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.

Key trends for WISPs from WISPAPALOOZA

Wireless Internet Service Providers or WISPs constitute a growing industry in the United States and worldwide. The WISP Association (WISPA), an advocacy organization for WISPs in the U.S., has over 650 members and 200 vendor associations. WISPA organizes an annual event called WISPAPALOOZA for the purpose of bringing together WISPs and vendors from all over the country.  Last week, Anthony Morris and Trey Smith were speaking with people about our wireless networking and telecommunications solutions at the TeleDynamics booth.

Here we cover some of the key trends this year that affect WISPs.

AstriCon, the longest-running event devoted to the Asterisk open-source communications framework, celebrated its 14^th year in Orlando last week. Todd Baca and Mark Parker were there at the TeleDynamics booth speaking with Asterisk experts and telephone systems professionals.

According to the Asterisk website, more than a million communications systems in over 170 countries are based on Asterisk, and “almost the entire Fortune 1000 list of customers” use Asterisk. So, if you are in the telecommunications business, you need to know about Asterisk!

If you weren’t able to attend Channel Partners Evolution last week in Austin, fear not: here are our top takeways from the event.

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.

IP telephony and its related technologies have matured over the past decade. As competition grows among IP telephony vendors, product designers are packing more options, functionality, and bells and whistles into their products. This sometimes results in making IP telephones and their accessories more complicated to operate. 

Yealink seems to have cut through the hype of multi-functional devices by designing and offering a simple, intuitive and easy-to-use device that performs specific and specialized functions, and performs them flawlessly. This is definitely the case with Yealink’s new CP920 touch-sensitive HD IP Conference Phone.

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!

How often have you led or participated in a conference call where a technician had to come in to set up the call or troubleshoot? Because many conferencing systems are not intuitive enough to be operated without some training and practice, they often go underutilized and the company doesn’t fully reap the productivity and cost-saving benefits that the systems are meant to provide.

Konftel has made this problem a thing of the past with its sophisticated yet easy-to-use conferencing solutions. Here we present a customer success story that demonstrates how Olsson Associates has been using its Konftel platform to improve and simplify the communications among almost 1,000 employees across some 30 offices in seven U.S. states.

Answers to the most frequently asked questions about our HD, IP door phone

By Kate Clavet, Content Marketing Specialist, Grandstream Networks

Grandstream Networks recently came out with our first facility access solution, the GDS3710 an HD, IP door phone.  It’s been a huge hit within the industry and we really enjoy using it in our offices, but as with any new product there are a lot of questions. I took this time as an opportunity to answer the most common questions, in one handy spot. Enjoy!