XConnect's HD Voice Peering Trial: Focusing on Who Rather Than How

XConnect's recently announced plan for a trial HD voice peering federation marks a significant advance in the move to HD communication. The trial, to take place between April and June of this year, will directly connect providers offering HD voice services. That will let them pass HD calls, which provide audio quality superior to that of conventional PSTN phone calls, to one another rather than just among their own customers. The trial thus represents an effort to start building a critical mass of HD-capable voice subscribers. As such, it is as much a commercial effort as a technical one.

Vidtel Aims to Take the Complexity Out of Video Communication

Making a video call, particularly one with good video quality, is a lot more complicated than making a voice call. No one system or service ties together all types of video communication equipment and users in a single network like the PSTN. In order to communicate, callers must have compatible equipment, network setups and/or software. They must also use the same method for identifying and connecting to other users. It's a far cry from just picking up a phone and dialing.

Ifbyphone's Cloudvox Buy Highlights Questions About Platforms' Future

Ifbyphone's acquisition of Cloudvox brought together two approaches to the hosted platform services business. One involves selling access to ready-to-use applications developed by the platform provider itself. That's what Ifbyphone has done from the start. The other involves providing the basic building blocks that allow developers to create their own apps. That's what Cloudvox was invented to do. The acquisition will allow Ifbyphone to do both. The question is which approach, if either, will predominate in the future.

Does AT&T Really Want to Get Rid of the PSTN?

When AT&T responded late last year to the FCC's request for comment on the transition from circuit-switched to all-IP public telephone infrastructure, it seemed to mark a turning point in the history of telecommunications. The 30-page letter the telco filed on December 21 urged the total phaseout of POTS (traditional "plain old telephone service") and the PSTN (public switched telephone network) on which it runs. It also recommended that the agency set a firm date for the transition in order to ensure that it happen as quickly as possible. Thus the company whose name is virtually synonymous with traditional telephony seemed to cast a clear vote in favor of the all-VoIP future. In reality, though, it was just as much a vote against AT&T's traditional service obligations. It was also a shrewd attempt to bind the phone company's interests to the high-profile issue of universal broadband access.