Hosted VoIP’s Worst Nightmare

The recent news of AT&T’s acquisition offer for T-Mobile USA got me thinking (and talking) about the small business voice space.

The small business space is very unique. It’s very unique because every single business is different and is looking for different things out of their voice service.

Two trends that have definitely emerged within space – regardless of the type of small business – is the need for flexibility and greater accessibility of voice service.
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VoIP QoS Monitoring With VoIP Spear

If you’ve been around VoIP long enough you know that one of the most consistent hurdles is guaranteeing a quality call experience at any time.

Everyone has heard of the VoIP horror stories related to quality of service (QoS) related to things such as packet loss, latency and jitter. While VoIP services have continued to improve and more folks have begun to follow best practices when deploying VoIP to avoid these issues, service quality is still a primary concern for anyone using VoIP.
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Vonage does sound good

Here goes Vonage again.

The oft criticized VoIP provider recently launched their latest ad campaign. And they seem to gearing up for a push on none other than call quality.

Gone are the heavy “save money” overtones in favor for a message of “sounds good”, an obvious play on the combination of savings AND call quality.
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A Hosted VoIP Provider’s Missed Opportunity: Surveillance

IP surveillance.

Like VoIP, IP surveillance is rapidly turning the traditional surveillance technologies on it’s ear. Legacy equipment manufacturers and VAR’s are quickly learning that the move to IP based solutions is inevitable. The same joys of IP based voice communications are realized with IP based surveillance. Lower TCO, increased scalability, more/better access to the technology and of course more functionality. As I have stated before, the parallels between the current surveillance marketplace and the voice marketplace are strikingly similar.

But unlike the VoIP marketplace, there are not a ton of players in the hosted IP surveillance game. Honestly, there are only two or three. The hosted IP surveillance model is very similar to that of hosted VoIP, yet the technology is more mature, in-demand and less sensitive to service interruptions that plague many types IP communications. With a hosted IP surveillance solution, a customer receives a set number of IP cameras (end-points) that are self-installed at their facility (or home). The control of the camera is hosted “in the cloud” accessible through an account management portal via a web browser. Customer receive the same sort of features and functionality they would with a premise based DVR or network video recorder, but don’t have to absorb the cost all at once. There is an up-front equipment fee and a monthly recurring charge for “camera management”.

In many ways, it is the exact same business model of today’s hosted VoIP providers…or maybe it is a complimentary business that presents an opportunity for current hosted VoIP providers to diversify their business model (and revenue streams) while providing an additional value.

So, with the cries for innovation, additional value and no more me-too’s, is hosted IP surveillance an opportunity that every hosted VoIP provider is currently missing out on?

What? Huh? You Need to Optimize Your Router For VoIP

PC World has a great little piece on how to optimize your router to put some priority on your voice traffic in order to prevent packet loss. While it is specific to Linksys routers it is well worth the read.

It is interesting to see residential users and the publications that cater to them, are finally clued into to creating favorably environments for VoIP calling.

Yoomba: Email to Email Phone Calls and Chat

Yoomba Offers Free Email to Email Communications

Imagine the ability to instantly connect with all of your contacts without having to get a new phone number, import contacts, export contacts or even download a complicated messenger software? That is what Yoomba offers. Yoomba gives individuals unique one-touch buttons which appear in their preferred email application, making connecting to anyone just one click away. With Yoomba you also have access to your most popular contacts, at a glance. The best thing is that it works on multiple platforms!

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SunRocket No Longer Accepting New Customers

Another Signal That There is Not Much Life Left at SunRocket

Om Malik is reporting that SunRocket is no longer accepting new customers. It seems the trouble single play plain old VoIP service provider has run out of devices. Not too long ago, I was working with a hardware vendor on winning SunRocket’s CPE business. While the deal never went through, in hindsight, it probably best that it didn’t. It would have hurt to be left holding the unpaid bill for the devices.

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