Avaya announces new SMB IP Telepony solutions
February 15, 2007
Avaya has announced new IP Telephony products aimed at the SMB market with between 32 and 270 users. The new products bring features from their enterprise solutions to the SMB customer. Depending on the software licences and hardware the key enhancements include:
1 - SIP gateway functionality, whether the SMB has digital, analog or IP phones. Businesses can subscribe to new SIP trunking services and significantly reduce calling costs.
2 - Remote diagnostic tools. Resellers can improve customer satisfaction by quickly and proactively identifying and resolving problems remotely.
3 - multi-site hot-desking capabilities so employees can log into any digital, analog or IP phone at any of their company’s networked locations and have their calls and voice messages follow them.
4 - Multi-site hunt group capabilities so workers at any networked location can be part of the same call routing group.
For those unfamiliar with SIP trunking it basically replaces traditional E1/T1 connections by providing an IP signalling connection directly to the carrier. The advantage being a business can operate the IP Telephony system using just a broadband connection, without the need and associated expense to order E1/T1 lines.
Entry Filed under: ip telephony, sip, voip. .
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1.
Mark Tomin | February 18, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Interesting, never heard of SIP. How is it compared with E1/T1 regarding speed/price/availability?
T1-T3-DSL
2.
inbabble | February 19, 2007 at 11:47 am
hi Mark, SIP (session initiation protocol) is the standards based signaling protocol that amongst other things controls call setup, teardown, and other telephony features in the VoIP world (hold, forward etc). So a call between 2 voip calls uses SIP.
In the ISDN world other forms of signalling are used. So when you connect your VoIP system to a carrier usually you needed a gateway to “translate” VoIP signalling to E1/T1 signalling. This meant your gateway needed an E1/T1 connection and the associated cost.
Now carriers are starting to accept SIP signaling directly to their switching infrastructure via an IP connection (e.g. ADSL or 100M ethernet).
So instead of a gateway and E1/T1s you just have an IP connection, and in general this is much cheaper… especially if you already have an IP connection for, say, internet connectivity!
So in short, carriers accepting VoIP signaling (SIP) means your connection to the carrier can be cheaper.
In terms of availability… well it’s only just starting to happen as equipment vendors and carriers agree on what version of “SIP” gets used… even though it’s meant to be a “standard”.
Hope that helps.
3.
fourlakes | April 18, 2007 at 11:58 am
Any idea of the pricing for this solution ? I appreciate there are lots of variables, but an indication would be nice
4.
inbabble | April 18, 2007 at 4:33 pm
hi there fourlakes,
sorry, no idea on pricing… less than ISDN 2 channel services if it’s going to be appealing.
sorry i dont have more info.
Richard.
5.
fourlakes | April 18, 2007 at 4:51 pm
No problem. I only ask cause it has potential to challenge my product (an Asterisk-based PBX) but I can imagine Avaya wanting extra money for all the nice features.
Cheers,
Colman
6.
inbabble | April 18, 2007 at 5:08 pm
yep, theres always a catch…