Community Guy

Skype took a tough hit yesterday after a software bug took out its 200 million peer to peer users for more than 20 hours. With 220 million subscribers an 9 million users online at any given time, this must have been a wake-up call for hardcore Skype business users that rely on the tool to [...]

Globe and Mail reporter, Paul Lima, asked if I would speak with him about a piece he was writing about the state of unified messaging. The article was printed in today’s Globe in the business section, titled “Here, There and Everywhere“. It’s an exciting time for me and the team at HIP. The technology we’re [...]

These photos were sent to me by a friend working for a local Toronto CLEC. During a visit to troubleshoot audio problems with calls passing through their phone switch, the technician found a simple diagnosis to their problem. Their best guess was this little guy was looking for somewhere warm to sleep when his furry [...]

Last week we enabled a new feature of our phone switch called broadcast paging and I’m so happy with its functionality and the problems it will solve for our customers, I felt compelled to share. Broadcast paging is a feature that lets a user dial a phone extension and “broadcast” their message to the speaker [...]

Mark Evans, a leading Canadian thinker about VoIP and related technology, offered up a thoughtful post yesterday titled “Deep Thoughts about VoIP’s Future in Canada“.  Mark refers to Monday’s announcement by Maxime Bernier, Minister of Industry that discusses the acceleration of “Deregulation of Local Telephone Service in the Interests of Canadian Consumers”. In his post, Evans wonders “what happens if Bell and Telus [...]

Being in the industry, a lot of my friends think I should know everything there is about VoIP, including companies doing cool VoIP things. Most days I think I do alright, but earlier last week a colleague asked me about Onebox, and up until today, I hadn’t heard of them. I took a few mintues [...]

Yes, there is a difference. During lunch at Jack Astor’s on Friday, my lunch partner told me a CEO friend for a large corporation was unhappy with his VoIP service at home.  Although the VoIP provider name wasn’t known, it’s a common story – Poor call quality, dropped calls, jitter, latency. I told him I wasn’t surprised. “Well, [...]

The number of simultaneous VoIP calls that can be placed over DSL depends largely on two things: Your available upstream DSL bandwidth (generally 640-800Kb upstream) The codec* your VoIP provider permits you to use (normally G.729a or G.711). I won’t get into the details of DSL or the codecs, because the real question is how many lines [...]