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Cisco has made it much easier for engineers to properly account for costs when evaluating alternatives and options. They've published a very extensive list of product part numbers and retail pricing. The standard way to estimate pricing on larger items (like routers) involves a long and arduous back-and-forth with a Cisco reseller. The reseller does help by configuring the proper combination of...

Note: The following essay was adapted from a talk I gave to staff at Earthlink Business in January 2011. Do we really need telephone companies, or are they a relic of the past technology, now replaced by data networks? I had this question upon entering the voice side of the Networking Industry, coming from classical Computer Science and Data Networking. Technology history had shown that c...

ECG’s School of VoIP now includes an industry leading customizable class covering BroadWorks Call Processing and Troubleshooting. BroadSoft Connections 2010, PHOENIX, October 25, 2010 — Responding to the need for quality instruction for BroadSoft® BroadWorks® operations and engineering teams, ECG’s School of VoIP now offers a new course to provide comprehensive training on BroadWorks Call Pr...

ORLANDO, Metaswitch Forum. VoIP service providers are thinking more about IPv6 every day, based on my requests. Here at the Metaswitch Forum, the UK-based company is dedicating an entire session to IPv6 deployments. They'll be speaking to the 200+ carriers, large and small, assembled at this year's Metaswitch event. The questions we hear are, "How will it affect me? How should I be planning now...

ECG Applies best practices for VoIP network design and deployment Three obstacles plague VoIP Carriers. First, the flexibility and complexity of network design options can make network development take many months or years. Second, support for the complex features of SIP Trunking and Hosted PBX create a huge burden on staff. Finally, experienced VoIP engineers and technicians are hard to fin...

Integrated with Metaswitch, the NGTelsoft call rating platform offers new choice for mediation, rating and billing platforms ECG, a network and systems consulting firm, today announced completed integration of the NGTelsoft Call Rating platform with Metaswitch Call Detail Records. NGTelsoft gives telecom carriers a new choice for their mediation, rating, and billing platforms. NGTelsoft i...

Metaswitch has been talking a lot lately about VoIP Session Border Controllers (SBCs). They recently took their DC-SBC product to the SIPit interop testing event in June. And they just published another white paper about SBCs and their role in IMS. The Enfield company formerly called Data Connection Limited definitely makes solid software. Rumor has it some of these gents were hired to make ...

A few cases of SIP dictionary attacks using the "friendly-scanner" have been reported recently. These appear to be active attempts to steal service. We responded today to an attack on a nationwide Service Provider. They reported up to 69 REGISTERs per second originating from an IP address in Anhui province, China. 69 REGISTERs per second is roughly the equivalent load of 5,000 users. Unfo...

A few cases of SIP dictionary attacks using the "friendly-scanner" have been reported recently. These appear to be active attempts to steal service. We responded today to an attack on a nationwide Service Provider. They reported up to 69 REGISTERs per second originating from an IP address in Anhui province, China. 69 REGISTERs per second is roughly the equivalent load of 5,000 users. ...

Advanced IP PBX Features Can Radically Change the Network Engineering, Support, and Costs for Hosted IP PBX Providers Many Hosted PBX providers based on VoIP are surprised by the network load caused by the SIP Features "Shared Call Appearance" (SCA), "Shared Line Appearance", "Simultaneous Ring", "Busy Lamp Field" (BLF), or "Line State Monitoring". Both of the big Application Server players, M...

Advanced IP PBX Features Can Radically Change the Network Engineering, Support, and Costs for Hosted IP PBX Providers Many Hosted PBX providers based on VoIP are surprised by the network load caused by the SIP Features "Shared Call Appearance" (SCA), "Shared Line Appearance", "Simultaneous Ring", "Busy Lamp Field" (BLF), or "Line State Monitoring". Both of the big Application Server players,...

In a March 16 article on The Hill, "Limbaugh prompts healthcare calls, ties up House phone lines", the US House of Representative's Chief Administrative Officer's spokesman, Jeff Ventura, is quoted: Our phone system is nearing capacity . . . Unlike computers, which can be scaled to accommodate something like this in real time, phone lines are hard-wired, so you have your capacity and once the c...

The Acme Packet SBC is an amazing beast. I tell clients that it's basically a programming language – there's a ton of flexibility, and all kinds of complexity. There are so many ways to accomplish the same thing – which one is best? ECG has a new, high-speed training class on Acme Packet SIP Trunking and Registration. This is a high-speed class intended to cover just the basics you need to c...

We at ECG are pleased to announce a new training course: BroadWorks Installation and Upgrades. This class is intended to give engineeers and technicians tons of experience installing, patching, and upgrading BroadWorks. There are a numerous small rules, and a few tricks. We at ECG have been doing BroadWorks installations since R9 – back in 2002. We've done hundreds of installs for carrie...

ECG is rolling out new training courses. Another new class we have is on BroadWorks Call Processing and Troubleshooting. This is a class for the people who really need to understand how BroadWorks does what it does. They need to know how to fix it when it breaks, and how to determine what's broken. This class covers all the arcane dark-magic BroadWorks tools, like healthmon, ttIsql, b...