Skype adds SIP for Enterprise VOIP

Skype wants to go beyond the retail consumer VOIP market and all set to get into Enterprise VOIP and they know SIP dominates the Enterprise VOIP Market. Skype most likely unwillingly accepted the industry standard and now opening up their platform for SIP support.

Skype named this enterprise VOIP venture as Skype for SIP. It is expected to allow company employees to make domestic and international calls using regular office telephones (PBX systems) instead of using a computer and a headset for VoIP calls. That means if your company uses Skype for SIP, you can use skype to make calls out but using traditional phone line. Skype would be basically your backbone for making calls or receiving calls as Skype also gives Incoming numbers in many parts of the world.
Skype to SIP will also give enterprise VOIP Customers the ability to receive and manage inbound calls from Skype users to SIP-enabled PBX systems, enabling them to offer click-to-call functionality on websites. This move is similar to Corebridge VOIP solutions which offer similar functionality for enterprise VOIP customers.

If you want to switch to Enterprise VOIP, would you consider Skype for SIP or would stick to good old SIP service Providers? We believe its not a cakewalk for Skype, especially when the Enterprise VOIP market has already crowded with SIP Providers and also large telephony companies.

Skype has to clearly define its advantage oves other SIP Providers to actually force existing Enterprise VOIP firms to switch to Skype SIP or have to target small-medium enterprise customers.

If you have a business, you can apply for Skype for SIP Beta.

VOXOFON VOIP Service Free Call Hack

Well, we haven't really given away any free voip calling hacks for some time. I thought lets do one today :-) This is good old loophole often left unattended by many VOIP companies.

Before we begin talking about Voxofon VOIP Service, Have you yet read about actionVOIP, the cheapest VOIP Phone service for India? Do take a look.

VoxoFon is basically a cheap international call service although many VOIP Providers claim to offer cheap international call service its often costlier than other VOIP Providers. VoxoFon's calling rates don't really excite us at all. With almost 8 cents for USA to India calls on Phone to Phone is way too costly.

Voxofon offers free trial calls to a few destinations including India. That's where you can actually use this free calling hack.

It asks for your phone number and the party's number to dial. Se below picture.



Now the real hack begins here, The idea is to use more digits than your phone number. USA to India free trial call is only for 1 minute but with additonal number combination you can do as many calls as you want. Use your imagination.

Take Example:

First Call: USA number: + 18888888888 and India Number: +912225999999
Talk for 1 minute.

Second Call: Add any digit at the end of the number. USA number: + 188888888889. Don't change India number. So now you have a new combination, Voxofon system won't recognize that this is the same number and will let you make another call.

This way you can repeat as many numbers as you want. It really depends on how many numbers you can add after your phone number. At this time, you can add almost infinite. So Imagine, how many combinations you can make out of this.

For certain countries, the per call limit is higher than 1 minute, so you can expect to talk for long.

Just your imagination and make the most of it. Let us know how you are able to make free calls with VoxoFon.

ActionVOIP VOIP SIP service offers cheapest calls to India

Betamax has yet again launched a new VOIP service and adds more variety to their existing VOIP offering. The good part of this new VOIP service ActionVOIP is of course the best and most cheapest calling rates to India.

India was offered by a few VOIP services at around 1.39-1.70 cents per minute range by VOIP Providers such as nymgo and Mediaringtalk. As we already predicted that this would trigger further competitive prices for India and Betamax has again managed to lower down the prices to a rock bottom .07 cents per minute. That means first time ever, calling india is cheaper than 1 cent per minute and that means you can call India at around 35 paise per minute, this is cheaper than a local call in India lol. Now you know you are being treated like a slumdog in India by telecom companies and mobile operators in India such as Vodafone, Bharati who charge anywhere between 35paise-1 rs for calls within India. WOW and a international ISD calls originating from outside of India is charged at 35 cents much cheaper than local calls.

Neverthless, 0.7 cents per minute is damn cheap and hats off to betamax to offer such price. Lets hope more popular VOIP Providers like localphone , nymgo start offering these prices very soon. This would not just eradicate low quality VOIP operators offering horrible quality calls but we would have more choice and quality at great prices.

You can start using ActionVOIP by downloading their softphone or you can use SIP with ActionVOIP.

ActionVOIP SIP Settings:

SIP port : 5060
Registrar : sip.actionvoip.com
Proxy server : sip.actionvoip.com
Outbound proxy server : leave empty
Account name : your Actionvoip username
Password : your Actionvoip password
Display name/number : your Actionvoip username or voipnumber
Stunserver (option) : stun.actionvoip.com

You can also use Actionvoip from local access number in your country, however currently the local access number dialing facility is available in a few countries mostly european countries only.

We suggest you give actionvoip a try with a small topup and check the quality of the service. Do remember to give your feedback coz your comments counts and it helps everyone on the blog to make a decision.

Ooma Voip Phone Service integrates with Google Voice

VOIP industry is closely watching the development at google voice and how it would effect the voip industry. Although many leading VOIP Providers look at google Voice as tough competitor, there are some VOIP Providers looking at opportunities by integrating google voice product into their existing VOIP Phone services.

Ooma is one such company daring to intergrate Google Voice into their existing Ooma Core VOIP Phone Service. Ooma will intergrate Google Voice's core features such as one number portability into ooma Core.

According to Rich Buchanan, chief marketing officer at ooma, when consumers combine Google Voice with ooma in the home, they “realize superior voice communication functionality with the greatest cost savings of any personal unified communications system available today.

The new features will do things like,

1) Help ooma users display Google Voice caller ID on outbound calls
2) display Google Voice text messages on home handsets and allow a call sent to an ooma home phone to be forwarded directly to a Google Voice number, just as if the call were originally directed to that number.

ooma would start working on these features very soon and exisying and new users of ooma can expect to see google voice integration very soon. Ooma is available only in the USA and its currently selling at Amazon for only $199.

Hopefully Google Voice would open up their platform for all users very soon.

Grandcentral VOIP becomes Google Voice

After a long time, Google finally rebranded GrandCentral, a powerful VOIP integration service into Google Voice.

Rebranding GrandCentral into Google Voice would open up multiple avenues for google in the coming years mainly in the integration space. It would be interesting to see if they would integrate Google Talk ingo google voice or add google voice to google talk. There were talks that Google Talk team doesnt do any further development and has been used by other teams possibly google voice team.

GrandCentral will continue to offer users with the same interface and its core feature, intregrating multiple phone numbers into one google voice number so you can manage your calls effectively.

Besides the standard features, Google Voice would also offer,

Call screening - Announce and screen callers
Listen in - Listen before taking a call
Block calls - Keep unwanted callers at bay
SMS - Send, receive, and store SMS
Place calls - Call US numbers for free
Taking calls - Answer on any of your phones
Phone routing - Phones ring based on whoConference calling - Join people into a single call
Call record - Record calls and store them online
Call switch - Switch phones during a call
Mobile site - View your inbox from your mobile
GOOG-411 - Check directory assistance
Manage groups - Set preferences by group calls
Forwarding phones - Add phones and decide which ring
Voicemail transcripts - Read what your voicemail says
Listen to voicemail - Check online or from your phone
Notifications - Receive voicemails via email or SMS
Personalize greeting - Vary greetings by caller
Share voicemail - Forward or download voicemails

Another important feature is obviously allowing totally free calls any USA number including mobile.

Unfortunately at this stage, google voice is restricted to existing GrandCentral users. However, let's hope they open up the doors to this exicting VOIP service to anyone anywhere in the world so anyone can leverage the benefit of having one number for call management.

We believe Google will now take up Google Voice seriously and would most likely integrate google voice voip service into other applications or services google offers.

See below a Google Voice Video explaining Features:

AIM Call Out VOIP closed down

AIM Call out VOIP Service by AOL is in the process of a shutdown. Unfortunately, They never took off with their VOIP Service,it was used only by a small number of people. I understand the pain to run a costly VOIP company and having a bunch of VOIP developers sitting in your office with no profit coming from the service.

AIM Call out received attention when they launched their VOIP Service, however they struggled to keep up with the competition. Call it bad marketing or just the way people associate AIM with messaging rather than VOIP Calls. AIM is still one of the best messengers out there.

If you look at Yahoo Voice, it also failed to establish itself as a promising VOIP Service, finally got sold to Jajah. AIM on the other hand could not possibly have the kind of volumes to sell off the VOIP business. Wonder what would they do with all the setup and people, hope its being reused and people being share across the technologies within the company. I know a few people personally working in AIM Callout Department.

However, I strongly deny the fact that VOIP is loosing it's pace. On the other hand, as i said before only VOIP companies with clear focus and innovation will stay long in this game and the rest would just dilute or merge or selloff. I would see more VOIP firms going down even in the residential VOIP market even though there is a strong indication that USA sales for residential VOIP might go up as people want to save money. However the switch from PSTN to VOIP can be tricky, as people are awry about taking any chances or trying a new VOIP provider during this touch economic time.

If you are currently a AIM Call out unlucky customer, I suggest you use all the credit. There are no indications unless otherwise confirmed to you that AIM will payout remaining credit to the account holders. The best way is to actually use the credit.

AIM will close their Callout VOIP service with effect from on March 25, 2009.
If you have used or using AIM Callout, do let us know your feedback on this VOIP Service and why do you think it went down abruptly?

Skype releases SILK VOIP Wideband Codec

Skype VOIP has slowly popping out from their shell and opening up their propietary audio codecs to the entire VOIP industry. Skype has been known to keep their award winning audio codecs private. We all know that Skype has some great in house audio codecs which can deliver great sound quality at much lower bandwidth usage but it wasnt readily available for third party integration.

Skype has finally released SILK, a New Skype-designed and developed default audio codec for all Skype-to-Skype calls. SILK is currently used in the latest version of Skype. If you don't have latest skype version, I strongly suggest you download one, its way better than older version and has superior audio quality.

Skype claims that with SILK, a super wideband audio codec it redefines the entire VOIP market by giving the best audio quality on VOIP calls with almost 50% less bandwidth usage.

What did they achieve with SILK codec:

-improved audio bandwidth going from 8 kHz to 12 kHz, meaning that a SILK conversation sounds like you are in the same room as the person you are speaking with. SILK can go upto 24 Khz.
-provides real-time bandwidth scalability to deal with degraded network conditions

-balancing codec optimization between voice, music and background noise, each of which can have an impact on the overall user experience.

-delivering a robust solution that delivers a more consistent audio experience, regardless of network conditions and an individual user’s voice signature

Skype is now expecting that industry and third party application developers will adopt SILK as a standard in wideband audio. SiLK is available for FREE. It would be interesting to see SILK adoption with Trixbox, Asterix and the likes with wideband hitting the entire VOIP world.

Nymgo VOIP Service slashes India Mobile rates to 1.3 cents

We have one good and one bad news coming from Nymgo. Lets hear the bad news first, Nymgo has stopped offering their unlimited India Calling Package. Existing customers will be on the same package however it seems they won't take any new customers.

However, Nymgo has now slashed India Mobile calling rates to all time low of only 1.3 cents per minute, this is industry first VOIP service to go as low as 1.3 cents per minute. It would be interesting to see if VOIP Providers like LocalPhone, IndiaMinutes, Mediaringtalk follow Nymgo in this race.

Nymgo although a new VOIP Provider have gained huge customer base in a very short time especially their India Unlimited Package was a huge hit and people also gave favorable reviews on nymgo service on our blog which made them sell even more.

1.3 cents to India Mobile does not include calling code (94), possibly because of high termination cost to this calling code. Secondly, nymgo offers VOIP services through SIP which gives an edge over other non-SIP Providers.

If you are having difficulty setting up SIP on Nymgo, you can follow our Nymgo SIP guide.

If you are using Nymgo, we would like to hear about their latest quality of service and if they are able to sustain with more customers?