TeleDynamics Think Tank

Sneak preview of new enhancements coming later this year

By Kate Clavet, Marketing Specialist, Grandstream Networks

It’s becoming imperative for any business to have tools available that not only enhance their internal communication but also keep their customers coming back. With so little face time (thanks to the internet), a customer’s experience is increasingly important. Grandstream’s UCM IP PBX series is a practical way to manage your communication without compromising on features or emptying your wallet. After all, we’re always striving to improve our customer’s experience and, by extension, yours.

To maintain a high level of service, there must be tools in place that highlight efficiency and collect data so that customer service, lead follow-up, etc. can be measured. Without metrics and data for evaluation, maintaining a positive customer experience is nearly impossible. Grandstream wants to make that easier for you. In the second and third quarters of 2017, a lot of enhancements are coming your way.

Voice over IP networks can be challenging to implement efficiently and securely. This is in part because voice packets require specialized management and must be treated differently than normal data packets. Quality of Service (QoS), security and flow control are just some areas in which the required handling of voice traffic differs from conventional data traffic.

The good thing is that with the proper expertise and care, many of these issues can be successfully dealt with within the corporate network. Such networks are under the complete control of the network administration team and thus can be fully customized for the needs of the voice being transmitted.

However, what happens when voice packets are routed beyond the corporate network, either for voice calls to the PSTN or mobile network, or for employees who use internal voice network services remotely? Here we look at various network edge mechanisms that can be used to monitor and manage data traveling in and out of the LAN.

The upgraded phone line takes the stack of advanced features even higher.

By Yingting Li, IP Phones Product Manager at Yealink

With the T4 series of IP phones, Yealink offers a well-rounded array of sophisticated calling features, state-of-the-art voice quality, easy installation, robust customization options and extensive expandability. Early in December 2016, Yealink released the upgraded T4S models based on the former T4 series in the North America region. The T4S models build on the user experience even more with a number of upgrades.

When most people hear about VoIP, they think of telephony over the internet. Online services that offer extremely-low-cost phone calls or even free calls may come to mind. Although such services do utilize VoIP (voice over internet protocol), IP telephony in a broader sense is technology and architecture that uses VoIP to allow you to create an internal telephone network within your organization that leverages the existing data network infrastructure.

IP telephony operates on converged network, which supports both voice and data. The advantages of this to a business are numerous and are well worth the investment. If you are considering a migration to IP telephony, here we present some information that can help get you on track.

Product review

There are several ISPs (internet service providers) that can provide your business with high- and super-high speed internet access. These technologies include Metro Ethernet and Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) and offer speeds from several Mbps to 1 Gbps and beyond – but with a hefty price tag.  

An alternative is the bonding of multiple ADSL/VDSL or cable lines to take advantage of the aggregate bandwidth of these connections while paying a comparably miniscule monthly cost. All that’s needed is a load balancing WAN router like Peplink’s Pepwave Balance 20 Dual-WAN Router.

Designed for small office and branch office use, not only does the Balance 20 router perform link bonding and load balancing, but it also offers an impressive array of additional features.

As one of the biggest expenses of any business, telecommunications solutions should be both reliable and cost-effective. One telephony network design aspect that can provide both is the direct connection of the IP phone system to a mobile network.

Here we explore two ways to do this, either of which not only achieves cost savings for the company but also enhances reliability by providing an additional redundant and overflow route.

If you deal with Voice over IP (VoIP), you must have come across this scenario at one time or another: A user complains that when they answer their phone, the caller can’t hear them, even though they can hear the calling party. Or, it may be that neither party can hear the other and there is just silence on the line.

This is the classic case of one-way or no-way audio, where a voice call is successfully completed, but either the voice packets only successfully travel in one direction, or neither end successfully receives voice packets. It may be difficult to understand why this happens, especially since the phone does ring, both physically for the called party and via the ring-back tone for the calling party. It seems counterintuitive that the transmission of voice packets could be unsuccessful if the call was successfully set up.

This is a scenario that comes up a lot on our tech support calls at TeleDynamics. Here we list four of the most common culprits of this issue and suggestions for how to tackle them.

Grandstream and Ubiquiti add excitement to desk phones by leveraging the power of Android OS and a modern interface. By integrating the Android Operating System into the phone, thousands of business productivity applications like Skype, GoToMeeting, Gmail and more can be downloaded onto these phones from the Google Play store.

Advanced apps ranging from Pomodoro Technique Timer to more obvious solutions provided by Google Calendar will make workers in any industry more productive as they perform phone call campaigns and meetings with one device instead of two. The versatility that the Android platform provides is a huge differentiator that separates these phones from a typical IP phone.

Here we look at five SIP endpoints from Grandstream and Ubiquiti that use Android OS.

By Nathan Miloszewski, on behalf of Yeastar

When it comes to VoIP PBX systems, channel partners need to determine whether an on-premise solution or a cloud-based service is best suited for their customer.

Each solution has its strengths. For the instances in which you determine that an onsite IP PBX is the best option for your customer, we’ve put together these guidelines to help you sell against the hosted solutions offered by your competitors. Here at Yeastar, we work with thousands of channel partners who find themselves in competition with cloud-based VoIP service providers and have identified the most compelling arguments for an on-premise solution. Think of each one as an additional arrow in your sales quiver.

By John Macario, SVP of Product Management and Marketing at Edgewater Networks

The beginning of a new year is a time when many business managers reflect on learnings from the previous year and begin working on their goals for the current year. Business continuity and data security are, of course, top priorities and securing the network is a vital part of this. 

For network professionals, there is no word more fearsome than “breach.” A security breakdown can mean lost data, stolen secrets, expensive lawsuits, and more. According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach is now US$4 million. This is why nearly every organization that knows what's good for it now invests in antivirus, data loss prevention (DLP), and of course, firewalls.

These days, however, we need to protect more than just data. Enterprise communications have grown into a multi-billion dollar market, particularly due to the widespread adoption of VoIP and unified communications (UC) services. This presents a new challenge that firms will have to face in order to gain a winning edge: voice security. IP phone services present a whole new attack area to potential hackers, a frontier that firewalls simply cannot protect by themselves. The essence of this challenge lies in the fact that we're talking about two entirely different types of information transmission that, in turn, require different security solutions.