by Garrett Smith
Thanks for returning. You're a very smart person.
When it comes to consumer VoIP service you can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you want service at low price with more features than a traditional land line it will come with trade-offs.
That’s why Robert Mitchell’s account of his dealings with Vonage’s technical support was interesting to read.
It’s a textbook case on the trade-offs that come with the usage of VoIP. And a look into what VoIP providers deal with when consumers expectations exceed their budgets.
by Garrett Smith
When you’re one of the world’s largest companies and “own” 85% of all IP networks you’re in a powerful position. This is especially true as technology moves from the analog world to the digital, IP world.
One industry that is currently moving from analog to IP, much in the same manner as voice, is video surveillance. Like voice, video surveillance has historically been a closed circuit analog technology.
But with advances in technology, lead by current market leader Axis, IP surveillance has continually gained momentum. Even as the economy has flattened the growth of the IP surveillance industry on the whole, there is no refuting the fact that IP IS the future of surveillance.
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by Garrett Smith
A day or so ago I read a post over at No Jitter by Matt Brunk that cast the IP communications channel as an eroding numbers game. The post was interesting to me as I’ve experienced the continual squeeze on margins through the years. Plus I’ve witnessed the frustrations of channel sales and marketing in today’s environment from working closely with many a manufacturerand service provider.
While Matt’s take on the current state of the IP communications channel is very real, his reasoning for it and resolution for improving it are off.
The present issues within the IP communications channel is not due to a numbers game as Matt suggests, but due to that channel game changing. All due to the Internet.
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by Garrett Smith
T-Mobile is offering unlimited calling to existing customers for $50 per month. If you’re a VoIP provider and news like this isn’t scaring you it should.
For year’s cellular carriers have raped and pillaged customers. Today technology (like VoIP), the economy and savvy consumers have caught up to cellular carriers. And they’re doing something smart about it.
Giving people what they want - unlimited calling at a reasonable rate.
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by Garrett Smith
Fellow Smith On VoIP reader Tshai Levent-Levi has minted a new piece concerning the abuse of the term open source.
You should go read it. It speaks to how marketers are representing open standards as open source. This is something that the open source VoIP community has been talking about for years.
But I don’t think the problem is that the industry doesn’t know what these terms mean.
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by Garrett Smith
A few weeks ago you might have read the article in CIO.com about Open Source in the enterprise. I was lucky enough to be quoted numerous times throughout the article, but I wanted to share with all of you some more of the background information that shaped my remarks.
What follows are my notes and thoughts that were compiled for the article. Hopefully you will find them both insightful and helpful to your business pursuits. Again these are just notes, so please pardon any less than stellar verbose you might find.
Open source telephony and the enterprise
While concerns are still abound enterprises have been using open source telephony solutions for many years. Having personally worked with a dozen large banking institutions over the last five years, mainly using some form of Asterisk (www.asterisk.org) the pioneering open source telephony platform. In addition, if it weren’t for NDA’s, I could run down a “who’s, who” of publicly traded companies and big name private companies using open source telecommunications today.
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