Celebrated at the prestigious London Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, and hosted by legendary comic Ronnie Corbett, the Comms National Awards brought together over 350 of the best companies in the industry.
The Chairman of Judges for this year’s award was Dave Sumner-Smith, Programme Director of the Daily Telegraph Business Club along with Keith Humphries, Director EuroLan Research and John Chapman, Business Development Director IT Europa.
UK resellers of hardware and software IP PBX equipment chose Mitel following an online vote where they were asked to spot the vendors that have helped them the most to grow their business through identifying market opportunities and helping them deliver the solution with proactive sales, marketing and technical support.
Mitel, whose global headquarters are in Canada and the UK office located at Caldicot, has received indeed several awards during the last years. Some of their most popular products such as the Mitel 5340 IP System Telephone show their commitment to ease of use while offering the most innovative features.
Mitel managing director Graham Bevington declared upon collecting the award: “Mitel is about identifying market opportunities and then developing mutually profitable relationships with our channel partners, and this award is a testament to this strategy. As the world of communications moves into a virtualised, software-centric environment, Mitel will continue to adopt a technology leadership position whilst supporting our channel partners every step of the way. It is Mitel’s channel focus that makes the difference.”
Their plans for the future are continuing offering the same quality service, spotting new opportunities, and winning the CNA award next year.
The two new VoIP headsets for internet telephony will make talking over the internet even easier.
The PC 11 and PC 100 combine the usual quality you would expect from Sennheiser and brilliant comfort.
Extremely light, the PC 11 is a single sided headset, designed for making calls wherever your laptop takes you. The PC11 is small enough to fit into a handbag or pocket and is easily adjusted with one hand.
The PC 100 is an in ear headsets with excellent sound quality. You can use this headset with your MP3 player, laptop or desktop PC for gaming, internet telephony and music.
Despite the size of the headsets the sound quality is outstanding and much more akin to the kind of superiority sound that you would expect from larger headsets.
What makes these two Sennheiser headsets even easier to use is the ‘plug and play’ set up. Really! Just take the headset out of the packaging and plug them straight into your laptop or PC to start making calls.
Watch this space to learn more about the new headsets from Sennheiser.
It seems that unified communications is sitting a little on the back burner and struggling to meet its full potential.
In light of this, unified communications providers and now repositioning the technology as a service. In order to do this, companies like Cisco Systems Inc etc will have to work closely with companies like us, who provide hosted voice-over-ip services.
The chat surrounding unified communications is that there are several versions, offering different features depending upon the size of company. Medium sized businesses can expect a mix of customer owned equipment and hosted services, where as for large companies there will be fully hosted options.
Microsoft have recognised Vodafone for providing unified communications.
The award handed to Vodafone is testament to their ability to integrate and deliver VoIP, instant messaging, voice and video conferencing as well as unified messaging services.
Cambridgeshire County Council recently implemented Vodafone’s revolutionary product and vastly improved communications for over 5,000 members of staff.
US VoIP services have topped the $20 billion mark in first half of the year.
It seems that there may have been some truth to VoIP services being an affordable alternative to traditional phone systems.
Businesses and homes have been capitalising on the internet telephone system and more growth is set for the second half of the year.
Home use is still where the majority of the revenue is coming from, with the number of subscribers growing 14% from the end of 2008 through until the first half of 2009.
Businesses are expected to get involved with VoIP more and more as unified communication grows; unifying all company correspondence.
According to TechCrunch Google has acquired skype-like VoIP venture Gizmo5 in a $30 million cash transaction.
Similar to Skype, Gizmo5 allows users to call other Gizmo users at no charge, offers cheap call rates to landlines and mobile phones and allows for SMS and Instant Messaging.
Google has not confirmed or commented on the buyout but the general consensus amongst industry experts is that the deal has indeed been done.
VoIP Watch blog author Andy Abramson considers the search giant’s acquisition a key component of its VoIP strategy. The Gizmo5 technology serves as a PSTN (public switched telephone network) link for Google allowing users to make conventional landline or mobile calls. This, combined with Google’s own Google Voice call management application and Google Talk (its voice/chat application), the path to a whole new all conquering service, “a lot more powerful than Skype” has been laid.
How exactly Google will shape its new masterpiece and what this will mean for consumers is still unclear but Abramson speculates that Google may offer a “free, ad-support phone service”, that is a service that is free and driven by advertising revenue.
Regardless of the details, VoIP is bound to change the face of telecommunications as we know it.
In-Stat expects a huge rise in the popularity of VoIP over the next four years.
In spite of many mobile operators trying to delay the development of online VoIP it is expected to create revenues of £21.3 billion by 2013. The number of users is predicted to rise to 287 million.
Reportlinker.com predicts that VoIP will have a dramatic effect on the way we use mobile phones to communicate. VoIP is no longer just a cost effective way to bypass international call rates but is developing into a sophisticated mobile application.
While some operators try to stall technological advancements in a bid to preserve revenues from international call charges, others such as WiMax and 3G have started harnessing the potential of mobile VoIP. As more operators join, this will further increase the speed and quality of technological development.
Business travelers can benefit dramatically from VoIP as an internet business solution when they are not at the office. This demand is expected to rise significantly in the next year in London, Paris and Berlin.
A great variety of VoIP headsets have been developed specifically to meet the growing demand for this up and coming technology and to provide quality and comfort to business people, professional and amateur talk-aholics alike.
No VoIP apps for iPhone just yet.
Last month, the phone giant AT&T Inc. announced that they would begin allowing iPhone owners to use VoIP calling services on its wireless network. The move came two months after the Federal Communications Commission sent letters to AT&T, Apple and Google Inc. asking why the Google Voice messaging and calling application had not been approved for use on the iPhone.
Everybody applauded this decision, but more than one month has passed by and applications such as Skype, Nimbuzz, Truphone or Fring still don’t work on the iPhone outside of Wi-Fi spots.
Those connections generally have limited mobility and therefore present less of a competitive threat to AT&T’s core wireless calling business. Nevertheless it is seemingly Apple the one who is preventing this to happen. In fact, an AT&A spokesman said: “any questions about why VoIP isn’t 3G enabled should go to Apple.”
Meanwhile Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said in an email that they are still working on the update to their development agreements in order to get VoIP apps on the App Store as soon as possible.
Dubai operators stand to make revenue from VoIP if legalised for international use.
VoIP is currently illegal for international use in Gulf states and punishable by deportation in some cases. However, Dubai has a large number of expatriates creating great demand for VoIP services to make calls across the border. With this in mind the telecommunications industry is currently reviewing the legislation.
Concerns are that if VoIP is legalised, the demand for mobile and fixed-line calls will be heavily reduced, causing the industry financial loss. Analysts, however, point out that a change in legislation may actually be an opportunity for operators to make revenue.
Senior analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media Mohammad Hamza explains that with VoIP legalised for international use operators will be able to claw back some of the revenue currently made from illegal use.
If legalised, VoIP for international use would be run by operators rather than third party providers and instead than being offered as a stand-alone product, it could easily be bundled with other offers allowing for added revenue.
According to the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority mobile and fixed-line call rates would not be affected much as they have already been heavily reduced.
VoIP call rates will be most beneficial when calling another VoIP user. If using VoIP to call a mobile or fixed-line, there will be a charge.
Many people would happily accept using the VoIP service at a small charge And are keen to get this legalised.
VoIP calls made with mobile phones are going to undercut the tariff costs set by mobile phone providers according to a new report.
The findings proved that mobile calls taken using a mobile network will be 15 times cheaper than a 3G mobile phone call. The allure of low cost calls, will of course increase the desire for VoIP.
Those could greatly benefit from VoIP will be those who want to avoid the exorbitant roaming charges from international calling.
The report did point out that 3G VoIP was not reliable as web coverage needed for this services was poor. However, as handset technology improves and web advances are made, 3G VoIP will be become more dependable.
As VoIP takes off, it is likely that mobile phone operators will design their own VoIP applications to capitalise on the technology, as currently the software must be downloaded.
The number of people using their phones to access the web has greatly increased with the figure last year reaching 14.4 million.
