Packnet Blog

Although not normally considered a ‘public relations’ or ‘image making’ tool, business VoIP (voice over internet protocol) has in fact shown itself to be a key factor in helping individual companies maintain or even improve their standing in the eyes of potential customers.

The first, and perhaps most obvious way in which business VoIP can bolster a firm’s reputation, is through its ability to allow customer calls to reach company staff even where those staff are unable to gain access to their normal place of business; such as during adverse weather conditions.

Whilst business VoIP is quite rightly often cited as being of huge benefit to a company’s bottom line, by way of reduced phone costs, a successful recent VoIP installation by a high school in the US also highlights the superiority of VoIP as a method of managing institutional and business phone systems.

Suffolk County Council, together with several local councils throughout Suffolk, has announced it intends funding high speed broadband development in the county to the tune of £10 million over a four year period.

The move follows a recent failure on the part of the County to win a £20 million subsidy from the UK government’s Broadband Delivery UK scheme – an initiative designed to increase high speed broadband penetration throughout the UK. The Council now intends submitting a fresh bid to try and secure a matching £10 million from the government.

Surrey County Council has launched its own broadband supplier tendering process in an effort to ensure that the county achieves full high speed broadband coverage by 2013.

Although national telecommunications supplier, BT, has committed to extending its high speed broadband network throughout the UK, Surrey County Council says that without its own private tendering initiative up to 20% of Surrey addresses will still remain unable to access high speed broadband – especially those businesses and homes based in the county’s more rural areas.

Two commercially-owned space satellites have begun offering dedicated high speed broadband access to areas of Europe generally considered unreachable by conventional broadband cable networks, such as some remote parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The Eutelsat-owned Ka-Sat satellite and the Hylas-1 craft run by Avanti carry ultra-high frequencies known as ‘Ka band’ frequencies; and it is these Ka-band frequencies which facilitate the fast data transmission required for broadband-quality communications.

Hampshire Fire & Rescue Service is to introduce a VoIP (voice over internet protocol) facility for its 1,935 staff based at various locations across the county.

In common with much of the business VoIP capability currently being acquired by many commercial firms in both the UK and around the world, Hampshire Fire & Rescue Service’s VoIP service will rely on access to a high speed broadband cable network; in Hampshire Fire Service’s case, this will be in the form of a recently installed public sector network (PSN) – itself utilising high-speed fibre-optic cables already laid down by Virgin Media Business.

Going down the route of fully embracing business VoIP may initially appeal to most firms but some may still be reluctant converts; perhaps a business might not consider that it receives enough calls every month to warrant taking advantage of the cost savings associated with VoIP; or perhaps expenditure priorities might appear to lie elsewhere. Yet, reliable advice on the merits of VoIP can often throw up some very tempting considerations for almost all businesses.

UK Cookie law has come to force from 26th May, 2011 and UK websites are given 12 months to make necessary changes that would make it comply with the guide lines. The UK government’s Information Commissioner’s office (ICO) has issued a guide line (which can be found here ) on what needs to be done by UK websites in order to comply with the EU directives. The new amendment states that the websites should give clear information about the cookies that will be set in the user’s device (PC, mobile etc.) and get consent from user or give the option to opt out.

The original pool of IP version 4 addresses is now empty! The history of internet has turned an important page earlier this year, when the last five available blocks of IPv4 addresses were officially handed over to the regional internet registries (RIR). This means that, any future allocation is possible only after a global deployment of the next version of Internet protocol, called IPv6. The distribution of last five blocks was triggered by a request from RIR for Asia Pacific region – Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) – which is running out of IP addresses thanks to the explosive growth of internet in the region. Two blocks were handed over to them and as part of a global policy the remaining three blocks where distributed among all the RIRs. The so called ‘/8s’ blocks, each of which can handle over a 16 million addresses each is expected to be ran out in the Asia Pacific region by September this year. On the other hand, in Europe, the currently allocated pool is sufficient enough to last for few more years as the growth rate is not in the same league as that of the Asia Pacific one.

A new report by business analysts, IBISWorld, claims that VoIP (voice over internet protocol) is the fastest growing sector in the US economy, and will continue to hold this crown until at least 2016.

According to the report, revenue generated from VoIP in 2010 stood at $12,498 million, a rise of 194% since 2000. The report predicts that revenue from VoIP will continue to grow by a further 17.4% between 2010 and 2016.