Packnet Blog

An influential business association representing the interests of rural enterprises has said that the government has been too slow in facilitating the expansion of superfast broadband to outlying areas of the UK, making it unlikely to meet its 2015 target of complete superfast broadband availability for the whole of the UK.

The Country Land and Business Association (CLA) claims that as much as 20% of the rural population is still without reliable broadband provision and that the time thus far taken in rolling out superfast broadband in the UK implies a strong likelihood that the government will fail to reach its 2015 target.

Business VoIP (voice over internet protocol) has shown significant expansion in New Zealand and is likely to grow even further, a new report has strongly implied.

The report, issued by respected independent research organisation Frost & Sullivan, points to business VoIP and telephony in general being one of the main catalysts behind what it claims is a 6.6% growth in the unified communications (UC) market in New Zealand over the course of 2011.

UK-based financial management group Charles Stanley & Co. Ltd has announced the achievement of substantial savings in phone costs following the recent upgrading of its internal exchange, claiming that more savings are on the way.

The group says that the savings it has achieved thus far, which amount to £100,000, are based on an almost immediate reduction in line rental costs, achieved through the adoption of session initiation protocol (SIP) trunking. The group predicts that SIP trunking will now help it achieve further savings of £100,000 between 2012 and 2013.

The City of White Salmon, a US resort area near Portland in Oregon renowned for its water sports activities, has announced the deployment of a large-scale internet protocol (IP) telephony network serving all the area’s main municipal buildings.

The new IP telephony system is reported to involve the deployment of a single business VoIP (voice over internet protocol) phone network connecting buildings such as the police and fire departments, as well as the main city hall.

A new business VoIP (voice over internet protocol) phone system has been given the go ahead by the prosecutor’s office in the county of South Bend, Indiana, USA, designed specifically for its Child Support Division.

The proposed new system – the installation of which is expected to be fully completed next year – has, according to one of the Child Support Division’s attorneys, Megan New, been given the green light for several key operational reasons.

The growing trend in the US for enterprises and local government authorities to switch their business phone systems to those which exploit the technology of internet protocol (IP) telephony has found one of its latest manifestations in plans by Jackson Township, New Jersey, USA, for a new business VoIP (voice over internet protocol) phone system.

The proposed new business VoIP system is planned to link all of the local authority’s municipal buildings, as well as its police headquarters, and is intended to make use of 46 lines for incoming calls, together with an added emergency back-up facility for the police department. 176 business VoIP handsets are expected to be provided to staff at the local authority sites.

A new report claims that the market across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) for internet protocol (IP) telephony phones and exchanges is worth nearly $3.5 billion, based on figures released for 2011.

The report, by the International Data Corporation (IDC), says that this year-on-year growth in IP telephony was particularly strong in the Central and Eastern European zones, where the market grew by 35.5% in comparison with 2010 figures.

Leading US current affairs broadcaster ABC News has shown the extent to which business VoIP (voice over internet protocol) can be truly mobile, by deploying the services of a host business VoIP provider in order to access voice, email and fax communications facilities when covering outside broadcast events around the country.

It is understood that the broadcaster’s new business VoIP facility can enable its reporters and production staff to communicate with both internal and external contacts just as if they were in their office environment.

By deploying business VoIP (voice over internet protocol), enterprises could not only be improving the state of their business phone systems today, they could also be paving the way for significant improvements in the quality of their voice telephony transmission and reception in the very near future.

Such is the view of Saddletree Research, whose analyst, Paul Stockford, has pointed to the high degree of compatibility between business VoIP systems and wideband audio – more commonly known as HD voice.

A leading teaching hospital located in the US capital, Washington D.C., has announced that it is to replace its old internal network of business phone systems with a single state of the art internet protocol (IP) telephony network. Included as part of this will be the widespread deployment of business VoIP (voice over internet protocol) phone handsets for the organisation’s 1,700 staff.

The hospital – the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, which specialises in providing medical treatment to former US military personnel – says it has made the decision to implement the new business VoIP system as part of a much needed overhaul of its entire communications network.