UK based SynCT Limited has joined TelcoBridges’ Media Gateway Partner Program. Launched by TelcoBridges in early 2010, the Media Gateway Partner Program provides member partners with access to enhanced channel pricing, new sales and training tools, and extensive product collateral that enable those same partners to easily market, sell and support converged network solutions based on TelcoBridges’ Tmedia family of VOIP gateways.

8x8 has received certification from Polycom as a VoIP Interoperability Partner, verifying the interoperability of its hosted IP PBX and unified communications technologies with Polycom SoundPoint IP desktop and SoundStation IP conference phones and SIP software.

Polycom VIP certification of 8x8's technologies was based on comprehensive testing performed in 8x8 labs and evaluation of test results by Polycom engineers to confirm the successful integration and end user deployment of Polycom VoIP phones with 8x8 hosted IP communications solutions. 8x8 began offering the Polycom SoundPoint IP 335 desk phone in October 2010, and recently added the Polycom SoundPoint IP 550 and Polycom SoundPoint IP 670 desk phones and Polycom SoundStation IP 6000 conference phone to its portfolio of IP telephony endpoints.

Intermedia announces promising data coming off the first three months of the company's hosted PBX offering. Customer adoption of hosted PBX, which offers companies business-grade VoIP telephone service integrated with their Exchange email, has doubled month-over-month since the August 2, 2010 launch. One of the first customers to sign on, JJ Buckley Fine Wines, already reports positive results, including improved employee productivity and customer service.

Intermedia's hosted PBX service is VoIP-based and integrates with Intermedia's hosted Exchange email service -- enabling customers to access not only hosted PBX features such as unlimited domestic calling and extension dialing, but also unified communications features such as Voicemail to Email and Click to Call. Companies manage their services from Intermedia's HostPilot Control Panel.

Cisco celebrated a major milestone with the distribution of its 30 millionth Internet Protocol phone to one of the world's largest banking and financial services institutions, HSBC. As part of a standardization strategy to enable a uniform groupwide global standard, HSBC has already deployed over 100,000 Cisco Unified IP Phones across 87 geographic locations.

HSBC is using Cisco's Unified IP phones and Cisco Unified Communications Manager as they have found that standardization, consolidation and simplification further improves system performance, helps increase organizational agility and reduces the cost of supporting infrastructure. In addition, intelligent call routing, a single directory and a standardized dial-plan foster greater employee collaboration to help HSBC develop strategies to serve its customers better. By providing device identity, digital signed images, call tracing, and call recording, Cisco's IP phones provide HSBC with enterprise-level security to keep conversations of a sensitive nature confidential, as well as providing support for various device functions and applications directly on the handsets.

Responding to the need for quality instruction for BroadSoft BroadWorks operations and engineering teams, ECG’s School of VoIP now offers a new course to provide comprehensive training on BroadWorks Call Processing and Troubleshooting. Students enrolled in any School of VoIP class gain new skills working with senior ECG engineers with years of experience in advanced VoIP network design and troubleshooting. These same engineers are also actively providing consulting services to ECG’s clients, so the expertise they bring to the classroom is on the cutting edge of current VoIP technology. ECG has provided BroadWorks network design and implementation since 2002 at dozens of carriers across the US, Canada, and Caribbean.

Voice over IP is becoming increasingly important to service providers and achieving significant penetration of the consumer market according to the latest figures from leading industry analysts Point Topic.

“Over 22% of consumer broadband lines worldwide now come with a Voice over IP service. Passing 100 million subscriptions by the end of 2009 VoIP has continued to grow adding another 12 million subscribers in the first half of 2010,” said Point Topic’s Senior Analyst John Bosnell.

John BosnellThere are some markets now where it is very difficult and not generally cost effective to subscribe to broadband without a VoIP service thrown in. France Telecom for example offer one relatively low speed consumer stand-alone broadband subscription but a wide range of higher speed bundles.

TalkFree recently surpassed 1.0 billion voice minutes and the numbers continue to grow. TalkFree is on a path to surpass 1.5 billion SIP terminated, paid voice minutes over its network in 2010.

Since launching its 1legcall and Zonefone mobile VoIP solutions in 2009, TalkFree’s total voice minutes have grown by an average of 40 percent for five consecutive quarters, making it one of the fastest growing mobile VoIP companies in the world. TalkFree’s mobile dialers are being downloaded all over the globe with heavy concentrations in the Middle East, Africa, Central American and South American markets.

Infonetics Research released excerpts from its SBC Deployment Strategies: Global Service Provider Survey. The report, part of a series on the service provider VoIP and IMS market, captures a strategic overview from a wide range of service providers about applications using session border controllers, important SBC features, security issues, and which vendors are being utilized in the market.

Nimbuzz has surpassed 3.65 billion mobile voice minutes in the last year, and 150,000,000 downloads of its application since launch in May 2008. With 50% of downloads originating from the Nimbuzz.com, Nimbuzz, the new-generation mobile service providing free and low-cost calls and messaging. It is also one of the best performing applications in the popular Ovi and GetJar application stores.

Ovi Store: Five million downloads since launch in the Ovi store from September 2009 to October 1, 2010, making Nimbuzz a global top five application.
GetJar: 45 million downloads (twice as many as Yahoo! Mobile) on GetJar, and the application is number four of the top five most downloaded global applications.

Vocalocity has launched Company Call Recording Service, a new feature available for all VoIP customers. The new service comes after Vocalocity’s slew of product launches in the past few months, part of an ongoing commitment to provide customers with new features to support their continuing small business communications needs.

The new service can be used for both training employees and compliance purposes. The service is simple to use. The account administrator sets up basic rules that define what to record. Once the rules are set, recordings happen automatically – there are no “buttons” to push.

Patton announces a three-way alliance with FaxBack and 3CX that delivers complete, fully-tested and certified-interoperable communications solutions for the new generation of IP-centric enterprise networks.

The alliance offers a set of joint solutions featuring Patton’s SmartNode VoIP gateway routers and 3CX’s software-based IP-PBX interoperating with FaxBack’s NET SatisFAXtion T.38 VoIP fax software or free Microsoft-certified fax-server plug-in for MS-Windows.

The three companies unveiled their joint solutions at ITEXPO in Los Angeles during 4-6 October.

The ninth IP Man adventure video from Broadvox was launched yesterday for the opening of the IT EXPO. It also coincides with the launch of the new Broadvox website at www.broadvox.com.

Echo, who continues to be the enemy of IP communications, has downloaded a virus into the IP PBX which will steal the IP addresses of all members of the IETF. Her Resonance Virus will turn their SIP phones into fragmentation bombs. Check out the video to see how this story ends.

View “IP Man and Metoo Stop the Resonance Virus, with the Help of Ingate’s SIParator,” at www.ipmanadventures.com.

Ooma announces that HD Voice is available on its award-winning Ooma Telo system. This marks the first time consumers can enjoy telephone calls in HD, further enriching the calling experience for those wanting a superior home telephony experience.

Ooma raised the bar on voice quality with the introduction of Ooma PureVoice technology in April, delivering excellent voice quality over substandard or overloaded Internet connections. Now, with the addition of Ooma HD Voice, Ooma Telo users can experience phone calls with twice the fidelity of a standard phone line when calling another Ooma Telo user. Beginning today, the HD Voice update will automatically roll out to all customers with an Ooma Telo.

XO Communications has surpassed one million VoIP customer employee end users, reaching a major milestone in the business VoIP services market.

Through its award-winning business VoIP services portfolio and industry-leading VoIP services bundle, XO IP Flex, XO Communications has solidified its position as the leading provider of VoIP services for businesses.

Voxbone announces new, one-stop support of short messaging service for its direct inward dial numbers. By enabling end users with phone numbers in foreign markets to receive text messages, as well as voice calls, at local rates, the new function takes further advantage of Internet protocol networks' capacity to converge voice and data. It also replaces a multi-step, multi-contract process for Voxbone's carrier and enterprise customers.

Voxbone's support of SMS is starting with phone numbers in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Numbers in other countries within Voxbone's 50-country inventory will be added in the next few months. Using the long-haul transport mechanism of Voxbone's voice service, an SMS message texted to a DID will be routed to Voxbone, which then will deliver the message over its IP network to the end user's provider for ultimate termination, at local texting rates.