VoIP, IP-PBX & TDM Phone Systems Atlanta

The operation of a cell phone is fairly complicated but at a rudimentary level it can be understood as a telephone the service for which is provided via a SIM card. Most mobile telephony systems use the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), and the SIM card has programming that allows it to connect to the nearest GSM cell for uninterrupted network access. These cells are controlled by a network provider who charges for the service offered. As can be understood, providers vary from region to geographic region and so do the costs associated with cellular service.

In many countries, the instruments are usually unlocked phones which give the consumers the choice of selecting a provider as per their financial ability. Sadly, the competitive market has created a consumer-unfriendly situation where mobile phone manufacturers tie up with a particular provider so that the phone is now SIM-locked, i.e. it only works with a particular provider’s SIM card. In such a scenario the consumer who wants to get a phone of his/her choice is stuck with an uncomfortably priced calling plan, not to mention long-term commitments and hidden fees. In other words, he/she is left wondering whether to go for a preferred phone or a preferred provider with a friendly pricing plan.

Unlocked Phones are a convenient choice, although a rarity especially with the higher-end brands. But consumers seeking to use different providers do have solutions available to them, although not entirely risk-free. One of the safest options for people using phones supplied by the network provider – it is assumable that such phones are locked to work only with that provider’s SIM cards – is to get the phone unlocked by the provider after the minimum stipulated time. Depending on the provider, this may be free or involve some minor charge. More enterprising customers have employed other means of getting the phone unlocked. Such methods generally involve private software developers using their own code to override the software-based locking mechanism.

This technique is not exactly foolproof, and may not work on some phones where the providers have employed more sophisticated SIM locking tools. One such tool is the unlocking box which is needed when phones are locked to SIM cards are locked with a random number key embedded into the firmware. The obvious preference for unlocked cell phones has spawned a range of facilities that cater to customers wanting such phones. Where conventional software unlock methods don’t work, people manage to get unlocked phones through second-hand dealers locally or over the internet. The fact that many countries prohibit the sale of locked phones while others see much greater sales of unlocked cell phones makes them viable export sources to supply unlocked phones to countries where providers employ SIM locking methods. From the trends seen currently, as long as locking methods are devised and employed, innovative minds will always come with a way to beat such devices and make the most of a demand for unlocked cell phones.

Eman P is the author of this article on Unlocked Phones.
Find more information about Unlocked Cell Phones here.

Author: Eman P
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Android tablet, netbook

To make VoIP work, it entails hardware and software elements that work together – each with specific functions necessary in the overall scheme of things. The hardware may include the fiber-optic cables and switches that bring broadband connectivity as well as the on-site physical PBX system, local phones and PCs used for configuring the system. The software side may include a hosted PBX system, soft phones, the compression codecs, encryption and packetizing schemes, and the signalling protocols that initiate and end each VoIP call.

Call initiation and teardown

In regular telephone calls, the so-called signalling system 7 (SS7) is the call control protocol that assigns a distinct channel for each PSTN call, providing the information necessary to maintain the call and preventing the line from going dead. SS7 also ensures that call quality is maintained throughout the call.

The high-quality call control in PSTN is one of the earlier barriers that hampered VoIP, as unreliable call mechanisms in the early Internet telephone systems could not offer the same level of quality as regular ‘legacy’ phone systems. Fortunately, new call control methods and advances in dedicated packet-switching enabled VoIP providers to offer services that match if not surpass traditional telephony.

Like in PSTN calls, call control or signalling mechanisms play a central part in VoIP systems, as these manage the overall structure of VoIP calls. The functions of the various signalling methods include determination of the language to be used in all communications for each call, and transmission of the following:

• Message header, phone number or IP of origin, phone number or IP of destination
• Prescribed limit for the number of times the call can be forwarded
• Listing of the accepted commands
• Specialized software for managing the path for the voice portion of the call
• Software for managing the packetization and compression of the media (codecs)

These functions give VoIP the flexibility to offer enhanced call services aside from the standard function of initiating a call and tearing it down once the call is completed. It allows users to connect to multiple endpoints, record the call, route to other endpoints, etc.

Though there are numerous signalling protocols available, most VoIP providers limit the choice to only two options:

Secession Initiation Protocol (SIP)

Currently growing in popularity perhaps due to its similarity to Internet technologies like HTTP, SIP is the de facto standard set by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for the transmission of media. SIP is structurally faster than other protocols, as it requires only one invite to start a call, and uses a conversational plain text approach. This plain text method allows easy analysis and troubleshooting of VoIP problems.

H.323

This older standard was designed by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), to support the transmission of both video and voice. The drawbacks of H.323 are its being in code, which makes it difficult for non-programmers to do even simple troubleshooting, and its points have a strict registration process, which means a VoIP phone has to be reprogrammed whenever it is assigned a new number.

Most VoIP hardware in the market, such as phones and gateways, are dedicated to one of the above protocols and hence, cannot be used for both. Even VoIP providers may restrict clients to one of the standards for compatibility concerns. Integration is possible, but calls can only successfully connect after the primary signalling method is agreed upon.

Saiju is an IP communications and hosted business software expert. He has a considerable amount of experience working with hosted VoIP PBX solutions and hosted SIP providers.

Author: Saiju George
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Android Smartphone

After the introduction of the first 2 Ps of the Marketing Mix, Product and Price, it is time to go a bit further by discussing the 3rd one, Place. When the 4Cs were introduced, Place became known as Convenience (Convenience to buy). Place is where you want to sell your product. It is often referred to as the distribution channel.

I view the place as where do you want to sell your product. As discussed in earlier articles, your product may be an idea that you want others to buy into, and not only a physical product. Place is in my opinion a more complete description than convenience, It may be a physical place or a virtual one such as the internet. Even physical places can be different. You can be selling from a retail shop or doing business from home by reselling from a warehouse.

Although Convenience may seem to be a better approach as part of the 4Cs, I don’t see it replacing the Place definition of the 4Ps. Place as I understand it is an answer to the question where. Where can I find the product? A well known answer (principle) in sales would state: Location, Location, Location. However, let’s take an example of one US village I lived in. The only grocery shop is found about 2 miles away. In winter, it is a hassle to start the car and head there to buy some drinks for example due to the extreme cold, snow, and ice on the roads.

It is definitely not convenient to me, yet it is the only place around when I am not planning to spend hours on a 15 Miles stretch of icy roads to reach the nearest City. Maybe the cost of setting up the business made more sense to the owner because he knew he was the only option for grocery around. He surely did not think of the convenience to the customers knowing that over 95% of the village population lives further than 2 miles away from his shop.

Although a convenient location may attract me, I think of convenience more as facilitation. Convenience to me includes accepting credit cards, checks, facility of payment, delivery, etc… Those do not replace the definition of Place in the Marketing Mix. If you do not have a place to offer your products then you do not have the opportunity to sell, you’re simply not there to be found!

So let’s assume you have a place, whether physical or virtual. It is only then when you can think of offering the convenience to buy for your potential customers. You can mail catalogues, print and post flyers, offer credit facilities, etc… If you are an on line business, you can offer free shipping along with the credit card purchases, have email lists, etc…

As I mentioned in a previous article, to me, 4Ps, 4Cs, and any addition or modification to the 4 Ps, is more of an explanation to the Marketing Mix to be used as a reference rather than being a fixed definition. When the 4Ps was introduced, no one was thinking that the internet would be such a success. Yet, the internet did not cancel those principles.

Place is not only about a physical or virtual address. It is also referred to as distribution channel. You may opt to sell directly via your own shop, or having a series of shops, having a franchise, selling via distributors, etc… I will not be discussing Sales strategies in this article, but it is important to know that defining your Place in the market needs to take into consideration your product, its price, and the next P of the Marketing Mix, Promotion.

Working in Telecoms, in developing markets, Place was an issue I have to tackle in every project. In earlier days, when we operated as almost a monopoly, in a small city, I didn’t focus much on the place. Mobile telephony was needed to cover the inefficiency and lack of presence of regular phones. People who needed to communicate locally and overseas did not have many options, and there weren’t any alternatives. My only place of operation was a Point of Sale, POS (Became later defined as Point of Service), found in the first floor of our HQ. If someone wanted to have mobile service, they had to include the cost of transportation in their costs. We were practically the only feasible option. In those days, the focus was mainly technical rather than commercial.

Things started to change slowly. Mobile phones didn’t need to be programmed anymore. A new generation that included small chips known as SIM cards (Subscriber Identification Module) were introduced. Prepaid services were starting versus the billed usage (Post-paid), and above all competition was starting as new comers were licensed to operate.

There was a need to find a solution. We were threatened by the presence of competition. Our competitors had their POS in another part of the city offering the same services to our potential customers there, who could now save the trip cost to our HQ. It wasn’t an innovation, it was a simple review of the principles, Place was the solution, back to the Marketing Mix basics. We opened 4 POS around the city and 1 in every major city we had coverage in. The competitor’s response was slow, and we were able to guarantee the major market share.

Things did not stop there, instead of keeping all the revenues we had to concede into offering a share of the pie to a 3rd party, the distributors. We needed to ensure maximum presence in the market and we resorted to spreading our products and services via distributors and their channels. As competition increased adapting our strategy (sometimes with better efficiency) the war of prices started. This policy reduced the revenues for all the operators. The focus was then turned into the reduction of costs to guarantee the positive revenue margin. We started by cancelling the less performing POS, while pushing our dealers towards exclusive sales of our products. It worked in some markets and failed in others where dealers refused to be forced into dealing with one operator.

We had to be more innovative and started applying strategies as franchising while keeping distributorships, among other tactics to guarantee our place in the market while working on reducing costs. We had a simple understanding during all this time, if we did not have a place in the market we would not have a chance to sell. Markets are surely different, as different as the people and their cultures hence the need for market studies (An issue that I will discuss in a future article). However once you have your reference points you can always go back to the basics. You have your product, you determined its price, and you have the place to offer it, now let’s think of promoting it. My next article will cover this point.

Your comments and questions are always welcome!

Osman Habbal is a well traveled Business expert. With over 20 years experience in Business covering Marketing, Sales, Customer Care, and Management, he has been exposed to many markets and cultures. His skills in Arabic, French, Russian, and English, widened his communication experience. Osman was born in Beirut, the capital city of Lebanon, in a Muslim family. He is strongly opinionated when it comes to Politics due to his early childhood exposure to war. Osman is Married and a proud parent. His personal website is http://www.dadaway.com.

Author: Osman Habbal
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Eco Friendly

When Magicjack hit the market in 2007, very few people realized that this small device will really be able deliver on its promises of free long distance calls to US and Canada. Though VoIP phone service like Skype was already very popular in those days, it required both the parties (Caller and the Calling party) to be online to make a call which was somewhat not so convenient for everybody. With the introduction of MagicJack, a new feature that enabled the calling party to receive calls on his/her traditional phone, VoIP telephony became more user friendly.

MagicJack became highly popular because of its features, portability and ease of use. I’d like to give a brief introduction of MagicJack to those who have never heard of it.

It is a small usb device that uses VoIP technology for routing long distance calls at dirt cheap rates. A Unique feature of this device is that you can make calls within US and Canada completely free of cost by paying a yearly charge. The initial cost of the device is approx. $40 which includes a subscription of one year. You need to renew your service every year for $20. You can make unlimited calls to US and Canada in just $20 (approx.). For other international calls, you need to buy international minutes.

Nettalk Duo -This is somewhat similar to Magicjack with an additional feature which enables you to make international call without using your PC. Nettalk Duo can be connected directly to your router and you can start making calls within minutes of installation. Unlike Magicjack, Nettalk duo is not dependent on the speed and performance of your PC. However the price of Nettalk Duo is somewhat costlier ($70 approximately) than Magicjack which is because of additional feature mentioned above. Also the yearly renewal costs you $30(approx). It hit the market a few months back and is getting quite good response in terms of customer service.

Both the devices are highly useful and portable. The customer service of magicjack has also improved a lot in recent times. Moreover it is also going to introduce new features like femtocell which will make it even more useful and may be more competitive than Nettalk duo which will definitely have to work very hard to penetrate the VoIP market already captured by Magicjack. The additional feature that makes Nettalk duo seem to be a better device, will only prove to be useful if it keeps the price, call quality, customer service and overall utility better than those of Magicjack. Lowering the price of Nettalk duo seems to be highly unlikely therefore I believe Magicjack will remain a preferable choice for the buyer.

I have been a regular user of Magicjack and found it to be highly useful and hassle free device. Keeping the PC on or off has never been an issue for me because I keep the PC on anyway. What really make it a better device than Nettalk duo are the lower price, lower yearly renewal fee and free trial offer. Read the complete review and grab your Free trial offer of Magicjack.

Author: James S. Peterson
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Alternative energy

Your business intends to make extensive use of video conferencing and multi-media applications. How do you determine what bandwidth solution (T1, DS3, OCx/Sonet, etc.) would best meet your needs and incorporate that decision into your network cover these applications?

I’d say that it depends on what kind of service and QoS you are looking at. For example, when you say “video” you mean video conferencing and not something like VoD. The Bandwidth requirements will vary according to your service requirements.

For example: For IPTV services, the image quality depends on the encoding deployed: MPEG-2 consumes approx. 3.75 Mbps, whereas MPEG-4 needs approx. 2 Mbps for the same high-quality image production. Also broadcast TV is delivered using IP Multicast which makes the bandwidth required dependent on the number of channels offered and the encoding rate. 200 channels of MPEG-2 in standard definition will take approx. 750 Mbps of bandwidth. VoD, on the other hand, is a unicast per-viewer channel. 1000 standard definition VoD users will need appro. 3.75 Mbps.

The QoS requirements for video conferencing using H.323 (SIP could be different again) can be planned on the “Rule of 75″ as follows: Calculate the minimum bandwidth required by each of your applications ( e.g., video, voice, data). The total of this bandwidth is the minimum requirement for any given link and it should consume NO MORE than 75% of the total available bandwidth on the link. The 75% rule makes allowances for bandwidth required for over head traffic, such as routing, Layer 2 keepalives and other applications, such as, email, HTTP etc.

So, Capacity planning for H.323, should look like something as follows:

Video data + 20% = bandwidth required.

Example:

Video data rate: Bandwidth Required:

512 kbps = 614 kbps
1.5Mbps = 1.8 Mbps …

For issues such as number of concurent users and more stuff on video conferencing you can perhaps consider looking into Cisco’s solutions offered and also TANDBERG boxes.

Cisco considers anything 766Kb to be a “slow link” for VOIP. Also you need to consider the criticality of the sites so you may need two separate connections. All multi-media applications run on top of your other applications so QoS only allows a preference of who goes first.

You need a good baseline of non-multi-media applications (VOIP). So bandwidth needs to be able to handle all necessary applications in the network.

Also, you’ll need to remember that the bandwidth aggregation at the Data Center needs to meet or exceed all inbound remote site traffic. In other words, if I have three remote sites all with T1s. I’ll need more than one T1 at the Data Center to manage the traffic. Remember unless this is a greenfield then baseline, baseline, baseline!

When it comes to streaming video, bi-directional – you are going to have to consider the quality of the compression you are planning to use. If you are planning on using high definition video 1 direction it is recommended to have at least 2MB in the direction of the video being accessed.

So if you are streaming video to your computer then you need to make sure that you get 2MB download capacity. Also, another thing to keep in mind is latency and loss of packets. I would recommend staying away from wireless for this type of application as it will add latency and cause issues later. DS3 bandwidth and anything higher may be over kill, but would easily be able to handle your demands.

Without knowing specifics, it is hard to provide a precise answer, but, one can still specify a systematic method for calculating required bandwidth. Once you know the bandwidth requirement, then it is all about negotiating the most economical way to order that bandwidth from a network provider in the area.

Here is what I would suggest:

1. Calculate the peak external link bandwidth requirements (inter-office data transfer, video conferencing, email transfers. With attachments running in tens of megabytes, email traffic can’t be ignored these days.).

2. Real time applications being mostly jitter and delay sensitive – so you have to make sure that you will have enough bandwidth when they need it. The bandwidth of video depends on the mpeg profiles used (without going into specific, generally 1.5 Mbps can give you very good video on a PC (equal to VCD quality). HDTV images can take about 20 Mbps – but that is domain more reserved for IP TV service providers). Most current users of interactive video communications will be happy with the images coded and transmitted @ 512 Kbps. This includes audio and video as well as control signaling. So, one should provision at least 512 Kbps per video stream, and more the better (I would say 1.5 Mbps is the good if you are a big organization and use a large TV for video conferences)). So, multiply bandwidth for a single stream by the number of parallel streams required. Now that determines the total peak real time usage.

3. There is no specific rule – but wise men with experience advise to keep the peak real time within 60 to 75% of network bandwidth available leaving the remaining capacity for background traffic. In a small organization of 5 people – it is easy to tell people not to download gigabyte attachments when video conferencing is going on , but in larger organizations it is hard to enforce such things except with router policies (assuming they have QoS support), and you can deal with occasional unhappy users.

4. Now, once you know your bandwidth requirements, it is time to talk to the network operator how they can provide that bandwidth in the most cost effective way.

For help in finding just the right bandwidth solution for your video conferencing and multi-media applications …. take advantage of the no cost help provided at DS3-Bandwidth.

Michael is the owner of FreedomFire Communications….including DS3-Bandwidth.com. Michael also authors Broadband Nation where you’re always welcome to drop in and catch up on the latest BroadBand news, tips, insights, and ramblings for the masses.

Author: Michael Lemm
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Solar panel, solar power

Choosing the best business CRM can be quite a taxing job. There are hundreds of CRMs to choose from in the market and it is difficult to finalize one. Some CRMs are better suited for one type of business than the others. However, it is a fact that all businesses need to make new customer relationships and improve the old ones.

Which One?

Choosing the right software can be difficult but not impossible if a business considers certain factors. There are different functions that a CRM can perform. For instance, it can help make a list of targeted customers and their contact details. It can also help maintain a “to do” list and lay down the tasks to be done by the sales personnel to attract customers.

Reports made by the sales personnel can be extracted and forwarded automatically to the managers using this tool. Now, the sales reps can just concentrate on their main job – selling rather than managing reports. A business CRM is the most profitable way to be seen on the web.

CRM solutions help a business to scrutinize and direct all facets of critical customer relationships to better customer satisfaction, and increase customer loyalty.

How It Works?

CRM solutions focus on three main business areas: sales, marketing and customer service. By systematizing key business functions, CRM helps to augment employee performance, rationalize marketing, and center on business customers.

Some of the tools that support the sales process are:
* Contract management
* Sales administration
* Customer preference management
* Lead management

Customer service tools help a business to develop a storehouse of customer service inquiries, to evaluate customer satisfaction and to develop a knowledge base of existing customer service behavior patterns. Marketing tools usually help business users to develop and administer marketing campaigns and to trail marketing campaign success rates.

Invest in a good business CRM to manage tasks like generating leads, processing orders, following up with customers, and collecting cash.

Achieve sales and management goals faster with Quality Integrity at http://www.qualityintegrity.com. Their Microsoft CRM software helps to support the best sales reporting and business CRM solutions for any organization.

Author: Karinn Kennel
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Android apps