VoIP Tech Chat

When my little girl went from being a benign, unmoving lump of sleeping, drooling baby to a terroristic unplugging, biting, chewing, eating, swallowing, gagging, breaking, pulling, tugging beast of a toddler, my home decor changed. When we moved into our excessive 4 bed / 2.5 bath home in 2007, we had dreams. We had a guest room, and a Disney room, and my home office taking up about 25% of the under A/C space. When the beast began terrorizing our home, we retreated into a fallback position and isolated her to the safest room in the house, my former office. I was relegated to Read the rest of this entry »

The AP reported today that MagicJack recently became the fastest-growing phone company in the United States. And we thought that only Fred and Patrick were up at 4am to watch those super, high-quality infomercials.

The parent company, YMax Corp out of Palm Beach, Florida, released sales figures showing 8 – 9000 sales per day. The MagicJack device sells for just under 40 dollars and includes a year of free calls within the United States and Canada. An additional year of phone “service” costs an additional $19.95.

Why put service in quotes? Right now, you are unable to transfer your existing number to magicjack; and according to their website, there will be a nominal fee when LNP becomes available.

With a device that requires connection to your home computer to both make and receive phone calls, this service truly has differences with “traditional” VoIP telephone providers such as Vonage, Voip.com, and Packet8. But, at $40 for a year of service, will anyone care? If you care to read more, Michael Graves has a nice little post about Magic Jack on his blog.

No, we’re not talking about another take on the Black Eyed Peas song (Alanis Morissette’s is our favorite). Instead, we’re talking about a new business service from Packet 8.

Voip Trunking provides a method of connecting POTS equipment or conventional telephone equipment with a Voice over Internet (VoIP) network. Vonage, Voip.com, and Packet8 already ship out phones and adapters (or ATAs) for their residential services. These ATAs are essentially VoIP Trunks.

Many companies already offer Business VoIP service to “any” device. For example, both Voip.com and VoicePulse (along with many other providers) offer a BYOD (bring your own device) business service; allowing a user to connect their current equipment to the provider’s network (Voip.com also provides BYOD residential service). Packet 8 however seems to truly embrace the non-voip office. 

Most other providers require some knowledge or existing experience with integration. BYOD plans basically are geared towards a user who knows what they want and can either integrate the service themselves or hire a consultant for assistance. Here’s where Packet 8’s offering differs. VoIP-News reports that Packet 8 will be including installation of the Trunking service to the customer’s system. Of course, this is not free. With installation costs of $1,500.00 (including the internet voip trunk gateway), it may be cheaper to get a consultant to integrate a different provider.

However, for Packet 8 to sell the installation, device, and connectivity as one package — well, that’s a really good idea for a non-tech savvy office.

Dean Collins introduced the Vdex-40 today on the Voip Users Conference. The device provides small business (think 30 or less extensions) with a great tool for lowering phone costs. Simply connect your ATA, IP phone, or SIP device to this embedded Asterisk box and BOOM!, there goes the dynamite.

The included GUI allows for creation of extensions, IVR’s, and many other asterisk features. With 4 ports to connect to existing POTS telephone lines (FXO), the device will work as either a VoIP (internet) gateway, an office PBX, or both. We love the size of this device.

We may have to pick one of these up and put it through the ultimate test — seeing if Fred’s dad can use it.