The Top 25 VoIP Innovations of 2008

Interessante post di Voipnews… mi trova d’accordo su quasi tutte le scelte.

1. Creating an iNum country code for VoIP: It was the most far-sighted initiative of the year. Belgium-based Voxbone SA, a global supplier of inbound local numbers and IP transport, persuaded the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) to create a new country code for international calls. The move meant callers would be able to dial an “iNum” phone number starting with 883, instead of a location-based phone number beginning with, say, 1 for the U.S. or 44 for the U.K., and reach a VoIP subscriber anywhere in the world.

The new country code went live in November. To start, it will mainly work for calls between subscribers of VoIP services. In 2009, Voxbone will begin setting up the commercial and technical arrangements with carriers that will allow calls from ordinary landline and mobile phones around the world to reach VoIP subscribers with iNums. At that point, VoIP will have become a country of its own.

2. VoIP for iPhone and Android: VoIP companies of every stripe raced each other in 2008 to make their services work with the hottest mobile handsets around, the iPhone and the Android. The contenders included fringland ltd., iSkoot, JAJAH Inc., 8×8 Inc., Truphone, Voxofon LLC and more. Some of the applications they came up with use client software downloaded to the handset, and some provide mobile Web sites that replicate, for example, the iPhone dial pad. Some rely on wifi connections, while others send calls over cellular voice links to the VoIP network. Voxofon’s Android application works in the background, emerging only to give the caller the choice to make international calls via VoIP rather than expensive overseas cellular circuits. Taken together, the flurry of applications demonstrated how rapidly VoIP companies can innovate in response to fast-changing conditions.

3. Extending voice-streaming technology to video: When GIPS changed its formal name from Global IP Sound to Global IP Solutions in January 2007, it pointed the way to the future of the VoIP industry. A variety of Web-based VoIP providers, from AOL LLC to Gizmo5 to Net2Phone Inc. to Yahoo! Inc., use GIPS voice-processing technology to maintain the quality of voice communication over widely varying network types and conditions. And if GIPS was ready to move beyond just sound (that is, voice), it meant they could too. So when the company extended its technology to video in October 2008, it laid the groundwork for an explosion of new services using VoIP as just one part of a larger array of real-time IP communications.