multinational corporations have offices there, and they want the same data services available as in the U.S., Cook said. Verizon Business is focused on becoming a top carrier for multinational corporations worldwide, company officials said. In Europe, Verizon Business will deploy CPA in 19 cities this year, including London, Frankfurt, Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Dublin, Madrid, Brussels, and Zurich. In the Asia-Pacific region, Verizon Business is deploying CPA in five locations this year: Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, Melbourne, and Sydney. Verizon Business also continues CPA deployment in the U.S. It now serves 37 cities, and by the end of the year, will add nine more, including New Orleans, Louisiana; Orlando, Florida; and Memphis; and Nashville, Tennessee. CPA supports legacy and newer services including IP, Private IP, Ethernet, private line data, voice traffic, Ethernet Virtual Private Line and Virtual Private LAN Service. It provides a single packet-access connection via an Ethernet interface at speeds up to one gigabit per second, often called GigE. Customers can also use CPA to migrate from older time division multiplexing (TDM) hierarchy to a packet-based technology. Some traditional network access plans require separate lines for voice, video, data and Internet, and require specific bandwidth contracts. CPA, instead, converges all applications on a single carrier-class packet access network and improves operating efficiency, Verizon Business said. MCI, which wasÂ acquired by VerizonÂ in January 2006, launched its CPA service in July 2004. Analysts praised the move, saying it would help business customers move to packet-based services.
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(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.
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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.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco's highly publicized cooperation with Microsoft on unified communications will focus on sharing presence information as well as on voice mail, Web conferencing, and other areas, a Cisco executive said Tuesday. Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer pledged last month to make their companies' technologies work together even as they compete in areas like voice call control. Details of the effort have been scarce, and some critics have called the Webcast promise a mere show of peace between two companies struggling over the lucrative communications and collaboration business. Unified communications is a buzzword for combining all forms of IP communications, making them accessible on a single client or from within applications. Because voice calls, text messaging, videoconferences, and online collaboration can all be controlled by software now, Microsoft is pitted against Cisco and longtime telecommunications vendors in the battle for this market. Rick McConnell, Cisco's executive sponsor of the partnership in the unified communications area, outlined one key objective of the effort in a meeting with reporters on Tuesday. Currently, Cisco federates all the presence and availability information from its unified communications systems and publishes that data to Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS), which can then push it to Microsoft clients. Microsoft doesn't reciprocate. The companies are working on making the same kinds of information go from Microsoft's software into Cisco's, said McConnell, who is vice president and general manager of Cisco's Unified Communications Business Unit. The way it is now, if an enterprise uses Cisco's Unified Communications Manager call control software and an employee picks up the phone, a colleague's Microsoft Office Communicator messaging client will show that employee as being on the phone. But if an employee indicated in Office Communicator that she was away from her desk, that information wouldn't show up on a colleague's Cisco IP phone. Making federated presence work both ways will make that possible, McConnell said. Cries for cooperation are rampant among Cisco's customers, according to McConnell. "I'm on the phone with at least one customer per day ... that's asking us about our Microsoft integration roadmap," McConnell said. Cisco's network domination and Microsoft's software role make that inevitable. "We're going to interoperate, frankly, in almost every account that we participate in," he said. "We have a deep interoperability roadmap, we'll deliver against that roadmap, and then the customer gets to pick," McConnell said. Most customers so far have chosen Microsoft for client software and Cisco for call control processing and multimedia conferencing, and he expects that to continue. Senior Cisco and Microsoft leaders in unified communications meet at least quarterly and typically more often, he said. But McConnell didn't mince words when discussing Microsoft as a competitor. The software giant has taken limited steps to share users' presence and availability information because doing so would let users adopt any kind of unified communications client, and Microsoft wants to own all the clients, he said. And Microsoft's forays into call management are weak compared with Cisco's more seasoned offerings, he said. "I think it's going to be some time before Microsoft really gets call control right," McConnell said.
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Vonage HoldingsÂ on Tuesday announced it has partnered with two companies to offer wireless telephone handsets for its VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) service.
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Philadelphia and Verizon Communications Inc. were nearing an agreement Tuesday that would allow the city to provide wireless Internet access as a municipal service, even if Gov. Ed Rendell signs legislation to give Verizon the power to pre-empt the project.
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Verizon Communications on Tuesday launched its Iobi service that merges regular telephone lines with Internet-based features such as voice messages available through e-mail and automatic call forwarding.
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The service, called BroadbandAccess, allows Verizon Wireless customers to download data to mobile devices at the same speed provided by a broadband connection at a work or home computer.
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Two startups, and not the better-known Skype, are making a splash with mobile voice-over-IP capabilities.
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Verizon Wireless, a venture of Verizon  Communications Inc.  and Vodafone Group Plc  said  on Thursday it has been working with five communications  technology providers on developing the next generation of  wireless Internet services.
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Intel Corp. and Linksys, a division of Cisco Systems Inc., yesterday announced the delivery of software that the companies hope will simplify the deployment of Wi-Fi networks for residential and small business users.