Answering Service Blog | American Inbound

Skype has released a ‘mini’ beta version of its service, this time, for cell phones. As of now you can only place outgoing calls if you live in Brazil, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Poland, Sweden, or the U.K.

Skype expects beta testing to last several months, and there is no word when all service locations will be able to receive full functionality.

Interested parties should visit Skype’s site and download the beta version of the program available for their cell phone.

VoIP can save you money on all types of telephone calls. Originally this could only be done with a computer and an internet line. However, there are several more options available now. Check Techcrunch’s list of VoIP providers for cell phones. They have also written up an excellent guide to the VoIP world. So if you haven’t heard of ViOP at all, their article is a great place to start.

Phone service costing you a fortune?  Small businesses can dramatically reduce the cost of internet and telephone by installing a shared T1 line. 

T1 Rex explains that T1 lines have recently dropped in price so dramatically that businesses with only 6 lines can save money if they were to switch. 

iPhone users should receive a nice surprise this summer when the iPhone 2.0 software is released.  JAJAH an iPhone software company will package their ViOP software with the new version of iPhone.

This will enable free long distance calling when you are near a wifi hotspot.  Check out VoIP News or iPhone Atlas for more information.

Attention all ViOP businesses, Network World and the New York Times are reporting the discovery over 100 security holes in ViOP products from Cisco, Avaya, and Nortell.

All three companies are responding well to the situation. Avaya has commented that their security holes can be patched with the proper user configuration. Cisco is also very concerned and will be working diligently to fix the issue.

VoIP Shield, the business reporting the security threat, has released a set of free diagnosis tools to check your ViOP network for vulnerabilities.

If you have never heard of Skype, you should look into it.  They provide free long-distance calling over your computer or cell phone.   Skype uses VoIP (voice over internet protocol) and an internet connection to transmit voice, text, and video.

All you need is an internet ready computer, or access to a wifi for your cell phone.  Go to skype.com and download their software. 

TMCnet and Dialaphone have both mentioned there are ViOP services other than Skype.  Travel to their posts to read up on these applications. 

The US senate has signed a bill (S.428) that will make all VoIP providers offer a 911 line.  Traditional land line and cell providers were forced to do this years ago.  However, this is the first time the issue has been raised with VoIP services. 

This will most affect VoIP providers whose customer base primarily uses software on a computer to talk on the phone (eg: Skype).  These business are now subject to the 911 tax and must pay to outsource the calls.  Vonage, the prominant ViOP, will be least affected by this, as they claim that 98 percent of its customers have 911 access.

Lots of VoIP news today.

On April 1 Sprint, Nortel, Ericsson, Motorola, Qualcomm and others will be hosting a mobile VOIP discussion at the CTIA Wireless 2008 conference in Las Vegas.  Here they will discuss techniques to implement this technology.  As VoIP networks evolve, expect them to be used more and more.

Telappliant is reporting that VoIP should expect even more growth in 2008. Mobile VoIP allows cell phones to connect to wi-fi hot spots and uses the internet to transport the calls seamlessly. In 2007 mobile VoIP customers rose a suprising 21.2%. The expected growth for 2008 is 24.3%!

VoIP growth in Quebec is even more startling. In 2007 Quebec nearly had a 200% increase in VoIP use! It is estimated that by 2010 VoIP will overtake standard land-line telephoney.

If your office has many lines and you have not switched to VoIP, consider the advantages it has over tradition PSTNs (public switched telephone network):

• More reliable
• More secure
• Half the cost for communications
• Can receive both audio and video

For more reasons, please visit TMC’s blog post.

Video Answering Services are in the near future.  But how would these features be used?  Most call center clients would have no need for this.  However, many would. Think about the last work meeting that you could not make.  If you happened to have a video based answering service, you could call your service, and they could patch you and your video through to the board room.  Board meeting crisis averted. 

Another situation: for property maintenance.  You’ve got a problem tennet.  One that calls every night about one thing or another.  Now she has a pipe leaking under her sink.  She has definitely called in false alarms before so you are wary.  Well if you had a video answering service, you could have video of the leak in real time.  It turns out that the leak was a just a small drip… and from the faucet!  She can wait until the morning.

As this becomes more and more of a reality, more uses for this technology are sure to appear.  There have already been a couple of skype based answering service start ups this year.  It would not take many changes on their end to enable these kind of video services.  However they have not offered any as of yet. 

Here is another article dealing with video answering services.