VoIP News: March 2007

Commercial VoIP over power line has been successfully deployed over AMB's network, an electricity utility located in southern Switzerland. The deployment of broadband power line communications (BPL) now means the company can offer VoIP and internet services over its existing electric grid to customers in the Ticino region. AMB says the deployment means it can offer its Wambo (internet speeds of 300kb/s to 1,600 kb/s) and Wambotel (VoIP using standard, off-the-shelf VoIP ATAs [Analog Telephony Adapters]) services at competitive prices.

UK companies are wasting more than £1 billion annually by simply not controlling the cost of communications, a new report claims. The telecoms expense management specialist Aurora Kendrick James says money is wasted as more than 75 per cent of UK firms do not have a corporate telecoms policy to measure, manage and control usage. The company bases its claims on a recent study by Matt Hatton, senior analyst at Yankee Group, which found enterprise telecoms spend in the UK was £5 billion in 2006.

Royal Dutch Shell has announced plans to shift its entire telecoms infrastructure to a VoIP based system. Johan Krebbers, group IT architect at Royal Dutch Shell told the VoiceCon conference that the company plans to host VoIP call control, messaging, collaboration and video for more than 130 sites worldwide at three data centres in North American, Europe and Asia, Computer World reports. "We have many different PBXs out there," the website reports Mr Krebbers as saying.

Digium has announced that the open source VoIP application Asterisk is continuing to gain supporters and has now been embraced by more that 2 million users. The company said that Asterisk's mature feature set and flexible open source license have led to rapidly growing adoption worldwide. Asterisk supports a wide range of TDM protocols for the handling and transmission of voice over traditional telephony interfaces, featuring VoIP packet protocols such as SIP and IAX among others.

A new report has found that fixed-mobile convergence when combined with VoIP can save spending on voice services by as much as 30 per cent. The FixedMobile Convergence in the Enterprise Voice Market report published by Analysys found that in the face of such cost reductions mobile network operators will have to work hard to slow the decline in enterprise voice revenues as companies bypass their more expensive services.