Telepresense almost gets there, but still falls short of the feel of an actual meeting, as the rhythm and pace of face-to-face communications--and their spontaneity--often are lacking. Researchers from Bell Labs are looking at ways to make those meetings more natural as well as for ways to recreate ad hoc meetings that happen between colleagues working in the same building. Article

Apparently call centers are booming in Columbia due to government investment. Most of these call centers rely on unified communications to provide services. Sipera, teamed with South American Sipera-reseller Belltech, has been brought on to secure the UC systems of Columbian call center company InterContact.

InterContact has selected Sipera's UC-Sec security appliances for its call centers. Sipera will provide SIP trunk termination and comprehensive UC security for call center staff, customers and partners using VoIP, IM and other UC applications.

The Sipera UC-Sec products are real-time VoIP and UC security solutions for next-generation communications over any network, to any device. UC-Sec can safeguard communications and deploy SIP trunks combating toll fraud while satisfying security and privacy mandates throughout multiple countries.

For more:
- read the release

Related articles:
Sipera raises another $10M to advance UC security
Sipera and Cisco team on unified communications security
Sipera protecting a million UC devices and counting

Mitel is taking Ottawa, Canada, to task to try and get a $7 million parts and service contract for a new digital voice network that's been two years in the making. Ottawa is changing out its traditional telephone and data networks into a single integrated VoIP network that would provide video and Web conferencing, integrated voice messaging and improved call center performance and will today discuss, possibly for the last time, who gets the parts and service contract.

Bell Canada/Cisco originally won the deal as the preferred suppliers but, in early April, Mitel came back and offered $2 million worth of free hardware in exchange for the service contract. The city reconsidered but city staff are now recommending the Corporate Services and Economic Development Committee restart VoIP negotiations with Bell Canada/Cisco, leaving Mitel in the cold again.

Mitel's argument is that Cisco, as the current data network, has an unfair advantage in the VoIP bid and is asking the city to cancel the current process. The city's answer is that there's no reason to do that and the matter's closed. For now.

For more:
- see this article:

Related article:
Ottawa suspends Mitel phone service bid on $2M donation

By Carl Ford

As a Bell Head, it's hard for me to find any gumption for righteous outrage.

For over a decade we have been watching voice become an application, and as we move to the social networking side, its being further reduced to a function. 

This is the future, regardless of any battles today.

So having this long-range view, the squabble makes little sense to me.

First of all lets take the side of Skype. Skype is providing an application that supports awareness of friends. As I have written, Skype has become something of a useful social network for me (far better than leave behind blasts on Twitter and Facebook walls). Internal to itself, it supports communication in various media- text, video, and voice. The value of the solution is the presence awareness and the ability to reach out to people at a higher completion rate than any other method. It has value independent of telecom. 

And the fact that it has this value has caused demand for it to reach beyond its application, which is why we have SkypeIn and SkypeOut.  These services extend the reach of the original Skype product, and people pay for the additional connectivity. And some carriers are embedded in making money with Skype on this service.

Now lets defend DT. This is not hard either. DT was one of the first companies to adopt ISDN, even before the Internet united data.  The cutting edge is nothing new to Germany where most homes have PBXs. So, they are not reacting out of fear. Skype has a cellular phone service with their partner 3, so why should DT's phone be required to have Skype?  DT sells the iPhone with voice included in the pricing strategy, so enabling 3G Skype does change the revenue strategy. Additionally, taxes are being paid by DT for voice calls, so will regulators will be looking for taxes regardless of how voice is delivered?

Which brings me to real issue.  Access is the unit of measure of the future. With access being the real value of a service provider, how voice, video or text comes across becomes less relevant.

The battle disappears, or at least gets minimized.

The Internet is a best-effort network, and the backbone is alive and well overall. However, the backbone's cost is not directly associated with access, and while dial-up set the costs based on sharing the network access, broadband services and wireless services particularly have different traffic patterns. So is cost recovery being achieved?

A few years ago, Dr. Falk Von Bornstaedt, vice president of product management and IP/Solutions, ICSS, Deutsche Telekom, pointed out that inefficient P2P systems were eating DT's backbone inefficiently. For my Bell Head brain, this is a real issue, (though I hear Henry's voice in my head saying bandwidth is cheap).

So while this battle will be interesting, my view is the war is one of regulation. The model for taxes and carrier interconnection needs to be changed. Since this battle highlights the problem, I am glad it promotes awareness.