This Week in VoIP: Verizon to Launch HD Voice Support

Among the announcements flowing out of Verizon Business (News - Alert) in June was one tidbit buried in a Unified Communication release that provides the foundation for the company to provide full-blown HD voice support by the end of the year.

Verizon announced VoIP IP Enterprise Routing or VIPER; I would have picked a different name because VIPER sound a lot like Cisco's (News - Alert) VIPR protocol and I'm sure there will be some confusion among the tech set when you start mixing up VoIP and IP interoperability and VIPER/VIPR. Maybe a better term would for what is going on is Pure SIP Routing (PSR) because Verizon is simply routing enterprise VoIP calls in an all-IP fashion without touching the PSTN.

VIPER is being offered to enterprises as an opt-in cost-saving feature where business-to-business VOIP calls on the Verizon Business network are directly routed via SIP, eliminating domestic and international per-minute calling charges. In addition, customers using Verizon IP audio conferencing will not incur per-minute charges from any VIPER-enabled (i.e. SIP-trunked) location dialing into the host conference bridge.

Verizon Business VoIP service such as IP trunking

If you already have a Verizon Business VoIP service such as IP trunking and hosted IP Centrex, the VIPER feature is available at no charge and does not require any additional customer hardware or software. On-line reporting provides tracking of which calls are "on net" for VIPER and therefore free.

For several reasons, ISPs which are controlled by government are performing blockage of VoIP around the world especially in UAE, Oman, Qatar and Africa. Even in these countries it is possible to bypass the blocking imposed by ISPs there. Service providers try to use VPN or VoIP Tunnel solution to allow VoIP use and circumvent current blocking issues.

SpeedVoIP’s innovative anti-blocking solution VGSCLite can be integrated with legacy softphone or dialer. It is suitable for any 3rd-party SIP softphone such as X-Lite/Eyebeam. The biggest advantage of VGSClite is that it is easy and affordable to integrate anti-blocking features into existing branded Softphone/Dialer in operation. This reduces the requirement for tough development and testing efforts.