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.

We had a chance to speak with Tommy Lee, VP of sales at VTech. Before VTech Holdings Limited acquired 100% of the share capital of Snom Technology, GmbH  in a transaction that was completed in November of last year, Tommy was president of Snom, Inc., an American subsidiary of Snom Technology, GmbH.

In this exclusive interview, Tommy speaks candidly about what customers can expect from the two brands post-acquisition.

Part 2 of 2: Cloud communications offer many advantages, but some businesses benefit less than others

In Part 1 of this series, we reviewed some advantages of cloud-based unified communications (UC). Among other things, we emphasized the ease of use, streamlined functionality, and cost savings of this platform as compared with a similar on-site deployment. However, there are situations where cloud-based UC is less advantageous. In this article, we look at the prerequisites for using UC over the cloud as well as some specific examples.

Part 1 of 2: The cloud-based UC trend and its business advantages

IP telephony products have been around for over a decade. There are many options to choose from and some may be wondering, what’s next? What new features of an IP telephony endpoint can make it stand out above the rest? Yealink may have answered this question with its new T5 smart media phones.

The T5 smart media phone series includes the T56A, T58A and T58V models.

 UPDATE: Since this article was first published, Yealink has since added additional models to the T5 series: The T53 with built-in Bluetooth and dual-port Gigabit Ethernet; the T53W with built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi; the T54W with full-color, adjustable display; the T57W, with its 7-inch full-color capacitive adjustable touch screen; and the VP59 flagship smart video phone. Any of these can connect up to 4 cordless DECT handsets via the Yealink DD10K DECT dongle. Click here to access our review of the new models.

There are many ways the IoT can leverage, and be leveraged by, VoIP systems to create a more productive workplace.

Are you hearing both sides?

By Kate Clavet, Marketing Specialist, Grandstream Networks

The very technology that makes VoIP so efficient can also indirectly cause one-way audio issues.

VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), indicating that the communication travels over the internet in little packets using RTP (Real-Time Transport Protocol). Since the packets are traveling through the internet, they must pass through firewalls and network address translation (NAT). Due to the tricky nature of firewalls, a common complaint of customers and installers alike is that either the caller or callee cannot hear the other party. Although this is a common inquiry and topic for support tickets, it is also rather easy to fix.

An SD-WAN can be up to 2.5 times less expensive than traditional WAN architecture.

One of the most challenging situations for networking professionals over the years has been how to interconnect remote sites and branch offices so users at all locations can enjoy the same quality of network and telephony services in a secure and timely manner. One way to do this is to duplicate all services at each location. However, this can become administratively unwieldly, not to mention prohibitively expensive.

The solution is the use of wide area networks (WANs), where centralized services like voice and data reside at headquarters and can be provided to the remote users as if they were all physically located inside the headquarters’ LAN (local area network). In this article, we look at the different ways to deploy WAN, as well as the problems solved and business benefits to be gained by using software-defined WANs (SD-WANs).

A useful yet vastly underused functionality of SIP is what is known as presence technology. According to Salesforce, 86% of executives surveyed blamed lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures. This is where presence can help.