The Suretec Blog

 

• Compliance with all ITSPA approved Best Common Practice documents
• Porting numbers (in and out)
• 999 Calling
• Membership of an industry standard Telecommunications dispute resolution scheme
• Operate a Single Point of Contact (SPOC) for liaison with other telecommunications operators and also the Home Office and other agencies.

Hi all,

The iPhone 4, which was officially unveiled on the June 7th at a presentation in San Francisco, includes several new features that will benefit VoIP users. These are touted as:

• Multi-task when making a VoIP call, so customers can access other applications, such as a calendar, during a conversation.


• Built-in noise cancellation to eliminate background sounds when making VoIP calls.


• Videoconferencing will also be possible between iPhones via the Face Time feature, allowing remote employees to partake in business meetings.


• Longer battery life, while the screen resolution has been significantly improved compared to previous models.

The iPhone 4 will be available in the UK from June 24th.

Wow you may think this is amazing, but all these features have been available on Android phones (Google's Open Source mobile operating system) for ages. I've just got an HTC Desire from O2 and it's the No.1 phone in the world right now. It can do all of above and more, plus the Sipdroid VoIP client is free and works on 3G and WiFi using our VoIP services or anyone elses. Best of all it's free software and just works.


Another good blog post covers why the iPhone can never keep up with Android or Open Source:

"Through a bevy of handset makers, Android can offer a variety of phones that will make it difficult for
Apple to beat with just one hardware release a year. While it is hard to

ever go wrong with an iPhone, Android offers a ton of alternative form

factors, price points and carriers: Sprint (NYSE: S) has released the

first 4G phone on Android; T-Mobile has a new competitive Android phone

with a slide-out keyboard; the HTC Incredible sold by Verizon has been

flying off store shelves; and even Google’s Nexus One still boasts some

of the latest hardware. Not to mention new Android phones from Samsung

and LG (SEO: 066570) coming later this summer."

Google now have figures to show that 100,000 open source Android mobile phones are getting activated daily!

Gavin.

It's taken us a while to get round to ordering one of these Yubikeys from Yubico, but they do look great and have lots of documentation via the wiki.

We're going to be testing them via the pam module for SSH access (and of course using pam_ldap).

So, users in LDAP^[?] via pam, and a Yubikey, let's see how it goes!

(will be interesting for logging in a SIP handset via Asterisk or FreeSWITCH that needs one too and all the others technologies Suretec use and support (Catalyst, Perl, PostgresSQL, Squid and more....). We'll see....

From WARP Enterprise from PIKA Makes Deploying SMB IP-PBX Applications Even Easier:

Based in Aberdeen, Scotland, Suretec Systems has recently launched a new telecom business to meet the needs of small and medium-sized businesses looking for cost-effective and highly featured telephone systems.

“PIKA’s WARP Enterprise PBX platform is the perfect fit for Suretec’s new Telecom business,” said Suretec managing director Gavin Henry. “It is so flexible in how it can be deployed and configured, yet remains a rock solid platform for any enterprise.

“Our customers have all expressed interest in not only the huge cost savings that can be achieved with open source products, but the feature richness, stability and support,” Henry added. “WARP Enterprise meets the cost targets and also saves us recurring integration expenses over the long run, with stable components that don’t churn on a yearly basis.”

Just a quick one to say that when you think you need Asterisk for a customer request, sometimes you don't!!

A question from a customer yesterday:

Do you know of an IP desk telephone that can be used on a
hotline/autodial/PLAR type basis? Ie pick up one phone and the other
rings, etc.

Tricky bit... no call manager of any sort in-between... just the
phones
direct on the network.

Aastra to the rescue!!! Any of the new 67XXi ranges have a feature either per line or globally like so:

Autodial Settings

Autodial Number
Autodial Timeout

Simply add an IP address in the Autodial Number field for line 1 and when you pick up the handset it dials the other phone on that IP directly. No need to put Asterisk in between or any other system, other than pure IP.

Nice!

P.S. I'm sure most of the business grade IP phones out there can do the same.