VoIP

This is a VoIP emergency. Service providers pay attention!

May 2, 2008

I was sad to hear the news about Elijah Luck, a young Calgary toddler, who passed away Tuesday evening after an ambulance was dispatched to the wrong 9-1-1 address by their VoIP provider. The ambulance was sent to the Luck’s previous address in Mississauga, Ontario, several provinces away because Comwave did not have the correct [...]

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Virus Targets Skype Users

September 10, 2007

Less than one month ago, a Skype outage that affected more than 200 million users during a 48 hour period during prevented Skype users from making calls and even signing on. In the end, Skype reported the outage was caused by a large number of users rebooting their computers after a Windows update, but that [...]

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Skype Reminds Users It’s not VoIP for Business

August 17, 2007

Skype took a tough hit yesterday after a software bug took out its 200 million peer to peer users for more than 20 hours. With 220 million subscribers an 9 million users online at any given time, this must have been a wake-up call for hardcore Skype business users that rely on the tool to [...]

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I’m in the Globe and Mail Business Section Today

May 17, 2007

Globe and Mail reporter, Paul Lima, asked if I would speak with him about a piece he was writing about the state of unified messaging. The article was printed in today’s Globe in the business section, titled “Here, There and Everywhere“. It’s an exciting time for me and the team at HIP. The technology we’re [...]

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Where’s the Pied Piper when the Telcos Need Him?

May 13, 2007

These photos were sent to me by a friend working for a local Toronto CLEC. During a visit to troubleshoot audio problems with calls passing through their phone switch, the technician found a simple diagnosis to their problem. Their best guess was this little guy was looking for somewhere warm to sleep when his furry [...]

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“Calling Doctor Howard”: Broadcast Paging for Hosted PBX

April 30, 2007

Last week we enabled a new feature of our phone switch called broadcast paging and I’m so happy with its functionality and the problems it will solve for our customers, I felt compelled to share. Broadcast paging is a feature that lets a user dial a phone extension and “broadcast” their message to the speaker [...]

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Hosted PBX: VoIP not “voice over Internet”

November 18, 2006

Yes, there is a difference. During lunch at Jack Astor’s on Friday, my lunch partner told me a CEO friend for a large corporation was unhappy with his VoIP service at home. Although the VoIP provider name wasn’t known, it’s a common story – Poor call quality, dropped calls, jitter, latency. I told him I wasn’t surprised. “Well, [...]

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Asterisk in the Enterprise? Be Mindful About IT’s Skillset

September 26, 2006

Alec Saunders, a favourite blogger of mine, writes a good post about Asterisk titled: Nerdy, Geeky and Cheap. In his article, Alec talks about VoIP Girl’s post on Canadian VoIP Providers and an important option he feels she missed on her list: free open source Asterisk PBX using Unlimitel’s SIP trunking service. I think Alec was right on the [...]

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How many VoIP lines can you have over DSL?

September 19, 2006

The number of simultaneous VoIP calls that can be placed over DSL depends largely on two things: Your available upstream DSL bandwidth (generally 640-800Kb upstream) The codec* your VoIP provider permits you to use (normally G.729a or G.711). I won’t get into the details of DSL or the codecs, because the real question is how many lines [...]

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Living and Breathing IP – for Voice and Data

June 2, 2006

It’s finally happened: My company has *officially* moved to the hosted PBX platform we’ve been building since last year. The grey hairs I’m not too happy about, but I have to say, the countless hours spent planning, documenting, specifying, budgeting and testing (lots of testing) have been well worth it. In much the same way [...]

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