convergence

Service providers name Cisco as a top VoIP vendor

Cisco Subnet — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:06:19 -0400

Cisco emerged as the most familiar manufacturer cited by service providers who were questioned about their perceptions of the main VoIP vendors. Cisco, Acme Packets, Alcatel-Lucent and Sonus, were identified as the "top VoIP equipment manufacturers," by service providers interviewed by Infonetics Research. However Cisco lost to Sonus in scoring the highest rating for technology, product roadmap, security, management, and price-to-performance ratio. The survey was conducted for Infonetics' Service Provider Plans for VoIP report.

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Slowdown in Vegas

Craig Mathias — Mon, 05 May 2008 17:41:13 -0400

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

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Sneak peek of book 'Voice over IP Fundamentals, 2nd Edition'

Cisco Subnet — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:22:32 -0400

This week's sneak peek of a Cisco Press book is Voice over IP Fundamentals, 2nd Edition by Jonathan Davidson, James Peters, Manoj Bhatia, Satish Kalidindi, and Sudipto Mukherjee. The book explains how a basic IP telephony infrastructure is built and works today, major concepts concerning voice and data networking, and transmission of voice over data networks.

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Cisco plans 'user-count' upgrades for small business unified communications platform

Cisco Subnet — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:29:31 -0400

It turns out that Cisco's Unified Communication 500 Series for small businessses isn't being upgraded to support 96 users from the current 52 users, as initially reported in a blog posting by IT consulting firm SADA Systems. Instead, Cisco plans to introduce license-based “user count” upgrades for all the currently shipping UC 500 Series, according to a Cisco clarification published by SADA Friday.

According to information from the UC product manager at Cisco, and posted on the SADA site:

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IBM to spend $1B prizing Cisco's convergence customers away

Cisco Subnet — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:00:47 -0400

Watch out Cisco, IBM is after your lunch. According to a snippet in Monday's MercuryNews.com, Big Blue plans to "spend more than $1 billion over three years to develop software and services for handling phone calls, messages and videoconferencing online." The investment is a significant increase in what IBM is currently spending on collaboration technologies, Mike Rhodin, head of IBM's Lotus division is cited as saying. IBM is targeting Cisco and Microsoft customers with the results of its big spending plans.

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Siemens targets Cisco TelePresence with lower-cost alternative on a common platform

Cisco Subnet — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:27:03 -0500

Siemens Communications is targeting its OpenScape Video HD video set at Cisco's TelePresence but at the fraction of the cost, writes Australian IT.

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Tools for use with OCS 2007 (part 1 in a series)

Alex Lewis — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:36:28 -0500

Everyone knows about Microsoft's strategic relationships with the big players around OCS; Nortel, Polycom, NEC, etc. However I wanted to focus on some of the smaller third party products around OCS 2007. Each week, for at least a few weeks, I'll try to bring two or three not-so-well-know products to light. Note that I haven't necessarily used these products in a production environment and their mention here does not imply an endorsement... I'm just passing along information.

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Cisco jumps to No. 2 position in enterprise telephony market

Cisco Subnet — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:18:50 -0500

More good news for Cisco from Infonetics Research. The research firm said Cisco jumped from fifth to second position in the top 5 vendors that shipped the most enterprise telephony systems in 2007. In the market for PBX/KTS (key telephone system) equipment that topped $9.6 million in 2007, Cisco "was the only one of [the top 5 vendors] with a meaningful increase in market share," according to Infonetics. The vendors in order are: Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, Siemens, and Alcatel-Lucent.

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IP Voice Trunking - Corporate Risk?

Matthew Nickasch — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:26:55 -0500

We've all heard about the claims of voice trunking over the Internet, be it SIP, H.323, IAX, or a proprietary trunking protocol. It provides for very low origination/termination costs to home users, SMBs, and large corporations. Personally, I utilize quite a few SIP trunks to different providers connected to my Asterisk servers. There's no cost-effective substitute that could even come close to providing PSTN termination at such low costs. Yes, we're all aware of the issues with IP-based voice transport, such as QoS concerns (latency, bandwidth availability, packet loss), as well as cross-carrier outages between providers' IP-to-PRI channel banks, etc. But, I don't think that the security concerns of IP trunking are as well communicated as they should be.

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Growing Up With Convergence

Matthew Nickasch — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:58:45 -0500

Convergence... isn't it beautiful? We've come a long way from the world of TDM telephony, and even farther from the days of pure analog. Now, we're connecting networks of networks of voice, video, and data together. First off, I'm happy to be blogging as part of the NetworkWorld community, especially on the topics of Convergence and Voice Over IP. Since this is my first post, I'll be happy to provide a little bit of information about myself and what I hope to accomplish in the blog.

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Does Cisco's call center system lack high-end scalability?

Cisco Subnet — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:32:51 -0500

If you're a member of LinkedIn you may have seen a question posted by an IT manager at a cable company asking whether anyone has had success with "a full blown Cisco CVP [Customer Voice Portal] to IPCC [IP Contact Center] (latest release) solution utilizing the CTIOS [Cisco Computer Telephony Integration Object Server] soft phone," because he's not come across a success story.

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Cisco unified communications box for small businesses upgraded to support more users

Cisco Subnet — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 19:47:36 -0500

Cisco's Unified Communication 500 Series for small businessses is being upgraded to support 96 users from the current 52 users at any single site or office, reports SADA Systems, an IT consulting firm in its blog. The upgrade, available in March, doubles the number of telephones support by the box. UC 500 was recommended by Cisco Subnet blogger Larry Chaffin as being easy to use and allows customers to use built-in VPN software and the same IP phones as large enterprise users.

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Cisco 'edges out' Adtran in small business VoIP bake-off but doesn't beat Avaya, Fonality

Cisco Subnet — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 18:12:28 -0500

With its focus on the channel, ChannelWeb reviewed small business VoIP offerings in a "bake-off" of gear from Cisco (Smart Business Communications System), Fonality (PBXtra), Avaya (Quick Edition), Nortel (Business Communications Manager 50), and Adtran (NetVanta 7100), and named products from Avaya and Fonality as the most attractive for small businesses.

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Cisco marries Google Android with unified communications for the enterprise

Cisco Subnet — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:21:57 -0500

Could Cisco be next to join Google's Android march? Cisco demonstrated a mobile device that combines Android with unified messaging and enterprise 2.0, reports Dave Greenfield, a principal of STAnalytics, writing in his blog on ZDNet. The keyboardless device "looks remarkably like an Apple iPhone," according Greenfield, and lets users transition calls between mobile device and PC with a swipe of a finger across the phone's touch screen.

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Asterisk plans higher-spec IP PBX, snaps at Cisco's heels

Cisco Subnet — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:20:53 -0500

The open source Asterisk PBX platform has been around for nine years and is snapping at Cisco's heels in the VoIP space. Having enjoyed success as an attractive alternative to pricey IP PBX systems, there is now a spate of commercial vendors that charge for Asterisk professional services, peripherals and software extensions. (Dell reseller Fonality is one of them. See these recent Cisco Subnet blog posts about this vendor: Cisco vs.

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Cisco Subnet's top 10 of 2007

Cisco Subnet — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:03:52 -0500

Cisco Subnet has been following Cisco - the company, its personalities and the individuals who work in the Cisco industry - since we launched the Cisco Subnet Community in February. We're witnessing Cisco morphing into a software firm - with an emphasis on social networking for enterprises - and we've been following its ups and downs as it tries to broaden itself away from relying on its traditional bead-and-butter network plumbing gear. Thank you, dear reader, for joining us on the Cisco ride. We've collected the year's most-read Cisco Subnet Community items for your pleasure.

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7 Cisco bad luck happenings in '07

Cisco Subnet — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:12:31 -0500

Even the best of us has bad days or makes bad decisions, but when Cisco has them or makes them for whatever reason, they get reported widely. Here are our picks of the top-7 bad luck happenings in Ciscoland in the past year, ranging from the departure from Cisco of a high-flying exec to a wireless LAN data flooding to some major problems with Cisco VoIP equipment.

No. 7: The departure of Mike Volpi

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Cisco confirms ability to eavesdrop on remote calls using its VoIP phones

Cisco Subnet — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:17:35 -0500

Cisco confirmed it is possible to eavesdrop on remote conversations using Cisco voIP phones. In its security response, Cisco says: "an attacker with valid Extension Mobility authentication credentials could cause a Cisco Unified IP Phone configured to use the Extension Mobility feature to transmit or receive a Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) audio stream."

Cisco adds that Extension Mobility authentication credentials are not tied to individual IP phones and that "any Extension Mobility account configured on an IP phone's Cisco Unified Communications Manager/CallManager (CUCM) server can be used to perform an eavesdropping attack."

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The Flaw in Femtocells

Craig Mathias — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 08:39:30 -0500

I recently ran into Paul Callahan at Interop New York. I've known Paul for a long time; he was one of the founders of AutoCell Labs, who developed a technology for automatically configuring and optimizing Wi-Fi that I consider to be sheer genius. It really works, but it so far has not caught on; something about added cost, non-standard elements, and other mostly-valid but completely short-sighted considerations. Anyway, Paul is now VP of Business Development at Airvana, a company best known for EV-DO base stations but which really has a much broader view of the wireless world.

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Forbes mag article likes ShoreTel VoIP over Cisco

Cisco Subnet — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 19:55:39 -0500

It appears that a Forbes story is singing the praises of ShoreTel's VoIP offerings, compared to Cisco's.

In a story headlined "ShoreTel: Cisco's Nimble Foe," Forbes writer Nikhil Hutheesing enthuses about ShoreTel's "distributed software architecture hardware platform" that makes it "easier for IT administrators to handle since they can make changes to any location from one single point," compared to Cisco's "server-centric" system.

Hutheesing adds:

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