VoIP News: February 2010

Bournemouth, UK, has received superfast internet as part of the FibreCity Fibre to the Home (FTTH) project. The increase in broadband speeds means that IP telephony solutions could receive a boost. Thinkbroadband has reported that approximately 1,000 homes in the area will soon receive broadband speeds of up to 1Gb per second (1,000Mb/sec).

Mobile operators are now realising they must work with the VoIP provider community or create their own VoIP solutions, according to Informa Telecoms and Media. The global telecoms and media markets business intelligence provider said that mobile operators are "beginning to change their attitude" to VoIP due to consumer demand, telecoms industry news website Telecoms. com reported.

Over one billion people will be mobile workers by the end of this year, according to a forecast from ABI Research. The global market intelligence firm also predicted that the mobile worker population will reach almost 1. 2 billion by 2013 - over one-third of the global workforce.

Businesses no longer need to splash out on specialist handsets when adopting IP telephony solutions, No Jitter has said. This is because "the latest and greatest" features of VoIP phones are now accessible via computers, mobile phones and analogue phones, according to the communications networks blog. Blogger Dave Michels said: "Existing phones and mobile devices represent the biggest threat to the traditional enterprise proprietary phone.

VoIP hardware could be set for a revolution with news from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (Caltech) that they have made a flexible solar cell. Flexible solar cells would allow a variety of applications to draw power while on the move and poses the possibility of cells being built into everyday items, such as clothing or rucksacks. Each flexible solar panel uses one per cent the amount of silicon which goes into a regular solar cell with the same level of output and each panel is five per cent the size of a standard solar cell.