In today's virtual world, telecom and network services have come a long way, from being offered using locally installed, standalone monolithic servers to ethereal entities residing in the cloud. This evolution has touched every part of network service provisioning, and one of the most fascinating facets of this trend is that the network infrastructure itself can be virtualized.

Network function virtualization (NFV) is a network architecture philosophy that virtualizes the network infrastructure. In this article, we take a look at what NFV is, how it works, how it fits in with other virtualization technologies, and how it can be of benefit for enterprise networks.

Yealink, the leading global SIP phone manufacturer by market share, ranked number one in customer satisfaction among 17 VoIP telephony manufacturers rated in a survey of IT managers published by Eastern Management Group. In this article, we look at some of Yealink’s most noteworthy innovations that helped it secure the number-one spot.

The cloud is used to offer services directly to the end user, as well as to provide a platform on which vendors can develop their online applications (including VoIP) for their customers. In a previous article, we covered SaaS, PaaS and IaaS as the three most prominent cloud-based models that are used to offer services to clients. In this article, we take a more in-depth look at the various cloud deployment models that are available (including private, public and hybrid) and how they are useful for businesses of different sizes. The article concludes with the factors to consider when choosing which deployment model to use when offering VoIP and other cloud services to your customers.

Product Review

Expanding on its line of solutions for Zoom Rooms, Yealink has launched the newest model in its line of CP960-UVC Zoom Rooms Kits: The UVC30, for huddle rooms and other small meeting spaces. In this article, we review this new model and show how it fits in with the rest of the series.

Cloud computing has had an irreversible impact on how IP telephony and other network services are delivered. In this article, we look at the three most common cloud service models and how they are used to deliver telecommunications and other services to connected businesses. By adding cloud-based services to your arsenal of offerings, you can deliver more value to your customers by proposing a wider range of services to them.

Redundancy and scalability are important for VoIP systems. Virtualization makes both of these easier, less costly, and more efficient. Coupled with cloud services, virtualization has revolutionized how network services are provided, and in particular, how VoIP deployment is executed.

In this article, we explain what virtualization is, the trends governing its newest technologies, and how all of this can be leveraged for use with VoIP services.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is changing the way networks are managed and designed. In this article, we take a look at how an SDN approach can be of great benefit to VoIP and video telephony deployments in particular.

Have you ever chosen to use a telephone to communicate even when a videoconferencing system was available? If so, it’s probably because videoconferencing systems have traditionally been difficult to configure and relatively cumbersome to use. This is no longer the case, thanks to Konftel’s simple video solutions.

Konftel has launched a series of videoconferencing kits with a unique and extremely attractive One Cable Connection capability. We take a look at these solutions in this article.

A major challenge inherent in designing and maintaining an enterprise network is the administration costs. Software-defined networking (SDN) can dramatically reduce both the hard costs (money) and soft costs (time) of managing a network. Although this tends to be the most compelling argument in favor of using SDN, it in fact offers may more advantages than this. In this article, we introduce SDN and examine some of its key benefits.

5G is emerging onto the telecom landscape. What’s new and different about it? 5G does indeed promise phenomenal potential. In this article we examine 5G and its applications for unified communications.