remove the labels – Gadgets and Life

With the network neutrality circus back in town, the use of bogus grass roots groups (aka “astroturf”) is again on the upswing as corporations lobby Uncle Sam to prevent network neutrality legislation. Such misleadingly named groups (grandmothers for network justice?) are used by corporations in every sector to give the illusion of broad consumer support [...]

Back during Verizon’s second quarter earnings call, the company announced they’d be laying off 8,000 employees this year in order to generate some savings. There’s a combination of reasons for the layoffs, including continuing losses of both landline and DSL customers, and Verizon’s continued shift away from more rural markets. Union workers obviously are annoyed, [...]

Late last night VoIP service pioneer Vonage announced a new unlimited calling plan that smells like their answer to Skype’s ever growing foothold in the international calling space. Named “Vonage World”, this new service offering from Vonage offers unlimited flat rate (.99 per month) calling to more than 60 countries, including India, Mexico and China. [...]

Yes that’s right. Unidata, the makers of the popular SIP WiFI phone WPU-7700 have introduced their latest SIP based WiFI phone, but with a big twist…..it supports video!!! May I introduce to you the Unidata SQ-3000… Recently, I had the pleasure of BETA testing a few SQ-3000’s provided by Unidata and wow, was I impressed. [...]

Korean vendor Unidata has just released a new entry into the WiFi VoIP phone market, with a few twists. The Unidata SQ-3000 is a wireless SIP handsets for WiFi 802.11a/b/g network connectivity. We have done some basic testing with the Unidata SQ-3000 in the lab and have successfully registered with several Asterisk based platforms. We [...]

One of our readers recently shared some issues they were having getting the Linksys / Cisco WIP310 WiFi VoIP Phone up and running on Trixbox Pro. Trixbox PRO is the “hybrid hosted” version of Trixbox, quite a bit different from normal Trixbox CE, and SIP setup is much different than a normal Trixbox CE [...] [...]

Aastra’s recent announcement of the 312W 802.11 b/g wireless VoIP phone last week is the latest in a growing number of mobility solutions for VoIP users. As Cory Andrews pointed out in his 2009 WiFi VoIP phone round-up, as soon as some manufacturers pulled out of the wireless VoIP game, new ones have entered. And [...]

Matt Riddell over at VentureVoIP has put together a great list of 35 free applications and bolt-on’s for Asterisk Open Source PBX. Many of these may be familiar to our readers, including FreePBX, FOP (Flash Operator Panel), A2Billing and ViciDial. Others like Asterisk Desktop Assistant and Asterisk.Net were new to me and I [...] Link [...]

It seems that the once in question marriage between open source telephony platform FreeSWITCH and Barracuda Networks is now official. Today both parties announced CudaTel, an open source PBX system built off of the FreeSWITCH platform. Still in BETA, the CudaTel system features a slick, “windows-like” GUI and is jam packed with all of the [...]

If you’ve been following this sector at all for the last decade, you’ll note that the broadband industry has had a hard time even accurately defining what broadband is, much less how we should forge a national policy. The FCC has traditionally defined broadband as anything faster than 200kbps, only recently upgrading that definition to [...]

Vonage has announced that they’re now offering a “Vonage World” service, which provides unlimited calling around the world to more than 60 countries for .99. As part of a clear response to Google Voice Vonage also unveiled a new Vonage Visual Voicemail service, which provides “readable voicemail” delivered via email or SMS text message. As [...]