Market trends continue to favor cloud-based UC deployments over traditional on-site call control, but users still demand PSTN-like availability, reliability, and service quality. What many organizations that move to the cloud quickly realize is that the move does not automatically guarantee better call quality—the usual culprits that cause both voice and video quality issues are still very much at play.

In this article, we explore the issues that lead to poor VoIP and UC communications quality in cloud-based deployments and how specific technologies and devices can be used to ensure consistently high-quality services.

January 28 marks Data Privacy Day, an international effort to raise awareness and promote best practices around privacy and data protection. While these conversations often focus on policies, compliance frameworks, and software controls, data privacy also depends on something more fundamental: how traffic moves through the network itself. That’s where the access layer plays a critical role. With the launch of its newest Pro Series layer 2 switches, Grandstream is giving small and mid-sized businesses the tools to build scalable, secure, high-performance enterprise networks that are fully manageable and customizable.

In this article, we examine the first four switches introduced in the new series, highlighting their most noteworthy features and sharing our perspective on key use cases and capabilities.

As business communications continue to blur the line between traditional telephony and smart collaboration devices, desk phones are being asked to do more than ever before. Yealink’s T8 series answers that shift with a new generation of IP phones that place intelligence, ergonomics, and user experience front and center.

In this article, we delve into the T8 series of IP phones, share with you some of their most attractive features, and showcase some typical use cases. We also compare them with the T7 series so you can get a better idea of what each series offers and where enhancements have been made, allowing you to make the most informed decision for your business.

If your UC or VoIP system goes down when an ISP link fails, no amount of call quality tuning will save the user experience. True availability starts at the routing layer. In this article, we explain how BGP multihoming helps keep voice and collaboration services reachable—even during outages—by giving enterprises control over how traffic reaches their public IP addresses.

UC is an area of telecom that has seen massive, rapid change in recent years. However, even given radical technological shifts, some principles remain the same. The need for quality of service (QoS) is one of them.

In this article, we take a fresh look at QoS from the vantage point of today’s UC, taking into account not only advances in QoS itself, but also in the underlying network infrastructure that serves it.

As the end of the year approaches, we are grateful for our wonderful manufacturers and customers. For our last article of 2025, we thought we’d end off with a bang by reviewing Yealink’s new T7 series of IP phones. This new generation of Yealink SIP phones is bringing some of the most cutting-edge capabilities to enterprise and office deployments.

Yealink has also launched an impressive T8 series, which we will review in early 2026, so continue watching this space!

Now that video communications have become a defining part of modern collaboration, it’s natural to wonder whether traditional voice-only VoIP systems still have a meaningful place in today’s environment. 

For businesses evaluating their communications strategy, this question matters. Understanding where voice is headed helps leaders make informed decisions about infrastructure, reliability, user preferences, and long-term planning. In this article, we take a look at voice and video and explain why these two technologies will continue to coexist well into the future.

If you’ve ever left a meeting wondering what the key takeaways were, spent hours writing follow-up notes, or juggled too many communications tools that don’t quite talk to each other, help is here. Unified communications (UC) platforms are getting a major intelligence boost, and it’s transforming the way teams collaborate.

What if your next great meeting could happen anywhere, without compromising sound quality or convenience? Whether you’re working from home, in a shared workspace, or on the road, Yealink’s new SP9x series speakerphones make it possible to bring professional-grade audio with you wherever you go.

The SP92 and SP96 are compact enough to slip into a laptop bag yet powerful enough to turn any room into an instant conference space. With long-lasting batteries, wireless connectivity, and AI-powered noise cancellation, these portable speakerphones are designed for performance and ease of use.

In this article, we take a closer look at what makes Yealink’s SP92 and SP96 stand out and why they’re redefining what a truly mobile conference experience can be.

When a customer complains that “the phones keep cutting out” or that “the video meetings are glitchy,” you know the pain of trying to track down the cause. Is it the internet provider? The PBX? The router? Maybe a burst of packet loss somewhere between branch offices? By the time you find the culprit, the customer’s already frustrated.

That’s why forward-thinking telecom pros are turning to a smarter, more proactive way to catch problems before users ever notice them. It’s called synthetic monitoring, and instead of waiting for real users to experience issues, it creates artificial “test calls” and “test meetings” that continuously check system performance from different points on the network. Think of it as a team of virtual users constantly making sure that every part of your VoIP and UC infrastructure is healthy and ready for the real thing.

In this article, we explain how synthetic monitoring works, how it differs from traditional passive monitoring, and why it's becoming an essential part of reliable VoIP and UC deployments. Understanding this approach can help you reduce downtime, speed up troubleshooting, and deliver a better experience all around.