Those wondering about the reach and potential for VoIP Telecommunications may be surprised to learn that Yo! Sushi, the Japanese cuisine restaurant chain, is to implement an IP phone system across it’s 35 branches in an attempt to reduce its operational costs.
The company’s current legacy set-up will be replaced with the new technology and plans to extend the VoIP system to a further 15 outlets are planned for the next 12 months.
Through integration with their customer database and maps software, Yo! Sushi hopes to generate savings by routing calls through to it’s London call centre.
Internal communications will be streamlined via a conferencing feature in the new VoIP phone system which will enable regional managers to hold remote meetings with restaurant supervisors thus reducing the need for travel or for employees to subscribe to a third-party service.
A spokesperson for the restaurant chain stated “The ongoing costs of line rental and telephony maintenance were becoming a significant overhead to the business and, as we had plans to double the number of outlets within two years, this was an appropriate time to review our overall telecoms strategy,”
“We expect the system to pay for itself within two years, and believe that we have only scratched the surface of what we think the telephony system can do for us in the future.”
Supermarket Retailer Tesco Plc has launched a service called ‘TalkWiFi’ that allows mobile phone users to make free and low cost VoIP calls over WiFi.
Provided in partnership with Freshtel, the service can be downloaded to Nokia’s N95,N81,E65 and E51 phones with plans to make the service available to other phone models by the end of the year.
The network works by connecting calls made while in an unrestricted WiFi to the Internet thus offering significant savings to the caller.
With TalkWiki, a call to Australia would cost just 1.5p per minute while calls to other TalkWifi customers are free of charge, even if the other user happens to be abroad.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has approved the 802.11r Wi-Fi protocol, which allows Wi-Fi enabled devices to pass between WLAN access points more quickly.
The new standard aims to improve the quality and security of VoIP services. With existing protocols, swapping from one access point to another takes considerable amount of time.
The 802.11r standard, also known as Fast Basic Service Set Transition, takes less than 50 milliseconds to enable the security authentication of the service, during the course of switching over. This is less than half the time taken by existing standards.
The 802.11r standard was developed in 2004 and approval for publishing the final draft of the standard was given by the 802.11r task group in January.
