European business telephony
Monday, June 25th, 2007
Let me be totally honest with you. I’m on holiday on an island near Italy and internet connectivity is far from ubiquitous. I struck a deal for Vodafone mobile internet but there’s not really a lot of coverage over here, much less 3G. Luckily, a hotel nearby just gave me their WEP password without wanting anything in return. Even though I’m not even staying there. So here’s a link to a great hotel in Procida if you’re ever going there. But I wanted to point you to some info about the European business telephony market.
We’ve had our coverage about setting up VoIP in your business on this newborn blog. But when the UK’s largest incumbent operator starts releasing “Understanding VoIP for business” our eyebrows are rising. Finding coverage on business VoIP isn’t nearly as easy as consumer VoIP. Probably because the uptake of VoIP in business environments is usually a little more thought out than on the consumer side and therefore also a little slower.
I was going to keep this juicy nugget until friday, but since I forgot posting yesterday. You’re getting some extra VoIP goodness today. Generally I tend to avoid a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) spreading articles about VoIP security, because they generally do just that. Yes, moving your voice communication to a data network requires planning and it may even increase the security risk. However, a lot of those problems can easily be avoided by some basic security measures.
Techtionary wrote a whitepaper for XO communications detailing the 10 steps to a successful VoIP implementation. While I think it is a little biased, XO’s name is mentioned 48 times on just 15 pages - it raises some interesting points. For those not interested in reading the entire whitepaper, here’s a short list of the 10 steps.
I haven’t really mentioned Mark Spencer on this blog anywhere. But if you don’t know who he is, you should. He is the original creator of Asterisk and founder of Digium. While I’ve never met him in person, we owe a great deal to him for creating Asterisk, since Sipcat would never exist without it.