Here are a few stories that caught my eye as I'm catching up and getting back in the swing of things.

A Difficult 2007 for Competitive VoIP?

How much worse can things get for competitive voice service providers like Vonage? Quite a bit, especially if you take into account the results of two major cable providers – Comcast and Time Warner – and the recent bundling efforts1 by Verizon and AT&T.

Comcast added2 419,000 new voice customers in the fourth quarter 2006, increasing its net adds from the previous quarter. The cable giant ended the year with 1.9 million voice customers. They plan to add another 2.6 million. Time Warner added 211,000 new voice customers in Q4 2006 and now has 1.9 million customers. [Read full post]

I think my friend Om is dead on the money with regard to consumer VoIP. That's really what he's talking about. The prospects for business VoIP services is much, nuch brighter.

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This from good friend and colleague Rich Tehrani.

The Real Unified Communications Relationship between Microsoft and Nortel

With all the IP communications industry focus on ITEXPO last week it was difficult to get a chance to share my thoughts on happenings from the prior week – especially between Nortel and Microsoft.

I really had a great time in New York listening to Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, and Mike Zafirovski, CEO of Nortel, talk about their collaborative Unified Communications strategy. What you may not know, because you weren’t at the press conference, is just how passionate Steve Ballmer is about communications. He is serious about our market and this could be a very good thing.

When I asked Steve about educating the market about Unified communications he got animated and his eyes lit up. He said, “When you show people this stuff, they get it. It isn’t something abstract like SOA.” I may have paraphrased a bit but that was the gist of his comments. [Read full post]

I take a very different view of Ballmer being so closely involved. I think that's very good for hype and very bad for end users. I remain thoroughly unimpressed by both the talk and the deliverables from Microsoft. I don't agree that Ballmer's enthusiasm will do wonders for the market. It will muddy the waters and put Microsoft's misconceptions at the forefront, creating headaches for us all. But that's just my view.

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Here's something worth note from Shoretel

ShoreTel White Paper Presents Three Approaches to Reliable VoIP Architectures

By Susan J. Campbell
TMCnet Contributing Editor

The benefits that Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) can provide to the enterprises are too great to ignore and many have opted to implement complete VoIP communication systems. However, despite the benefits, VoIP still presents certain challenges in terms of security and reliability.

In the white paper, Voice over IP Reliability: Architecture Matters, prepared by ShoreTel and available on TMC (News - Alert), the company explores the different elements that must be present in order to obtain 99.999 percent availability of VoIP systems. This type of availability is an absolute must for business continuity andShoreTel ( News - Alert) provides three different approaches for consideration. [Read full post]  [MCnet’s White Paper Library]

I had some in depth dealings with Shoretel folks in the past. They're very good at VoIP and have detailed understanding of many of the issues. This paper will be worth reading.

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There are two great disservices vendors can do. One would be over-hyping a problem like SPAM/SPIT. The other would be dismissing it as trivial. I believe Cisco is erring on the side of making too light of this. In an effort to downplay the real threat, they're being too dismissive and setting customers up for other problems.

Cisco: VoIP spam is no big deal
By Cisconet on Mon, 01/29/2007 - 7:04pm

Cisco is not worried about the potential of VoIP spam. ZDNet UK reports that NEC has developed a software add-on to its PBXs, which the company says will stop up to 99% of spam phone calls. But when asked if Cisco has similar plans, Mick Stevens,Cisco U.K.'s security manager said: "We have not seen activity [of this nature] that has put people on the back foot ... We have nothing along the lines of what NEC has developed."

I expect to elaborate on this in a separate post.

Technorati Tags: VoIP, Comcast, Time Warner, Vonage, Verizon, AT&T, unified communications. Microsoft, Nortel, Shoretel, VoIP Architecture, Cisco, VoIP SPAM, SPIT