VoIP News: March 2007

Digium has announced the imminent availability of the Asterisk Appliance telephony solution, which aims to combine the cost savings and flexibility of open source with the rapid installation, high reliability and ease-of-use of an appliance. Designed to meet the needs of businesses and branch offices with up to 50 users, Asterisk Appliance can be easily configured by customers or resellers and supports VoIP and traditional analogue phones alike.

New research has revealed a wide interest in VoIP services among German small businesses with 64 per cent of SMEs in the country interested in IP telephony, but traditional carriers could be under threat. According to Savatar Consulting, which conducted the survey, there are parallels between the current German market and the status of the US market in 2005, when traditional operators subsequently lost their market leadership in VoIP services to non-traditional operators.

The increased acceptance of internet protocol (IP) is driving convergence as the leading feature of change in the contact centre environment, according to a new report. A report by Dimension Data has found that 60 per cent of contact centres have introduced IP based or hybrid IP PBX/ACDs so far – a significant increase from the 50 per cent recorded last year. The top two reasons cited for the migration to IP were the flexibility of architecture (69 per cent), closely followed by cost savings (66.

A new broadband satellite service has been launched over Europe that hopes to expand DSL and VoIP coverage to remote rural areas. The SES Astra ASTRA2Connect service has been launched with Filiago as an anchor customer in Germany. SES Astra said a satellite-based DSL infrastructure is the only possibility for many rural regions in Germany to access high-speed DSL-internet.

New online voice over IP (VoIP) services are the greatest threat to fixed-line revenues with 68 percent of respondents identifying VoIP operators as the primary cause of declining revenues, a new report by the Economist Intelligence Unit has revealed. The report found that over 80 per cent of industry executives believe that voice calls will no longer make up the primary revenue source for communications carriers within six years and over half believe this will happen within the next four years.