Small Business VoIP Requirements List

November 3, 2008 by Garrett Smith

If you are a small business it is tempting to simply throw caution to the wind when selecting the right VoIP solution. Even though VoIP is touted as a way for a small business to sound like a “big one”, in order to get the most for a VoIP solution, small businesses must still prepare for a VoIP deployment like a big company would.

If you are like most who work for a small business, you probably wear multiple hats and the “VoIP Expert” hat is probably one you don’t own, so let me lend you mine for a few minutes and walk you through a basic set of requirements that need to be addressed prior to deploying VoIP within your small business.

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Need an IP PBX? 101104 Alternatives to Cisco and Avaya.

October 31, 2008 by Garrett Smith

A few months ago I began compiling a list of IP PBX products and other telephony platforms that are either directly Open Source, or are commercial products that have spawned from various open source projects. These include core open source platforms like Asterisk, Freeswitch and FreePBX, as well as commercial products developed and maintained by “for profit” companies.

I stopped counting at 101. It’s amazing to see the sheer range of choice out there for businesses and individuals seeking a VoIP communications solution. If you have developed or currently market a VoIP capable IP PBX product, and I neglected to mention you, please feel free to add your comments and I will put you on the list.

Asterisk Open Source PBX Straight out of Huntsville, AL….the original Asterisk, Open Source PBX project, created by Mark Spencer and maintained by Digium.

Asterisk Business Edition Huntsville, AL – Commercial PBX software derived from Asterisk Open Source.

AastraLink Pro160 PBX Hardware Appliance manufactured by Aastra Telecom of Canada, runs Asterisk, targeted toward 25 User and Under crowd.

AsteriskNow Huntsville, AL – Digium developed graphical UI for Asterisk Open Source PBX.

Integrics EnswitchCarrier class, muli-tenant hosted PBX. Based in UK.

FreePBX Kirkland, WA – Open Source, Full-Featured IP PBXweb application and system management utility.

FreeSwitch McAlester, OK – Open Source telephony platform created by Anthony Minnesale Minessale (Sorry Anthony!).

Jazinga Toronto, Ontario Canada – IP PBX Appliance targeting small business users, based in open source.

PhoneBochs Duluth, MN – Hardware appliance designed to host Trixbox CE.

Sark UCS PBX UK – Linux Mitel SME / Asterisk based IP PBX appliance.

PBXInAFlash North Carolina – Linux / Asterisk based IP PBX created by Ward Mundy.

Trixbox Community Edition Los Angeles, CA – Formerly Asterisk @ Home, Linux / Asterisk based IP PBX platform created by Andrew Gillis. Acquired by Fonality.

Trixbox Pro Los Angeles, CA – Commercial IP PBX appliance built off Trixbox / Asterisk / FreePBX.

Fonality PBXTra Los Angeles, CA – Commercial IP PBX derived from open source.

NorLeaf Hi-Brid IP PBX Quebec, Canada – Commercial IP PBX platform built off Asterisk Open Source PBX.

Evolution Callcenter Barcelona, Spain – Callcenter focused telephony platform based on open source.

Switchvox San Diego, CA – Commercial IP PBX platform based on Asterisk Open Source.

QueueMetrics San Pietro, Switzerland – Telephony and Call Monitoring solution built on Asterisk Open Source.

Intuitive Voice Evolution PBX Phoenix, AZ – Commercial IP PBX appliance based on Asterisk Open Source.

Abraxas Ljubljana, Slovenia – Asterisk based telephony platform.

Askozia PBX Platte, South Dakota – Asterisk based IP PBX platform.

EasyPBX Italy – IP PBX software developed from Asterisk Open Source.

Vox Office Dublin, Ireland – SoftPBX derived from Asterisk Open Source.

Bicom System PBXWare San Ysidro, CA – Offering a range of telephony solutions derived from Open Source.

YATE (Yet Another Telephony Engine) Bucharest, Romanio – Open Source telephony platform.

2CanCall PBX UK – IP PBX built off Open Source dna.

Resonance Networks Australia – offering a range of telephony solutions built from Open Source.

EasySpeak PBX Middleton, WI – SMB IP PBX built from Open Source Asterisk.

SpiderStar Stuttgart, Germany – Commercial IP PBX platform derived from Open Source.

Xoasis Prodigy PBX Seattle, WA – IP PBX appliance products developed from Open Source roots.

CallWeaver Open Source IP PBX derived from Asterisk Open Source.

VoIP Connection VS1 Indian Harbour Beach, FL – Commercial IP PBX Appliance built off Asterisk Open Source.

Schmooze Appliance Neenah, WI – Commercial IP PBX appliance built off Open Source.

PBXpress BC, Canada – Unix Based IP PBX derived from Open Source.

ThirdLane IP PBX and Multi-Tenant User Interface software for Asterisk Open Source PBX, designed by Alex Epshteyn.

GPBX Neuwied, Germany – Asterisk Based IP PBX Appliance.

SerComm Taipei, Taiwan – Offering a range of telephony solutions based on Open Source.

Astimax Germany based firm offering commercial IP PBX based on Open Source.

Vercom IPLex Asterisk based IP PBX products.

iAreaPhone Staten Island, NY – Offering a range of telephony products with roots in Open Source.

Contaque India – IP PBX and Predictive Dialer solutions based on Asterisk Open Source PBX.

StarFace PBX Germany – Asterisk based commercial IP PBX products.

Aretta NetPBX Roswell, GA – Commercial telephony solutions derived from Open Source.

SugarPound Asterisk based IP PBX with integrated SugarCRM features.

Kamailio (Formerly OpenSER) – Open source telephony platform.

PBX4Linux Germany – Open Source IP PBX developed from Asterisk.

Hanashi Buenos Aires, Argentina – Commercial IP PBX platform derived from Open Source.

LuxSys Korea – Offering a range of telephony products based on Open Source.

VoISpeed UK – Business IP telephony solutions built from Open Source.

Advantage PBX Asterisk based commercial IP PBX products.

Rhino Ceros Tempe, AZ – IP PBX hardware appliance designed to host Trixbox CE and other Open Source IP PBX software.

Rhinosterisk Tempe, AZ – Open source IP PBX software built from Asterisk.

Druid Open source IP PBX software derived from Asterisk.

MySIPSwitch Ireland – Open Source IP PBX software.

ConduIT New Zealand – Asterisk based IP PBX platform.

IPCortex UK – Commercial IP PBX appliance derived from Open Source.

Astium Germany – Open Source IP PBX

VoIPEntity Switzerland – Commercial IP PBX derived from Asterisk Open Source.

MagicLink China – Commercial PBX products built from Open Source.

OpenPBX Australia – Commercial telephony products built off Open Source.

Elastix – Ecuador – Open source IP PBX platform forked from Asterisk.

VMI Spydur Hialeah, FL – Commercial IP PBX products derived from Open Source.

Digantel Indianapolis, IN – Telephony products built from Asterisk and FreePBX.

TAA VDex40 San Diego, CA – Asterisk based IP PBX Appliance.

NetStar PBX Czech Republic – Offering a range of telephony products with roots in Open Source.

2N Omega PBX Czech Republic – Asterisk based IP PBX appliance.

4PSA VoIPNow Free IP PBX software

Bayonne GNU Open Source telephony platform.

Belco PBX Korea – Commercial IP PBX products derived from Open Source.

CenIP Buenos Aires, Argentina – Commercial IP PBX derived from Open Source.

Daktela PBX Czech Republic – Commercial IP PBX derived from Open Source.

Datera Callex Commercial IP PBX derived from Open Source.

Dialexia Quebec, Canada – Commercial IP PBX derived from Open Source.

EasyVoxBox Asterisk based IP PBX platform.

Critical Links EdgeBox Fairfield, NJ – Commercial IP PBX appliance derived from Asterisk Open Source.

Xorcom Phoenix, AZ – Asterisk based IP PBX hardware appliances.

Pika Warp Appliance Embedded hardware Asterisk appliance.

Aztech Embedded hardware Asterisk appliance.

AYC Telecom IPCTS Open Source based converged telephony system.

YeaStar BizSky China – Asterisk based IP PBX appliance.

Xeepe Open source based IP PBX product.

TigerPBX China – Embedded hardware Asterisk appliance.

3Com Asterisk Appliance Asterisk Open Source IP PBX embedded on 3Com hardware.

VoiceRD Open source based IP PBX appliance.

Micro Server Embedded hardware Asterisk appliance.

PartySIP Open Source SIP server.

PBXes Asterisk based open source IP PBX.

Sutus Commercial IP PBX converged hardware appliance with roots in Open Source.

Aheeva Asterisk based call center solutions.

Telesis PX24U Commercial IP PBX converged hardware appliance with roots in Open Source.

EntVoice – Reader Mitul Limbani’s company EntVoice markets a commercial IP PBX solution based upon Asterisk and several other open source components.

Nortel / Pingtel Another reader pointed out that Nortel belongs on my list, and I agree they do with their recent acquisition of Pingtel, and the incorporation of Pingtel / SIPExecs open source technology into their UC strategy.

ZED3 Integrated PABX appliance running software based in Open Source.

A Couple of Updates From the Customer Experience Front

October 30, 2008 by Ben Sayers

As most of you who are reading this already know, a little less than two month’s ago we underwent a major upgrade of our ecommerce platform – the one that powers the world’s most popular VoIP store, VoIPSupply.com. Similar to what many other businesses experience when tearing out a piece of business infrastructure and replacing it with something new, things didn’t go 100% according to the plan.

Hey, we never said we were perfect.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of taking part in an undertaking such as this, it is essentially the equivalent of flipping a dilapidated home (or retail store). In essence, you don’t always know everything that is right, wrong or indifferent about the structure, until, well, you go out and actually get down to it.

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Polycom SIP Firmware 3.1 Released: What’s in it for me?

by Garrett Smith

Polycom recently announced the release of SIP Firmware version 3.1 for their popular SoundPoint IP Series telephones. Feature enhancements in this release include:

Enhanced Feature Keys
Configurable Telephony Soft Keys
Server driven message display to user
Enhanced ‘Dialog Package’ BLF
Electronic Hookswitch compatibility with Plantronics Headsets
Programmable Soft Keys
Telephony Control and Status API
Push Capability
XHTML browser link in a SIP message
User activated restart for faster configuration changes
De-Regsiter on a reboot

An updated BootRom 4.1.1 and full release notes are available from The Polycom Resource Center

Demystifying Linksys Part Numbers

October 29, 2008 by Garrett Smith

SD. RV0. SPA. ABC..DEF…ugh.

If you are like me, you probably want to pull your hair out when confronted by the alphabet soup of product names that today’s manufacturers cook-up. Well, before you go and stock up on Rogaine, let’s take a look at demystifying at least one manufacturer’s part numbers – Linksys.

Demystifying Linksys Part Numbers

The funniest thing about product names is that on the surface they don’t seem to make much sense until you actually learn what the name conventions mean. Then, ironically, they are actually pretty easy to understand and remember. Now, if you are not a “power user” like me, the following information probably won’t help you much unless you save this as a reference (please do), so don’t feel like you have to pull an all-nighter to retain this information. However, if you do find yourself working with the Linksys product line often, it might me smart to spend a few minutes learning the information below.

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9 Steps to Selecting an IP Phone

October 27, 2008 by Garrett Smith

An IP Phone – It’s just a phone.

Really, there’s no way it could be difficult to select the right one for your needs, right?

Well, not exactly.

With over 200 different IP Phones on the market today, selecting the right IP Phone for your needs isn’t as easy as it might appear. That shouldn’t scare you away though – selecting the right IP Phone doesn’t have to be a painful experience. In fact, you probably don’t need to know much about IP Phone’s in order select the right one for your current and future needs, so if you are starting at the very beginning don’t worry – you just need to conduct a basic IP Phone needs assessment.

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Is Mobile VoIP Ready For Your Business?

October 24, 2008 by Garrett Smith

A few weeks ago, I was interviewed for a TechTarget piece on Mobile VoIP.

One of the set’s of questions that I was asked had to deal with the business use case for Mobile VoIP – or more specifically – is Mobile VoIP ready for the small medium business or even the enterprise? Well, the answer to that questions is both yes and no depending on where your business lies on the technology adoption curve.

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Get a FREE Linksys WRT54GL

by Garrett Smith

A quick pause from our normal posting in order to help pay the bills.

We are currently giving away a FREE Linksys WRT54GL ($70 dollar value) with the purchase of the much talked about QuickPhones QA-342. There is no limit, so technically you could buy 50 QuickPhones QA-342’s and get 50 FREE Linksys WRT54GL‘s – with Christmas around the corner these might make a great gift.

How to Display Flickr Photos on your Polycom IP Phone

October 22, 2008 by Garrett Smith

Photo sharing service Flickr is arguably the most popular such service on the web (sorry Photobucket :(). I’m sure many of our readers use Flickr to share photos with friends and family.

I digress….back when Linksys first showed me their SPA-962 IP Phone prior to its release, one of the bells and whistles they had built into the product was the ability to serve still images from the network to the color LCD display on the phone. You can even poll images show that they change at random on a 5 second interval, much like the inexpensive LCD “picture frames” that seem to be everywhere these days.

At the time, I remarked that was a neat feature, but wouldn’t it be cool to take it a step further and build a widget to serve images directly from Flickr. Sadly it remained just an idea, but now it looks like Polycom had the same idea and ran with it. Today I caught wind of a widget available on Netvibes called Flickr Photo on IP Phone. This little applet apparently leverages the XML toolkit available for Polycom SoundPoint IP Phones to pull in photo content over the web from your Flickr photostream and display it on your Polycom IP Phone as a slide show screen saver when your phone is idle.

Many IP phones, including Polycom and Aastra, have XML capabilities and can pull in a wide variety of content served up from the LAN or WAN. XML is also a flexible tool for building value-added applications that reside on the phone….basic things like stock tickers, weather and traffic update feeds….and more advanced apps like time and attendance loggers. The average user has probably given little throught to leveraging XML on their office phone….perhaps this widget from Polycom will help push user awareness and adoption. We’ll give this a shot in the lab in the next few days and let you know how it works. Perhaps we can even modify the application to pull content from iCanHasCheezBurger.

The Tides Are Turning For Mobile VoIP

by Garrett Smith

The good folks at fring, a mobile internet service and community that allows users to access and interact with a variety of communication services such as Skype®, MSN® Messenger, Google Talk™, ICQ, SIP, Twitter, Yahoo!™, AIM® and any SIP provider, contacted me yesterday to announce that they had inked a deal with Austria’s leading mobile network operator, mobikom, to provide a custom version of the fring application for mobikom. According to fring, and my own accounts, this is the first ever deal between a Mobile VoIP operator and a Mobile Operator.

This is HUGE news for the Mobile VoIP sector as it was thought that Mobile operators would fight Mobile VoIP operators to the death – rather than partner. As many of you mobile users out there know, mobile operators aren’t exactly the cheery bunch – they fight tooth and nail for every penny they can suck out of you, so the fact even one mobile operator has “seen the light” is an extremely positive sign and signals big things for the Mobile VoIP industry. As Mobile VoIP becomes more ubiquitous and mobile users become more and more exposed to Mobile VoIP offerings (and therefore more price sensitive), one can expect that mobile network operators will face increased pressure from consumers and prosumers alike to offer Mobile VoIP services.

Small Business VoIP Requirements List

(more…)

Need an IP PBX? 101104 Alternatives to Cisco and Avaya.

A Couple of Updates From the Customer Experience Front

Polycom SIP Firmware 3.1 Released: What’s in it for me?

Demystifying Linksys Part Numbers

Demystifying Linksys Part Numbers

(more…)

9 Steps to Selecting an IP Phone

Is Mobile VoIP Ready For Your Business?

Get a FREE Linksys WRT54GL

How to Display Flickr Photos on your Polycom IP Phone

The Tides Are Turning For Mobile VoIP

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