VoIP News: IP PBX

A rundown of the most innovative producers of VoIP phones of all time has ranked the Asterisk IP PBX within the top two. Tom Keating writes on his TMCnet blog that he discovered the open-source IP PBX in 2001 during his hunt for a platform compatible with Linux. Digium, subtitled as "the Asterisk company", formed soon after Mr Keating discovered Asterisk - and he notes how the features list has grown rapidly in the years since.

Asterisk solutions could help companies concerned about becoming 'locked in' with a particular vendor for the long term to adopt IP telephony solutions without having to commit to one provider indefinitely. The open-source nature of Asterisk solutions means a broad range of different companies can develop add-ons and upgrades for the system, enabling new features as time goes on. Such an approach could satisfy the IT leaders concerned about vendor lock-in, as discovered by the London School of Economics (LSE) in a recent cloud computing survey.

IP telephony solutions could be one way for entertainment media companies to keep pace with the digital trend. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the companies that hope to keep track with consumers' adoption of modern media formats must be ready to do so through technological innovation of their own. "Technology is again becoming a differentiator of competitive advantage within media companies," the analyst reports.

Digium's IP PBX solution Switchvox hit another milestone this week with the release of version 5. 0 of the unified communications solution. Writing on the Digium Inside the Asterisk blog, Angie Reed, product marketing manager for Switchvox, says its fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) is a key feature in the new version.

On June 8th, the planet looks ahead to a new generation of IP telephony solutions and internet access with the celebration of World IPv6 Day. IPv6 is the solution to the rapidly diminishing availability of IPv4 addresses, which leaves the question of how future devices will be able to identify themselves online. With the new standard, many more machines can be uniquely located via the internet, allowing for the proliferation of mobile computers, smartphones and standalone IP telephony solutions that now connect alongside desktop computers, rather than through them.