On the font page of the Realtime VoIP Community we show an industry news watch that list some important headlines with links to the stories. Inside the community there's also a VoIP Industry News feed. With those resources, I try here in the blog to focus on expanding on ones I think are especially noteworthy. Today's a pretty interesting news days because there are several articles in the feeds that also warrant attention.

I can't comment on all of them right now, but thought I'd at least share what I saw in my reading today that looks really noteworthy for one reason or another.

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BlackBerry VoIP over WLAN Solution on Display

Research In Motion Limited (RIM) is showcasing the BlackBerry WLAN solution, including the 802.11-enabled BlackBerry 7270 handheld, at VoiceCon 2006.

The BlackBerry 7270 wireless handheld connects through BlackBerry Enterprise Server to provide support for push-based email, instant messaging (IM), organizer, Internet and intranet applications and to make and receive wireless VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) calls through enterprise telephone systems (ie. IP-PBXs) via the industry-standard SIP (session initiation protocol).

The Blackberry handheld has been widely embraced and adopted by companies everywhere. Many have put plans on hold, but this weekend RIM and NTP reached a settlement agreement, paving the way for forward motion again.

Given the number of businesses that use Blackberr, and the number that use VoIP services, the potential convergence of these solutions does lead to a wealth of future integration capabilities. This is worth following if you use either VoIP, a Blackberry, or both.

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Harnessing VoIP for application convergence

By Charles Ciarlo
The aspect of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) being most broadly promoted currently is using an Internet connection to replace traditional phone lines. Calls, of course, can be made on the Internet using a VoIP service provider and standard computer audio systems. Alternatively, some service providers support VoIP through ordinary telephones that use special adapters to connect to a home computer network.

From a call center standpoint, however, there is a whole lot more to VoIP than a few TV ads by Vonage or cheap calls to your relatives across the planet. IP, for example, can facilitate internal communications. To begin with, it means only one set of wires that have to be strung to the desktop since the computers and phones will both just be nodes on the same network. It also means that staff only needs to support a single transmission protocol.

For quite some time, convergence has been about service convergence. More and more lately, as I've written several times, application convergence is creeping into our daily thinking. This story adds merit to my thoughts that we're going to see some strong efforts ahead, by many players from multiple sectors, in integrating VoIP with application services.

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Cisco aims to "change everything" with new VoIP-based services and equipment

3/6/2006 8:32:36 PM, by Jeremy Reimer
Voice-over-IP (VoIP) has been in the news a lot lately, whether it is from big-name purchases of VoIP companies, open-source implementations of VoIP protocols, or complaints from the phone companies that users should have to pay their Internet Service Providers extra for VoIP features. Now, the VoIP revolution has received a big boost from the biggest name in Internet networking, Cisco Communications.

Cisco officially announced today the release of "Cisco Unified Communications," a broad marketing initiative that brings together updates to a whole suite of Internet telephony products and services.

It's no secret to any of us in the tech sector that Cisco has been working hard to expand its VoIP penetration. Cisco works hard to wrestle control of corporate voice services from more densely penetrated voice service equipment vendors like Avaya and Nortel. Their recent strong show of support for SIP denotes this ongoing commitment.

As always, Cisco is a player to watch in the VoIP space.

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Critics Argue AT&T/BellSouth Threatens Net Neutrality and VoIP

By ROBERT LIU
TMCnet Wireless and Technology Columnist

Even though the ink on the merger agreement between AT&T and BellSouth is barely dry, consumer groups are already calling for regulators to block the proposed $67 billion deal, characterizing it as a detriment to net neutrality and VoIP.

Consumers Union and Consumer Federation of America said they plan to ask the Justice Department to block the RBOC merger. According to statistics compiled by TMCnet, a combined AT&T/BellSouth would have nearly 42 percent of the market share for U.S. consumer access lines.

Net Neutrality is a concept or issue that's garnered a great deal of attention recently. The tide of support for net neutrality is growing, but not without detractors.

Throw in the acquisition of Bell South by AT&T, which to many of us looks a lot like an undoing of divestiture of the Bell System, and a whole array of new arguments and concerns opens up.

Your company may not be impacted by the issues of net neutrality, but every one of us who uses the Internet as a consumer will be impact. Those impacts can easily ripple into broad effects that change our business processes. It's an issue that we all need to be cognizant of, even if we don't think we're directly involved.

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