Back in May we reviewed Yealink’s innovative T5 smart media phones. Now, Yealink has introduced the Version 40 firmware upgrade for these phones, adding to an already impressive arsenal of features and functionalities.

Review of the EdgeMarc 2900a and 2900e Enterprise Session Border Controllers

Update: Since this article was published, in 2018, Edgewater Networks was acquired by Ribbon Communications.

Edgewater Networks has added to its line of enterprise session border controllers (eSBCs) with its EdgeMarc 2900A and 2900E models. These are designed to enable enterprises and service providers to future-proof their SIP trunking and Unified Communications (UC) deployments. With built-in mechanisms for both QoS and security, they provide intelligent mechanisms allowing for both hosted PBX services as well as SIP trunking applications.

They have several features that differ from other EdgeMarc SBCs.

Product Review

Companies are continually striving to discover new workplace philosophies that will maximize the productivity of their employees. Google, Apple, and Facebook are just some examples of organizations that are introducing innovative workspace and workplace designs. Most of these are moving away from the traditional “employee tied to a desk” standard by freeing up their staff and providing for mobility within the workspace.

Yealink’s W60B DECT IP Phone Base Station is an ideal ally to aid any small- to medium-sized business in achieving such employee mobility. Since it is easy to deploy, flexible in its functionality, and rich in features, it provides for all the requirements of any internally mobile workforce.

Even in this digital age, your business can’t afford to ignore voicemail

There’s a lot of talk out there about the obsolescence of voicemail. But companies that don’t give importance to voicemail do so to the detriment of their customers' experience.

CRM.com reported that small- and mid-sized businesses experience up to 75% voicemail abandonment, referring to the people that call the company but hang up without leaving a message when transferred to voicemail.

This startling statistic is in part fueled by a lack of responsiveness on the part of the voicemail recipient. According to Nuance, 27% of those surveyed reported that when they get a voicemail, they feel burdened by the process of retrieving and listening to it, and 19% said they actually get annoyed when they receive a voicemail!

Luckily, it’s possible to have the best of both worlds and reap the benefits of voicemail while removing the hassle for company associates.

Ignore them at your own risk!

As we gear up for Channel Partners Evolution later this month in Austin, we’ve been thinking about the incredible pace at which digitization is taking over every aspect of business and the importance of a nimble enterprise structure that can continually adapt to this progress.

It can seem overwhelming keeping up with it all, so we’ve boiled it down to five trends that will define the evolution of VoIP over the next decade. Ignore them at your own risk!

In today’s connected world, it is increasingly common to have workers in different parts of the country, or even different parts of the world, collaborating over the multiple communications channels available to them. Many remote workers use OTT services like Skype to keep in touch with their clients, partners and customers in situations where a telephone call (even over VoIP) would incur a non-trivial cost.

Such calls usually require the use of a computer with a webcam and either a headset or speakers and a microphone. This makes Skype calling more complex than a simple telephone call. Skype-enabled telephony devices remove this complexity by integrating the application with the endpoint, so communicating over Skype becomes as simple as a traditional telephone call. By enabling Skype, these devices also make more features available to the user like instant messaging, presence technology, and file sharing.

In this article we list some productivity-boosting Skype- and Skype for Business-enabled products.

Yealink has smartened up its IP conference phone with the CP960. This ergonomic, intuitive and exceptionally sleek conference phone adds the Android operating system and other enhancements to the Yealink CP860.

When to use VoLTE vs. an OTT voice app

In a previous article, we discussed voice over LTE (VoLTE) and its implications for the enterprise VoIP phone system. All voice traffic over the LTE (also known as 4G mobile) network is packetized and conforms to modern VoIP standards, making it the first mobile telephony standard to completely circumvent the traditional circuit-switched telephony infrastructure.

In many ways, VoLTE sounds a lot like over-the-top (OTT) voice applications that leverage the same protocols for voice. In this article, we look at what OTT voice apps are, what VoLTE is in relation to OTT, and the benefits of using one, the other or both over an LTE network.

The family of endpoints includes the GXP1760, GXP1780 and GXP1782 models

Telecommunications infrastructure can be one of the biggest costs for a small- to medium-sized company, so it’s critical to find a solution that strikes the right balance between value and cost, while at the same time ensuring scalability so the system can grow along with the business.

IP phones often comprise the bulk of the cost of a business telephone system, so choosing the right endpoints is an important part of the functionality-cost ratio. Developed specifically with growing businesses in mind, Grandstream’s mid-range GXP17xx series IP phones achieve this balance remarkably well.

As investments in the legacy circuit-switched voice network wane, national telephone operators are directing their energies to mobile and IP networks. This focus has brought about many “Voice over X” or VoX technologies over the past few years. While VoIP (voice over IP) is one of the most important ones, many related technologies are also proliferating such as VoWiFi, VoDSL, and VoZigbee. The VoX technology we examine in this article is voice over Long-Term Evolution or VoLTE, which has exciting implications for enterprise VoIP telephone systems.