Packetizer News

Back in December, there was news that the ITU would publish its standards free of charge. This was a temporary "trial" period, as it turned out. However, today we learned that the ITU has decided to make the standards available free of charge permanently.

We re-introduced the VoIP jobs page about 10 months ago. Unfortunately, we've had very few job postings (in spite of the fact that listing is free). Thinking we ought to just get rid of the page, I checked the server statistics and discovered that the RSS news feed is viewed by a large number of people and pulls in more hits than any other single file on Packetizer! So, we'll keep it here a while longer. I sure do wish employers would take note and use the opportunity to reach a wide audience!

8x8, the company behind the Packet8 VoIP service, reported a profit of $508,000 on revenues of $14.7M, or a penny per share. Hats off to 8x8!

The ITU-T SG16 formally initiated work on a new multimedia system called the Advanced Multimedia System (AMS). This new system will take a leap forward beyond the now decade-old H.323 and SIP systems that are currently used in the industry. Check out the concept slides.

AT&T, like all other mobile service providers in the United States, requires a contract for new customers and when getting phones at a reduced price. But AT&T goes further in abusing its customers by demanding contracts from existing customers with established credit histories who do not buy equipment.

I am sure that some of you might have seen where states want to regulate VoIP which, more than likely, also means adding more taxes. Many states definitely want to add taxes to Internet access. So, we will have taxes upon taxes to make a phone call. Is it not bad enough already? I checked my Vonage phone bill and the taxes were 21.6%! By comparison, my mobile phone was taxed 9.2%. Do we really need even more taxes on my VoIP services?!?!

Today, H.323 commands about 80% of the international long distance VoIP minutes, which is an estimated 15.8% or 49.4B minutes of all international voice communication. Skype has taken 4.4% of the market, while SIP competes with proprietary protocols for the bottom 4% of the traffic. Read the complete story.

We received notification this week that AT&T plans to increase the cost of sending an SMS message internationally from 20 cents to 25 cents. In a day and age when we would expect the cost for text messaging to decrease, only in the United States would we see such stupid pricing increases.

There has been a lot of speculation about who is buying Avaya. We know who is it is, but who is it really? Here is our best guess: Alcatel-Lucent. Why not? They need an enterprise play and this would be the best move they could make to get a bigger foot in the enterprise space.