The auction of the 700 MHz band ended yesterday after thirty eight days of bidding. A whopping $19,592 billion was raised for the federal treasury, despite fears that the auction would disappoint due to a staggering economy.

Is anybody surprised that you can do that on the Internet? The porn industry has thrived on the new media and in fact is responsible for many of its early innovations. With streaming media and broadband connections becoming common place, those who will pay and those that are willing are bound to get together, by credit card or cash.

These web telephony widgets can add a new dimension to websites and blogs, and from a business perspective, a quick and easy way to get connected with customers for free.

Siemans, Skype, Clearwire, and Tata – Apple opens the iPhone

Don’t be fooled by SunRocket’s collapse or Vonage’s woes, VoIP in the residential community is very much alive and well.

Here’s a nice little list I found of some of the best open source VoIP applications out there today. The list includes SIP proxies and clients, H323 clients, PBX and IVR platforms, developers and more.

Senate passes 911 bill for VoIP, and Comcast packs the hall at Harvard, literaly.

What it is and what it can do for your business. Tired of playing phone tag? This article explores how unified communications can benefit your business through increased productivity.

Some strange things have been happening to the Internet lately...All this just goes to show that the Internet is not perfect, and is vulnerable to things that happen, malicious or not. But what isn’t?

3CX has released a new version of 3CX Phone System for Windows. The latest version of the award-winning software-based IP PBX has an integrated 3CX Tunnel which simplifies firewall configuration by channeling all VoIP traffic over a single port; making it easy for remote workers to connect to their company’s PBX and for Network Managers to connect different remote PBX systems between them.

Speaking of the Cablecos and their bandwidth, the FCCs open forum on traffic management starts today in Harvard. Speakers will include representatives from Comcast and Verizon, U.S. Rep Ed Markey of the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, and Professor Timothy Wu, original coiner of the phrase net neutrality.

The Telecom Industry Associations 2008 Market Review and Forecast came out today, and as previewed on FierceVoIP, the U.S. residential VoIP market is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 20 percent over the next four years. Cable companies will continue to gain market share at the expense of the pure play providers.

Largest 802.11n deployment planned by Duke University, Star Wars 2008, Broadband Balloons, and T-Mobile goes VoIP. News and Commentary on the weeks more interesting stories.

It has been said that the two companies have significant cultural differences, Yahoo being very collaborative with a Linux based open source philosophy. Microsoft has never been accused of being a champion of open source technologies. The engineers that thrive in that kind of innovative environment are even now considering bolting.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is looking into sabotage as a possible cause of the five submarine cable cuts that affected the Mid East and south Asian Internet and phone services in late January and early February.

Some of this weeks top stories: Microsoft leaps into the low end cell phone market, as the Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona. Vonage gains some market share while VoIP Inc. sues for patent infringement and the WiMax forum comes clean about its FDD plans. Also, an awful lot about Comcast in the news this week.

Without a net neutrality law in place, publicly traded service providers will always straddle the fence between their customers and shareholders. More often than not, they will opt for the bottom line, leaving consumers rights by the wayside. It is exactly the absence of such legislation that has allowed the cell phone industry to wall in their gardens, offering dumbed down browsers that only access the content that the provider wants you to see (and pay them for). Left to their own devices, ISPs could be headed down the same road. If it starts with BitTorrent, where does it stop?

Microsoft Corp. has been in the news a lot of late, most notably due to its unsolicited takeover bid for Yahoo. Progress in their unified communications partnership with Nortel was charted this week, and they also announced on Monday that they were acquiring the Sidekick cell phone maker Danger.

The first week in February ends with another pure play closing shop, new product announcements, more cable cuts, and the FCC auction creeping up on the 20 billion mark.

I am pleased to announce the first in a series of Whitepapers from VoIP-Facts.net is available for download on the home page. VoIP Call Control: The Signaling Protocols of Voice over IP Telephony explores the history of the signaling protocols and their technical differences and similarities. Technical specifications of the Simple Gateway Control Protocol, MGCP and Megaco, the ITU H.323 Protocol, and the Session Initiation Protocol are all discussed in detail. The paper ends with a look at the future of the signaling protocol, the ITU’s Advanced Multimedia System project slated for standardization in 2010.

It’s Super Tuesday. Do you know where your candidate stands? While not a pressing issue for most Americans, technological innovation and Net Neutrality (or lack thereof) will shape the way we use the Internet for years to come.

Commercial Block C of the 700MHz auction has met the minimum reserve, ensuring open access for all...cables in the Mediterranean were cut, causing a massive slowdown of Internet and telecommunication services from Egypt to India...Sprint is reviving talks with Clearwire...Continental cuts a deal with LiveTV LLC to offer in flight WiFi Internet access and Satellite TV starting in 2009...8X8 Announces Profitable Quarter...

Phiar Corporation is using Quantum Tunneling technology to develop microchips that would operate in the Terahertz region, wirelessly transmitting huge amounts of data at blazing speeds. Historically, frequencies between 100GHz and 10THz, known as the Terahertz Region, have been difficult to access. Midway between Microwave and Infrared on the Spectrum, Phiar’s terahertz technology is set to bridge the gap between radio and photonics, and open up a whole new world of possibilities. Some say the technology could eventually replace the semi conductor.

Jaduka, recently named one of Red Herring’s Top 100 Global Emerging Technology companies, has launched EarthCaller, a new PC-to-phone service that enables calls to any landline in the U.S. for free along with super low international rates. EarthCaller runs its calls over the Public Switched Phone Network (PSTN) backed by Jaduka iQT™, a patented call quality control interface. Users are reporting calls to be cleaner, clearer and more reliable than VoIP.

As developers saw the trend of increasing voice traffic entering the network in the late nineties, the need to deal with the gateway functions between the IP and PSTN networks became apparent. One solution was the Physically Decomposed Media Gateway concept, effectively offloading the call control and signaling process to other entities, leaving the Gateway to perform translation between the PSTN and IP. The Simple Gateway Control Protocol was the first born, or perhaps even the creator of the concept, and is still in use today for applications that require a simple, lightweight signaling protocol. A brilliant little idea that spawned a slew of protocols resulting in the Megaco/H.245 IETF and ITU-T standards.

Senior says they have been working on the profile for the past twelve months, but have kept it under the table for fear of upsetting their chances of getting the IMT-2000 approval for Mobile WiMax. The ITU endorsed WiMax in May of last year for the 2.6GHz swath of spectrum, thinking that TDD WiMax would sit in 50MHz between two 70MHz bands configured for FDD. With an FDD profile in place, Mobile WiMax could score a coup for the whole swath.

SIPs emergence as the protocol of choice came in no small part from its work on IMS, and the consequent development of the concept of Presence. While by no means exclusive territory, the standards committees have worked hard to put SIP in the forefront of presence technology. Knowing where a person is and their availability, coupled with the ability to communicate through a variety of applications and devices, business productivity and mobility soar as the old days of playing phone tag become obsolete.

Wireless broadband provider Clearwire Corp announced this week that it was partnering with Nortel Networks to offer VoIP telephony services to its customers over its own network infrastructure...Last summer, Clearwire struck a deal with Satellite TV providers DirecTV and Echostar that would allow each of the companies to sell a bundle of Internet, voice, and TV services. If they can make it work, another player in the triple play market can only be a good thing for the consumer.

The FCC, who will begin testing wireless devices in the spectrum on January 24, now have another option for how to use the white space. Will they stand by their commitment to eliminate the Digital Divide in the U.S., expanding broadband Internet access for all nationwide? Or will the allure of licensing the spectrum and pumping more money into the Treasury sway them to further embed the cellular monopolies into the publics’ electromagnetic right of way?

...the White Spaces Coalition wants to use the spaces between local television channels, which are becoming available in 2009, to bring inexpensive wireless broadband access to the masses...Like the 700MHz UHF band of spectrum, these lower (2-698 MHz) radio waves travel far and penetrate deep, making them ideal for large rural expanses, as well as densely populated cities. It has been said by some that this spectrum could provide speeds up to 80mbs, and that access could be as low as as $10 per month.

The first hurdle to overcome when making a VoIP phone call is to establish a connection between the parties involved. In legacy telephony, this is done by switching circuits until a physical wire is established between locations. The Internet Protocol on the other hand is connectionless by nature. IP packets have a tendency to take whatever route they find first, and end up in whatever order they arrive. For time sensitive applications such as voice and video this is unacceptable. Steps must be taken to establish a point to point connection and to keep it open for the duration of the call.

The whole argument of the open access vs. walled garden approach rekindled the Net Neutrality debate, with the Free Marketers (i.e. ATT, Verizon) arguing against Federal regulation of the Internet...In the end, the FCC's decision in this case was a victory for wireless network neutrality, with open devices and applications getting a free ride on the wireless waves. Perhaps as a consequence, late last year Verizon caved by announcing it would open its network to any device or application that meets its specifications by later this year.

The 700MHz band of spectrum has a unique set of properties and capabilities that have not been available to the market since, well, since television took to the airwaves. Able to penetrate deep into buildings and travel 4 times farther than its peer frequencies, the FCC, as well as many commercial interests, see a once in a lifetime opportunity to build a nationwide wireless broadband network covering metropolitan and rural regions across the country, turning the have nots into the haves, and virtually eliminating the Digital Divide in the U.S..

Comcast announced this week at CES that it has surpassed first Vonage and now Embarq, to become the fourth largest residential phone service provider in the US, behind Verizon, ATT, and Quest. According to CEO Brian L. Roberts, Comcast is the fastest growing residential phone service in the country, now offering its triple play of voice, video, and broadband Internet access to over 40 million households.

Without a doubt, 2008 is poised to bring some major changes to telecommunication as we know it and the wireless industry in particular. With the maturation of Voice over IP and WiFi, and the emerging 4G WiMax and LTE technologies, the telecommunications business model morphs into a broadband access business, offering interactive multimedia services to a data greedy populace. Driven by device manufacturers, application developers, and consumer demand, voice will share the bandwidth with email, texting, videoconferencing, GPS navigation, national security alerts, games, advertising, music, and TV, just to name a few.

As we move head strong into the New Year, I would like to take this time to look back at the past 12 months as they relate to VoIP and the Telecommunications industry in general. 2007 was a year of upheaval and innovation, as VoIP became more of a mainstream technology and less of a novelty, the growing pains experienced define the winners and losers in a tumultuous year. On a positive note, for those of us that think VoIP and open source is a positive thing, Verizon announced late in the year that it would open its network to “any” device or application that meets the minimum requirements. A potential road to Fixed Mobile Convergence...

Just like any major network undertaking, best practices dictate that deployment take place in stages, the success of each successive phase depending on the previous. The first stage is planning and assessment, followed by an intense pre deployment testing and implementation stage, and once the migration has taken place, the ongoing operations and optimizations stage. Taken together, these phases of deployment are what is known as the converged IPT network life cycle

After all the planning has been done and the network assessed, the conclusions drawn and assumptions made must be tested to assure that they are correct before moving on with the migration. Testing new applications and hardware in a production environment can be potentially disruptive to a business if things don't go as expected. It is therefore essential that the testing and tweaking be done on an isolated network segment.

The converged network analysis solutions available to you should be assessed in the planning stage, and once decided upon, used extensively in the testing, implementation, and ongoing operations and optimization stages. Such features as capacity planning, network assessment and simulations, design and configuration are all crucial in the pre deployment stages Your analysis software should be hardware agnostic and compatible with a wide variety of PBXs to accurately measure voice use patterns both pre and post deployment.

WiMAX promises to deliver last mile wireless broadband internet access capable of carrying data intensive applications such as VoIP to Metropolitan Area Networks, as well as sub-urban and rural communities.

If the early development of the Internet can be compared to the American Wild West, then the rise of the U.S. cellular industry can be likened to Stalin’s Soviet Union. Carrier networks rule developers, device manufactures, and consumers with an iron fist, allowing only services and applications that they see fit on their networks.

As the technology of VoIP over WiFi networks continues to develop, businesses of all sizes can reap the benefits of increased mobility, productivity, and significant cost savings...A cell phone that can switch between cellular and WiFi networks can significantly reduce telecommunications costs at the corporate office. With WiFi hotspots popping up at hotels, cafes, and corporate LANs across the globe, mobile workers can stay in touch with office and family both on and off the job. With the addition of a VoIP service provider, cheaper VoIP calls can be made from any WiFi network at the push of a button.

The following is a compilation of just some of the security threats facing a voice over IP network, as well as some security measures that could be taken to prevent such attacks.

There are basically three ways for the residential consumer to obtain a broadband connection, from your cable television provider, your telephone company, or a wireless network. With these options becoming increasingly more wide spread, utilizing the Internet to route your phone calls has also become a viable and cost saving alternative to traditional landline telephony.

With the advent of widespread broadband Internet connections, consumers are discovering what businesses have known for a while. Voice over IP telephony, or VoIP as it is known, can be a viable and cost effective alternative to the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS).

As technologies mature and more households gain access to high speed Internet, consumers will come to realize that it is simply more efficient and cost effective to send packets of voiceover the Internet than over a point to point circuit switched land line. Long distance charges become a thing of the past, and international calls are pennies a minute if not free to some countries.