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Open Telecoms Planet

March 21, 2023

• Digium Protecting Your Mission Critical Services When Your Internet Provider Has An Outage

  Late summer of 2022, there was a major multi-day internet outage that happened in Canada that affected many businesses, small and large. Let’s discuss what happened and some of the steps you can take to protect your business if something similar happens to you.

  In July of 2022, Canada’s Rogers Communications suffered a major internet outage. For those of you who haven’t heard of Rogers, it is a very large internet and wireless service provider, on the scale of ~ 20 billion US dollars and 26,000 employees. Rogers suffered an outage due to a packet storm on their network. It was caused by a software upgrade that accidentally removed all the traffic filters to the internet from their network. Without the filters, the Rogers network equipment became quickly overwhelmed and stopped functioning. Rogers serves about 30% of Canada’s internet capacity, so this was a big event and affected many people and businesses. It took about 2-3 days to fully restore services to all customers.

  So, as a business delivering services to your customers, what would you have done in this case, if your internet service provider was down for multiple days? Businesses who had invested in SD-WAN and redundant ISPs were generally okay. However, those without redundancy, or without an SD-WAN platform to prioritize internet service, they unfortunately suffered catastrophic downtime. Some of them even had to rely on manual processes to keep their business running. They would never have thought service from a large and reliable vendor like Rogers would come to a halt like this, so the investment didn’t seem needed. Businesses with backup internet access generally made it through, and the ones that had SD-WAN did not experience any degradation in service, at all. This is because SD-WAN prioritizes real-time traffic, by application. Even if your redundant internet connection is based on inexpensive broadband, SD-WAN will automatically prioritize your most important applications, so that things like voice and point-of-sale (POS) have the capacity they need, while other less critical applications are limited to what’s left over. This is a significant benefit of SD-WAN and something to consider if real-time traffic is important to your business, because without it, your typical failover setup means a loss in all active communications which would need to be re-established once the backup connection becomes active.

  SD-WAN has a couple of other key features as it relates to protection. For instance if your SD-WAN provider is a gateway or private middle mile service, your inbound traffic is also protected because inbound packets will be routed over the best available circuit. Also, if you’re using an SD-WAN provider with gateways or private middle miles, you’ll have built in DDoS protection. So SD-WAN provides a number of protections aside from just managing network resiliency.

  Here’s the interesting takeaway. Even if you had a resilient design, and you had sufficient internet, and you had SD-WAN in place, your vendors and business partners may not. With the Rogers outage, a major credit card transaction system was taken offline, leaving their point of sale customers without the ability to accept credit cards. Another example was cell phone service being disrupted as well. We can imagine that many businesses with critical vendors and applications experienced an impact even if they themselves continue to have strong internet service. It might be far-fetched to try and identify whether or not your key business partners have network redundancy and utilize SD-WAN, but identifying the key providers and confirming with them may actually be a new priority element in your business continuity plan.

  Beyond internet access, what other key services might be exposed to vendor interruption. Is voice critical to your business? Are you using Microsoft Teams for voice or collaboration? For example, what would happen if Microsoft had an issue or you had to quarantine Office 365 because of a cyber event?

  If you’re curious how to protect your environments and learn more about our maintenance-free SD-WAN service, get in touch with one of our Managed SD-WAN specialists.

  The post Protecting Your Mission Critical Services When Your Internet Provider Has An Outage appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

March 16, 2023

• Digium What You Need To Know About The Growing Complexities of Communications Taxes

  It’s definitely a great time to be a Managed Service Provider (MSP), Communication Service Provider (CSP), and Voice Service Provider (VSP), delivering managed communication services. Whether they be a seasoned provider or just starting out, the work-from-home movement has created a massive change in IT infrastructure, which means managed service providers have become very popular and are enticed to deliver more. For instance, the MSP market was valued at $242.9 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach 354.8 billion by 2026, registering a CAGR of 7.9%! This tremendous growth is pushing MSPs to continue to broaden and diversify their offerings. Still, there is a big surprise waiting for inexperienced or ill-informed providers: the increased set of communications tax complexity, obligations, and risk.

  Why are communications taxes more important than ever?

  MSPs, CSPs, and VSPs certainly understand that they are required to charge for and remit communications taxes. If you are reselling, charging, and invoicing for telecom services, such as data, voice, video, and messaging, then you’re in that camp. But what’s been happening, which has become more challenging, is that communications services have become the de facto method for delivering services from the cloud, but not only that, they’re being offered via programmable interfaces, or APIs. So now communication services are being embedded into SaaS platforms, essentially reselling data services. So the lines have become blurred, and knowing whether you need to pay communication taxes is a bit unknown. You need to ask yourself, “Is my business selling services that incorporate voice, video, or data?” If the answer is yes, then you’ll need to make sure you’re up to speed on tax compliance; otherwise, you’ll have some penalties to pay, aside from learning how to pay those taxes going forward.

  So, what are the complexities of communications taxes? And how do MSPs, CSPs, and VSPs know what taxes apply to their services and customers?

  Let’s start with general sales taxes, which apply at the federal, state, county, and city levels. Communication taxes fall under this umbrella too. From there, though, they can be very different, not just in terms of the rate and how it’s applied, but with communications taxes, there are instances of tax on tax in tearing of taxes. In many instances, the jurisdiction for communications taxes will be completely different from what you may have from a sales tax perspective. For instance, there are a lot of communication taxes that are based on school district zones, so even just establishing the jurisdiction that applies can be different. We now have a stacking of communication tax complexity over the existing complexity of sales tax. So, registering with the local jurisdiction, and collecting the tax, is one thing, but then it cascades since communications taxes have different compliance obligations. There are different registration obligations, different filing obligations, and also things like exemption management, where the forms that are needed to be filled out to be exempt from communications taxes are different from what is needed to be collected from a sales and use perspective.

  How many tax returns do you need to file as a service provider?

  This depends on two criteria: jurisdiction and types of services sold. These combined could mean filing 1,000s of compliance tax returns, especially if the provider is selling services nationwide. Voice itself is taxed heavily, as many different types of taxes are applied. Communication taxes are applied at the federal, state, and jurisdictional levels. E-911 is also similarly taxed.

  Recent Developments

  We talked a bit about the blurred lines around knowing if a business is required to pay communication taxes. On top of that, with the plethora of service providers out there, it would be unsustainably time-consuming for the government to find every business out there with communication services, find out if they are simply consuming or reselling them and dig from there. Businesses could easily fly under the radar from paying their taxes.

  The recent robocall mitigation regulations, including the STIR/SHAKEN mandate, has forced VSPs, CSPs, and MSPs to register their telecommunications business by applying for a Federal Registration Number (FRN). Now that their telecommunications business is registered with the FCC, comprehensive compliance is much more important for that business. This includes the rating, collection, and remittance of taxes, fees, and surcharges that are levied by the government in the various states, counties, and cities that they sell in, as well as at the federal level.

  Things to Consider as a Provider

  • Are there communications taxes on video conferencing and softclient calls? In general, concerning communications taxes, voice is the most comprehensively taxed. When it comes to soft clients, such as Slack, Skype, Zoom, and other collaboration tools, even peer-to-peer VoIP communication is taxed. It’s not as heavily taxed as services going through the PSTN, but VOIP to VOIP services are taxed at a lower rate.
  • How do communication taxes work when bundling products and services? This is something that is becoming prevalent as MSPs are bundling more and more services together within their offerings. This is especially true for MSP customers of Sangoma’s Wholesale Carrier Services, who pick and choose carrier service features to bundle and resell; more on that below. An MSP can bundle voice, SMS, fax, and soft clients and more, so figuring out the tax compliance for these individually sourced features is essential, as they are all taxed at different rates and dependent on the region.

  With all that there is to consider and the challenges there are to become well informed of tax compliance, it may be a good idea to pair up with experts in the field for consultation or, better yet, with a vendor having a tax engine, who can automate rating and calculations of services, based on local and service feature.

  How Sangoma’s Telecom Tax Module Can Help Providers

  As part of our wholesale carrier services hosted billing service, we have a built-in tax module that automates the calculation and collection of taxes and regulatory fees for our customers who resell our wholesale carrier services. For readers unfamiliar with our wholesale carrier services, read this blog post. What differentiates us is that we offer a complete set of wholesale VoIP services, from termination/origination, DIDs, SMS, E911, Fax, fraud detection/protection, and telecom compliance toolkits, wrapped around an intuitive portal, which includes our hosted billing platform and tax module.

  Our tax module is the “single pane of glass,” where our customers save a ton of time in tax rating and calculation for all their customers who may be dispersed nationwide using various services we resell. It consolidates taxes on all levels of government and service types. Also, as our customers expand across regions, the tax modules save them time from figuring out new tax compliance information for those areas as well.

  Tax compliance becomes more complex as products become more innovative and are offered in a less traditional fashion. For instance, voice services integrated within APIs were never something tax compliance was designed for. The natural progression is that innovation outpaces tax law but, with time, always catches up. A great example of this is with streaming services, such as Netflix or Amazon Prime, for example. When they came out on the market, communications tax compliance only applied to traditional TV services. So no taxes were applicable for a while, but communication taxes started working their way into these new innovation streaming services as time progressed.

  As an MSP, CSP, or VSP, it’s essential to understand the gray areas of communications tax compliance and be informed to avoid risks and possible penalties.

  Learn more about Sangoma’s Tax module, built into our hosted billing platform, and have your tax rating and calculations automated for you.

  The post What You Need To Know About The Growing Complexities of Communications Taxes appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

March 14, 2023

• Digium Softclients are a Critical Component of a Unified Communications Solution

  When the day came that we all “had” to work from home, everyone learned how important a phone system client became (whether it was a mobile one, or a desktop one), because that was how we continued to talk to people and keep the business running– because our business phone number could be called, or we could call out on the business phone number – from these clients. And then the clients that integrated chat and video took center stage. Today, this is all part of a typical Unified Communication solution, including those from Sangoma.

  However, as we start to return to the office, will the importance of these clients diminish? I’ve definitely started to see articles about how especially the mobile client experience may not be the best.

  It seems unlikely that client importance will diminish. First, some form of hybrid work seems to be here to stay, as discussed in this article from Forbes. Employees will always be working remotely in some fashion, whether it is from home or from another location. Employees like it, and while there is some debate about it, it seems organization output is not impacted, though organization culture might be impacted. So, while everyone now needs to come back from the cool place they moved, they likely don’t have to go into the office every day.

  And second, just like always, technology will “solve” any problems. We saw it 20 years ago when VoIP first came on the scene. There were issues and they were overcome. And we’ll see it here as well. 5G is one technology that will certainly play a role in improving the mobile client experience.

  Getting back to the clients. So yes, they will remain even more important. And we’ll need to keep innovating them forward since they’ll remain an ever-critical part of a business communication system.

  The post Softclients are a Critical Component of a Unified Communications Solution appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

March 09, 2023

• Digium Exploring SD-WAN – The Advanced Evolution of Business Networks

  In today’s world, it’s imperative to have access to information from any device, anytime and anywhere. However, this has led to the growth and complexity of the networks that connect everything, making them increasingly challenging to manage.

  LANs vs WANs: A Basic Overview

  The two main types of networks are Local Area Networks (LANs) and Wide Area Networks (WANs). LANs connect devices within a local office, while WANs connect offices across different locations globally. Without WANs, businesses would be restricted to communicating within their local offices, preventing them from accessing the broader online world, the internet.

  The Emergence of SD-WAN: Next-Gen Networking

  SD-WAN, the latest evolution of WAN technology, has recently emerged as a game-changing innovation. SD stands for “software-defined,” and while the concept is not new, it has become a focal point, particularly in infrastructure and networking. SD-WAN essentially leverages software to make IT smarter, faster, and more cost-effective. It is a revolutionary way to construct and manage long-distance networks, providing better bandwidth optimization and ensuring the delivery of real-time applications with improved user experiences.

  Why, How, and What Makes SD-WAN Better?

  Traditional WANs typically have a large number of routers that communicate with each other over extended distances. Within each router is a data plane and a control plane, with the data plane holding the information transmitted or received, and the control plane determining the route the data should take. However, someone needs to program the control plane with rules on how to handle network traffic on the data plane. This is typically done by entering a series of commands into each router’s command line interface, or CLI, by a network administrator. This can be a very manual, time consuming and error prone process. For example, let’s say there is a large business with 100 locations that needs to deploy a new application across all these locations. Let’s assume that each location has one router which needs 20 new commands to implement the correct configurations for the new application. With 100 locations, that’s 2000 (20 x 100) commands and if each command took 40 seconds of time that’s roughly 22 hours of work just to deploy a single application for the business. Also, the CLI can be error prone. Imagine a mistake was made on one of those commands and having to hunt down that error or troubleshoot the application. Staff and IT resources would be impacted and could potentially paralyze the business! To overcome this tedious process, network admins will try to automate this process using programming tools and scripts, however, these tools and procedures add more layers of complexity as well as even more CLI commands with more variables that could compound existing problems.

  With SD-WAN, this process is simplified, as the control plane is centralized, where changes can be grouped and managed simultaneously across the entire WAN, from a centralized management portal. Businesses can use specific rules to automate the process and distribute configurations instantly, eliminating the complexity and errors inherent in the old manual method.

  The Benefits of SD-WAN

  One of the most significant benefits of SD-WAN is the ability to leverage broadband internet connections, reducing the need for expensive private MPLS networks, lowering costs and increasing performance. Moreover, the software-defined capabilities of SD-WAN enable network admins to change characteristics of their entire network from a central management portal, such as:

  • Moving business critical applications to a private MPLS network between locations
  • Block, or lower the priority of social media applications to improve worker productivity

  Once these rules or policies are set, they can be automatically distributed and implemented across the organization in seconds.

  So, with SD-WAN, configuring new or existing networking infrastructure is much easier than the old way of fragile command lines and manual updates.

  What does this all mean about SD-WAN?

  Here are three key takeaways for businesses regarding SD-WAN:

  Agility: SD-WAN enhances agility by simplifying network policy configuration and management.
  Performance: SD-WAN provides higher performance by leveraging multiple paths intelligently, including broadband connections.
  Cost: SD-WAN lowers IT operational costs by simplifying WAN infrastructure and providing a more efficient network.

  Managed SD-WAN: Taking It to the Next Level

  Setting up and managing a WAN has never been easier, provided that it’s software-defined. But taking it a step further, businesses can take advantage of a Managed SD-WAN, where a vendor handles the entire network for them, including deployment, maintenance, updates and technical support. To learn more about this zero-touch network infrastructure get in touch with one of our Managed SD-WAN specialists for more info.

  The post Exploring SD-WAN – The Advanced Evolution of Business Networks appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

March 02, 2023

• Tox Redesign of Tox’s Cryptographic Handshake

  In 2017, Jason A. Donenfeld (known for WireGuard®) reported an issue in Tox’s handshake [1]. This issue is called “Key Compromise Impersonation” (KCI). I will try to explain the issue as simple as possible:

  In Tox you don’t register an account (e.g. with username and password), but instead your identity is solely based on (asymmetric) cryptographic information, a so-called asymmetric key pair. Such a key pair consists of a public part (public key) and a private part (private key). The public part, as the naming suggests, is public and contained in your ToxID which you share with your contacts to be able to communicate with them via Tox. The private part, again as the name suggests, needs to stay private! If someone gets in possession of your private key, they stole your Tox identity. This could, for example, be the case if someone got physical access to your computer or successfully installed malware on your system, e.g. a so-called trojan horse, to be able to extract data from it. If this happens, you will most likely have multiple problems and your Tox identity may be just one of them. The password you enter when you create your Tox profile, e.g. when you first start qTox client, is used to encrypt your profile and also your private key on your disk. If you start qTox, you need to enter your password to decrypt your private key, to be able to communicate via Tox. Your private key is then stored unencrypted in memory (i.e. RAM) while qTox is running. This means an attacker either needs to get access to your password (steal or crack it) or to read your Tox private key from memory while your Tox chat client is running.

  If someone successfully stole your Tox identity (i.e. this private key), they are you – at least in the context of Tox. So they can successfully impersonate you in Tox. Now in this case the KCI vulnerability leads to “interesting” behavior. It is clear that someone who stole your identity is able to impersonate you. But because of the KCI vulnerability, they may also be able to impersonate others to you. This means, to exploit this vulnerability in practice, someone not only needs to successfully steal your private key, but additionally:

  • Know the ToxIDs of your Tox friends to be able to impersonate them to you.
  • Control the network connection between you and your friend. This could be the case e.g. if they are in the same (public) WiFi as you, or via the Internet – which is way harder and is most likely only possible for state actors (e.g. the NSA).
  • Implement their own version of toxcore because it’s not possible to exploit this issue with the current implementation. There is no public exploit available which can just be used.

  In summary, KCI is exploitable, but with a huge effort.

  Anyway, this is a real vulnerability and it should be fixed. The current Tox handshake implementation is not state-of-the-art in cryptography and it also breaks the “do not roll your own crypto” principle. As a solution, there is a framework called Noise Protocol Framework (Noise, [2]) which can be used to create a new handshake for Tox. More precisely, the application of Noise will only change a part of Tox handshake — the so-called Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE). Noise-based protocols are already in use in e.g. WhatsApp, which uses it for encrypted client-to-server communication, and WireGuard®, which uses it for establishing Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections. Noise protocols can be used to implement End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) with (perfect) forward secrecy (which is also the case with the current Tox implementation), but further adds KCI-resilience to Tox.

  Tobi (goldroom on GitHub) wrote his master’s thesis (“Adopting the Noise Key Exchange in Tox“) on the KCI issue in Tox, designed a new Handshake for Tox based on NoiseIK and implemented a proof-of-concept (PoC) for this new NoiseIK-based handshake by using Noise-C [3]. This PoC has a few drawbacks, which is why it should not be used in practice (see Appendix). If you want to know more about his master’s thesis, see the update in the initial KCI GitHub issue [4].

  He applied for funding at NLnet foundation and their NGI Assure fund to continue his work on Tox and to be able to implement a production-ready Noise-based handshake for toxcore. Fortunately, this application was successful [5]. NGI Assure is made possible with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme (https://ngi.eu/).

  The objective of this project is to implement a new KCI-resistant handshake based on NoiseIK in c-toxcore, which is backwards compatible to the current KCI-vulnerable handshake to enable interoperability and smooth transition. The main part of this project is to implement NoiseIK directly in c-toxcore to remove Noise-C as a dependency (as the only other dependency for c-toxcore is NaCl/libsodium) which was used in the PoC and therefore improve maintainability of c-toxcore (see Appendix).

  The tasks in this project are:

  • Implementation of a Noise-based AKE for the use in Tox’s handshake in c-toxcore
    • This task is to implement and test an AKE for the Tox handshake based on a Noise protocol (most likely Noise_IK_25519_ChaChaPoly_SHA512, but it may change due to new insights in c-toxcore).
  • Implementation of a symmetric transport phase encryption based on a Noise-based AKE/handshake
    • This task includes the implementation of a symmetric transport phase encryption based on the secret key(s) generated during the Noise-based AKE during the Tox handshake and evaluation of Noise’s rekey feature.
    • Subtasks:
      • Decision of which symmetric cipher to use for the Tox transport phase encryption (e.g. ChaCha20-Poly1305 or XSalsa20-Poly1305)
      • Evaluation of Noise’s rekey feature to allow for session rekeying to reduce the volume of data encrypted under a single cipher key (cf. section 11.3 of Noise specification, revision 34). This may not be applicable to be implemented in c-toxcore (e.g. changing keys may be expensive). Also, it may not be necessary for ChaCha20 / XSalsa20. Further, it’s dependent on how the transport phase encryption will be implemented.
  • Support for the Noise-based AKE and the KCI-vulnerable AKE for backwards compatibility
    • This task includes the implementation of a mechanism to fall back to the KCI-vulnerable handshake if one of both peers uses a legacy c-toxcore version to provide backwards compatibility for the handshake transition phase (e.g. via cookie phase (request and response) of Tox’s handshake).
  • Error handling and testing, Documentation, Blog posts

  The plan is to implement this new handshake until July 2023. Since it’s not a trivial task, there are still some obstacles:

  1. In Noise it is necessary to differentiate between the initiator and responder of a handshake. Due to the architecture of Tox it is possible that both peers initiate and respond to a handshake at the same time.
  2. Tox is P2P and UDP-based. Therefore packets can be received out-of-order or be lost altogether. In the Noise specification this is only considered for transport messages (cf. [6]).

     • “Note that lossy and out-of-order message delivery introduces many other concerns (including out-of-order handshake messages and denial of service risks) which are outside the scope of this document.” (cf. [6])

  Both points are not ideal for a handshake based on NoiseIK (i.e. it would be way easier to implement it in a client-server model using TCP), but it should be possible to work this out.

  Tobi is available in #toktok (libera.chat) as tobi/@tobi_fh:matrix.org and ready for any input, questions, remarks, discussions or complaints.

  ---

  Appendix

  The PoC shouldn’t be used in practice/in production because it should be improved in the following aspects (for details see chapter five of Tobi’s thesis [4]):

  • The PoC was implemented by using the Noise-C library [3]. Instead of using the library, NoiseIK or more specifically the Noise_IK_25519_ChaChaPoly_SHA512 protocol will be implemented directly in c-toxcore. This will remove Noise-C as a dependency for toxcore (i.e. the only other dependency is NaCl/libsodium) and therefore improve maintainability. Additionally this will reduce the number of possibly vulnerable source lines of code.
    • Notes on maintainability: Noise-C has a lot of code/functionality which is not necessary for c-toxcore. Also Noise-C is currently (?) not actively maintained. If NoiseIK is implemented directly in c-toxcore it is only necessary to maintain the c-toxcore codebase and it is not necessary to care about Noise-C.
  • The PoC implementation uses the ChaCha20-Poly1305 AEAD cipher during the AKE/handshake and XSalsa20-Poly1305 during the transport phase. In this project it should be evaluated if it’s possible to also use ChaCha20 during the transport phase to only use one cipher instead of two different ones (XSalsa20 is not supported by the Noise framework). For details see chapter four of Tobi’s thesis.
  • Further testing of NoiseIK handshake behavior and improved error handling.
  • The PoC implementation is not backwards compatible with the current KCI-vulnerable Tox handshake. In this project a mechanism should be added to enable interoperability with clients based on an old c-toxcore version.

  ---

  References:

  • [1] Tox Handshake Vulnerable to KCI #426: https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426
  • [2] Noise Protocol Framework: https://noiseprotocol.org/
  • [3] Noise-C Library: https://github.com/rweather/noise-c
    • https://rweather.github.io/noise-c/index.html
  • [4] More information on Tobi/goldroom’s master’s thesis: https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426#issuecomment-759511593
  • [5] “Adopting the Noise Key Exchange in Tox” project description/information: https://nlnet.nl/project/Noise-Tox/
  • [6] Noise specification, 11.4. Out-of-order transport messages: https://noiseprotocol.org/noise.html#out-of-order-transport-messages

  ---

  “WireGuard” is a registered trademark of Jason A. Donenfeld.

February 28, 2023

• Digium The Importance of Channel Partnerships

  Channel partnerships are the way Sangoma does business. We understand the value the channel partnerships bring to Sangoma, and ultimately to the end-user customers who need business communication solutions. As such, we work hard to ensure our channel programs bring value to our channel partners, that what we offer our channel partners is unique, and ultimately that it is worthwhile for the channel partner to invest their time with Sangoma solutions.

  If you want to learn more, we will likely be at your favorite Telecom Services Distributor / Technology Services Distributor event as they roll their events out across the country.

  We will also be at the channel event of the year, Channel Partners in Las Vegas in early May. We’ll be at booth 1819.

  We’d love to meet you and show you why Sangoma would be a great option to help you service your customers with the best business communication solutions.

  The post The Importance of Channel Partnerships appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

• Digium The Importance of Channel Partnerships

  Channel partnerships are the way Sangoma does business. We understand the value the channel partnerships bring to Sangoma and, ultimately, to the end-user customers who need business communication solutions. As such, we work hard to ensure our channel programs bring value to our channel partners, that what we offer our channel partners is unique, and ultimately that it is worthwhile for the channel partner to invest their time with Sangoma solutions.

  If you want to learn more, a few ways are coming up where you can meet us and hear more from us:

  1. We will start some national roadshows, with our first one on March 9 in the Dallas area, up in Plano. If you are in the area, we’d love to have you attend for lunch and drinks afterward. Reserve your spot now.
  2. We will be hosting a general webinar to hear about what Sangoma offers and how we have changed over the past few years, on March 2. Click here to register.
  3. We will likely be at your favorite Telecom Services Distributor / Technology Services Distributor event as they roll their events out across the country.
  4. We will be at the channel event of the year, Channel Partners, in Las Vegas in early May. We’ll be at booth 1819.

  We’d love to meet you and show you why Sangoma would be a great option to help you service your customers with the best business communication solutions.

  The post The Importance of Channel Partnerships appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

February 15, 2023

• Digium Sangoma Wholesale: Compliance-as-a-Service

  In the mid-2000’s, VoIP Innovations pioneered SIP trunking services for an emerging number of non-facilities-based, value-added resellers and managed service providers. Back then, VoIP for business-use was less common. Today, there are over 40,000 VAR’s/MSP’s and VoIP has replaced POTS lines in the large majority of businesses nationwide.

  As enterprises have all but done away with in-house telecommunications departments, these VAR’s/MSP’s have more heavily relied upon rebilling the tailored services provided by VoIP Innovations. Now known as Sangoma Wholesale Carrier Services, the legacy of innovations continues with Compliant Service Solutions for this continually growing market segment.

  Not only are clients’ technical expectations on VAR’s and MSP’s heightened, so too are the FCC’s expectations and requirements on these non-facilities-based voice service providers.

  For example, In December 2021, the FCC pushed out the Small Provider Order Fourth Report and Order pertaining to STIR SHAKEN. This order is specifically for non-facilities-based, small voice service providers to be in compliance by the revised deadline of June 30, 2022.

  Our many Compliance-as-a-Service solutions provide the tools you need to take care of your SHAKEN requirements yourself. Other compliance-related solutions include SMS Campaign Registry, e911 Dynamic Location Routing, Hosed Billing with comprehensive tax calculations, and HIPAA compliant fax solution services. We have found that the more seamlessly our products work for our VAR’s and MSP’s, the more easily they can customize their services to more profitably meet the needs of their end-users.

  As our reseller partners’ demands are ever evolving, we continue to innovate our products mix to keep up with the FCC’s more demanding requirements.

  Check out another recent blog post Brian Smiley, our VP of Wholesale, created to learn more about reselling the most trusted, best-in-industry, carrier communications services for your clients.

  If you are attending ITEXPO Feb 14-17, please come to booth 617 to meet Brian and/or consult with a Sangoma Wholesale Carrier Sales SME about our innovative solutions.

  Or visit our website at carrierservices.sangoma.com. Stay tuned for more exciting, innovative offerings coming soon!

  The post Sangoma Wholesale: Compliance-as-a-Service appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

February 14, 2023

• Digium Overall Managed SD-WAN Benefit Review

  In a December blog, I wrote at a high level about a paper from the Eastern Management Group regarding the benefits of utilizing different types of cloud services, which basically boil down to the following organizational benefits:

  • Reduced IT Effort
  • Deployment Velocity
  • Scalability
  • Business Agility

  Today, according to that paper, I will highlight just a few of the benefits of using Managed SD-WAN services. Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) is a virtual WAN architecture that allows enterprises to leverage any combination of transport services – including MPLS, LTE, and broadband internet services – to connect users to applications securely. It creates a network managed through cloud software rather than disparate hardware systems. A significant benefit of using SD-WAN is:

  • Removes the need for companies to choose between high-cost private networks or low-cost Internet connections when building corporate networks. Instead, it allows businesses to leverage affordable, widely available broadband connections to boost bandwidth and reduce redundancy. It also prioritizes mission-critical applications such as voice and video while streamlining administration and centralizing management.

  Managed SD-WAN utilizes a third party to oversee the implementation, continued monitoring, and updates of the SD-WAN service. Major benefits include:

  • Proactive monitoring – identifies issues in real time and allows the organization to take corrective action before users notice or complain
  • A managed service provider can deploy additional security solutions and keep your company up to date with the latest developments

  If you are looking for more information on Sangoma’s Managed SD-WAN offering, please go here. If you want to read the full report now, please go here.

  The post Overall Managed SD-WAN Benefit Review appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

February 08, 2023

• Digium Sangoma Wholesale: Power of the Portal

  More than 15 years in the making, the VI Communication Services portal leads all other SIP trunk providers’ portals in the industry for features and capabilities. As VI Communications is now Sangoma Wholesale Carrier Services, our legacy of innovations continues both in network expansion and portal enhancements.

  The BackOffice Portal is our customer portal for ordering and managing DIDs. And, the end-user portal is our brandable, extensible portal for our customers to pass on some of the powerful capabilities, such as number porting, to their end-users.

  Our award-winning portal simply does more than anyone else’s. And, our industry-leading service further separates us from the competition. At Sangoma Wholesale Carrier Services, customers can always talk to a live person 24/7.

  Often emulated for its ease-of-use, our portals are unrivaled for their comprehensive capabilities.

  What else would you expect from the company known for leading the industry in innovations?

  A true multi-tenancy portal for resellers to organize multiple customer profiles, provisioning, and managing telephone numbers. Our integrated billing platform will exceed expectations for what is possible. Easily process taxes and even other carrier’s call detail records (CDR’s).

  We are so much more than just Trunking as a Service with a great portal. We are your one-stop source for the compliance solutions that you need which are integrated into our nation-wide carrier network.

  Learn about our Hosted Billing and integrated Tax Solutions. Manage SPAM and fraud before it affects your customers. Stay ahead of all the new STIR SHAKEN requirements for VoIP resellers. Keep on top of the changes with Campaign Registry for SMS. And, your customers can remain connected even in emergencies with our e911 Dynamic Location Routing solutions.

  Check out another recent blog post that Brian Smiley, our VP of Wholesale, created to learn more about reselling the most trusted, best-in-industry, carrier communications services for your clients.

  If you are attending ITEXPO Feb 14-17, please come to booth 617 to meet Brian and/or consult with a Sangoma Wholesale Carrier Sales SME about our innovative solutions.

  The post Sangoma Wholesale: Power of the Portal appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

February 02, 2023

• Digium Sangoma Wholesale: Empowering Value-Added Resellers

  VI Communications has been the carrier services division of Sangoma since being acquired in 2019. Otherwise known as Sangoma Wholesale Carrier Services, this division is integrated yet operates as an autonomous business unit.

  There is one primary reason for this autonomy. We primarily service and support the important “middleman” or value-added resellers.

  Nationwide, approximately 40,000 managed service providers typically support multiple end-customer businesses’ IT and communication service needs. We have provided wholesale services to these value-added resellers for over 15 years.

  As the wholesale arm of Sangoma, it could be perceived as competing for the same end customer. Our distribution model is designed to be trusted and complement our customers’ unique offerings and expertise.

  Our wholesale division exists to provide value-added resellers access to the best industry products and services possible at a discounted rate to service aggregators. And we follow stringent CPNI (customer proprietary network information) rules to ensure privacy and the protection our customers expect.

  Our reliably engineered network is the foundation for our product and carrier services offerings. Our award-winning BackOffice and End-Client portals with industry-leading, FCC-compliant features are offered in an a la carte manner where you only pay for what your customers use.

  Sangoma Wholesale Carrier Services continues a legacy of innovations in product development, the expansion of our core networks and technological capabilities, and value-added resellers thrive as communications service providers.

  We are so much more than just Trunking as a Service. We are your one-stop source for the compliance solutions you need, which are integrated into our nationwide carrier network.

  Learn about our Hosted Billing and integrated Tax Solutions. Manage SPAM and fraud before it affects your customers. Stay ahead of all of the new STIR SHAKEN requirements for VoIP resellers. Keep on top of the changes with the Campaign Registry for SMS. And your customers can remain connected even in emergencies with our e911 Dynamic Location Routing solutions.

  Check out another recent blog post Brian Smiley, our VP of Wholesale, created to learn more about reselling your clients’ most trusted, best-in-industry carrier communications services.

  If you are attending ITEXPO Feb 14-17, please come to booth 617 to meet Brian and/or consult with a Sangoma Wholesale Carrier Sales SME about our innovative solutions.

  Or visit our website at carrierservices.sangoma.com. Stay tuned for more exciting, innovative offerings coming soon.

  The post Sangoma Wholesale: Empowering Value-Added Resellers appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

January 31, 2023

• Digium Sangoma as a Frost and Sullivan FROST RADAR™ North American UCaaS Market Leader

  A couple of months ago, I wrote about being selected, again, for the 9th year in a row, to the Gartner UCaaS Magic Quadrant. It never gets old, just like football teams that consistently get to the playoffs! I’m pleased to announce that we’ve also been designed a Leader in the Frost and Sullivant FROST RADAR North American UCaaS Market for this year.

  It’s very nice to honored like this by key analyst companies. It makes all the hard work, by the entire company, mean something. The recognition is nice.

  We know we can’t just sit still and not innovate if we want to keep getting this recognition. The market is continually changing, and the competition changes as well. I mean who would have thought 9 years ago that video meetings and collaboration would be key features in a UCaaS platform now? But they are. Business phone systems are just different now, in a way that benefits the customers.

  Change is still coming though. If you read the report (and the report can be found here on our website), you‘ll see it mentions that “Integrated platforms delivering UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS are at the foundation of next-generation business communications solutions”.

  Sangoma certainly agrees with that statement and we have been driving this on our roadmaps for a while. We have or own CCaaS and CPaaS platforms, that are integrated with our UCaaS. And we are using our CPaaS to create apps that augment our UCaaS solution, whether that be with integrations to other software systems, or productivity improvement apps that supplement UCaaS.

  As Elka Popova, VP of Connected Work Research, ICT of Frost and Sullivan says “Sangoma continues to strategically augment and diversify its extensive UCaaS portfolio and partner network, more recently via the acquisition of Star2Star and NetFortris. Sangoma consistently prevails within the industry as a one-stop shop for complete communications solutions, including UCaaS, CPaaS, SD WAN and communications devices.”

  We certainly intend to continue to offer the best one-stop shop cloud communications solutions, intend to continue to innovate, and thus continue to be recognized as leaders!

  The post Sangoma as a Frost and Sullivan FROST RADAR™ North American UCaaS Market Leader appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

January 17, 2023

• Digium Going to ITEXPO and AstriCon

  It’s been a while. For both an in-person AstriCon and an ITEXPO during its “rightful” time in mid-February in southeast Florida. And they are both converging and happening in a few weeks in Fort Lauderdale.

  The last time we had an in-person AstriCon was in 2019. This will be the first one since Covid. We decided to co-locate it with ITEXPO since, at the last AstriCon, we did not have members of the ecosystem (such as phone vendors that support Asterisk and FreePBX). The ecosystem exists in force at ITEXPO, so it made sense to run AstriCon as a co-located event. To register, please go to this link: https://www.itexpo.com/east/astricon.aspx

  And Sangoma will also have a booth at ITEXPO. Since the last time we did a show, we changed our logo, so you will surely notice that. Sangoma has the widest range of business-focused communication services, and we won’t be able to demonstrate all of them. But we will showcase our UCaaS platforms, phones, MSP Services, Open-Source products (Asterisk and FreePBX), and wholesale carrier services (i.e., VoIP Innovations) offerings.

  We’re looking forward to catching up with you, so please stop by our booth (617)!

  The post Going to ITEXPO and AstriCon appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

January 12, 2023

• Digium VI Communications is Sangoma Wholesale Carrier Services

  VI Communications is Sangoma Wholesale Carrier Services. Known initially as VoIP Innovations, Sangoma Wholesale was built on over 15 years of Trunking as a Service expertise. Sangoma Wholesale continues the legacy of innovations within its award-winning user and end-client portals.

  Sangoma Wholesale Carrier Services’ innovative solutions are industry-leading and delivered on its own reliably engineered network.

  Ideal for VoIP resellers and communication service providers, wholesale customers can buy unbundled services on an a la carte basis. A full-featured, extensible SIP Trunking platform puts number ordering, management, and provisioning all in your administration or directly into the hands of your end-users. This multi-tenant environment allows for customizable parent-child account relationships. And our integrated Hosted Billing options are popular, complementary add-on services for their ease of use.

  Sangoma Wholesale is much more than a one-stop shop for your carrier services like VoIP, SMS, fax, and video collaboration solutions. Check out our array of Compliance Solutions. Whether it is STIR SHAKEN, Tax Calculation, SMS Campaign Registration, Kari’s Law for e911 Dynamic Location Routing, or Fax solutions that meet all the requirements for HIPAA – we have what you need for resale.

  And likewise, as consumers demand heightened detection and protection from SPAM and Fraudulent calling, we have services you can trust.

  If you are attending ITEXPO Feb 14-17, please come to booth 617 to consult with a Sangoma Wholesale Carrier Sales SME about our innovative solutions.

  Remember, VI Communications is Sangoma Wholesale Carrier Services.
  Visit us at booth 617 at ITEXPO or learn more at https://carrierservices.sangoma.com/.

  The post VI Communications is Sangoma Wholesale Carrier Services appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

January 03, 2023

• Digium UCaaS Futures Musings Podcast

  In December, I did a podcast with Isha Mukherjee, our Asia-Pac marketing wiz. We talked about a bunch of things, ranging from our new logo, to what happened to UC in 2022, to my thoughts on UC in 2023.

  If you want listen to whole podcast, just go here.

  For this blog, though, I just want to focus on my thoughts for UC in 2023. I encapsulated my thoughts into the term “Smart Business”. This could mean multiple things, such as making your business smarter through using UC. And I certainly see that. In the Frost and Sullivan blog from a few weeks ago, I talked about the integration of contact center, unified communications, and CPaaS. And I certainly see that moving quite far along in 2023, even bringing in some aspects of AI that’s already in the contact center towards UC. And utilizing CPaaS apps to augment the UC system, so that the UC system is “smart” for your business. In other words, it does what you need it to do.

  And that brings us to another meaning of Smart Business, which is doing business in a smart way. I think we’ll see more one-stop shopping with cloud communications in general. If there is a global slowdown, then businesses unfortunately may not be able to keep the same number of employees. There would likely be retrenchment. And this means you need to do business smarter in order to keep the same level of service, and to even grow. One way to do that, is to get your cloud communications from one provider. One bill, one place to talk to, many less headaches. Focus your people on growing the business, not the back-end that runs the business. UCaaS, Contact Center, Augmentation Apps, Collaboration, Video Meetings, and MSP services – all from one vendor, servicing you well. That is Sangoma.

  The post UCaaS Futures Musings Podcast appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

December 20, 2022

• Digium Overall SaaS Benefit Review

  Sangoma recently partnered with Eastern Management Group regarding a report reviewing the end-customer benefits of Sangoma’s various Communications as a Service offerings. The full report can be found here, and it covers all of Sangoma’s Communications as a Service offerings:

  • Unified Communications as a Service – UCaaS
  • Video Meetings as a Service – MaaS
  • Collaboration as a Service CollaaS
  • Contact Center as a Service – CCaaS
  • Trunking as a Service – TaaS
  • Communication Platforms as a Service – CPaaS
  • Network Connectivity – Network Access as a Service
  • SD-WAN Managed Services
  • Security as a Service – Managed Security
  • Fax as a Service – FaaS
  • Access Control as a Service – ACaaS
  • Desktop as a Service – DaaS

  While each one of these has specific customer benefits, at a high level the value to the end-user of using any managed communications service comes down to the following:

  • Reduced IT Effort
  • Deployment Velocity
  • Scalability
  • Business Agility

  In the next couple of weeks, I will go a more in-depth into some of the Sangoma cloud services, and explore more specific end-user customer benefits of the cloud service discussed that week. If you want to read the full report now, please go here. Otherwise, stay tuned here and I’ll provide a few quick updates for you.

  The post Overall SaaS Benefit Review appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

December 16, 2022

• Jitsi Self-hosting a fully-featured Jitsi Meet instance just got as easy as pie

  Hey there Fellow Jitsters!

  Have you ever considered adding telephony to your Jitsi Meet self-hosted instance?

  Up until now you only had the option to run Jigasi and deal with telephony yourself. Many of our users do this every day, but when we asked we learned that there was interest in offloading that part. Could someone else host it?

  

  Today we’re launching a new way to quickly connect to the public telephone network and offer dial-in capabilities to your users without the need for hosting and managing the entire telephony infrastructure: JaaS components. You can give it a try today!

  Are you running Jitsi Meet on a Debian instance or are you using Docker? Either way, you can opt-in for this feature and it will be automatically set up. A new JaaS account will be created for you and you’re good to… call.

  If you’re running Jitsi Meet on Debian all you need to do is to answer ‘Yes’ to this question and you will have dial-in capability on your Jitsi instance.

  

  Note: A Let’s Encrypt certificate is required and the email address used to generate the certificate will be used also for creating your new JaaS account.

  If you’re running Jitsi Meet on Docker you’ll need to set the following variables on your .env file:

  • PUBLIC_URL: the domain were Jitsi Meet runs
  • ENABLE_JAAS_COMPONENTS=1
  • A Let’s Encrypt certificate is required so do enable it too

  

  Now you can restart your setup with `docker-compose up –force-recreate`

   

  An email will be sent to you, asking you to set up a password for the JaaS admin account:

  

  From the JaaS admin console you can manage your account, see the overall activity and upgrade to another plan if needed.

  

  You’re all set up now! Let’s make a phone call! Join a call on your Jitsi Meet instance and notice how the dial-in option becomes available when trying to invite participants. You can now dial-in to one of the phone numbers provided in the list and you’ll be connected to the meeting.

  

  Get started today, a free trial is available! Please check the JaaS components website for details on pricing.

  Jigasi is the first Jitsi component offered as a service, with more to come. Stay tuned!

   

  Your personal meetings team.

  ---

  Author: Oana Emilia Ianc

   

  The post Self-hosting a fully-featured Jitsi Meet instance just got as easy as pie appeared first on Jitsi.

December 12, 2022

• Digium Sangoma is Recognized in the Gartner UCaaS Magic Quadrant

  Last week you may have noticed that Gartner, Inc. positioned Sangoma in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service. Sangoma is one of only twelve other companies placed in 2022 and one of six to appear consecutively for the last eight years.

  

  “We are thrilled to be recognized again in this year’s Gartner UCaaS Magic Quadrant,” said Sangoma Chief Marketing and Product Officer Jim Machi. “It’s gratifying to be independently recognized for vision and execution. Sangoma has grown its position in the top tier of cloud communications companies. Sangoma offers the widest set of cloud communication services in the industry, all engineered in-house, to offer partners and customers a single-source, business-oriented cloud-native communications portfolio. UCaaS is the centerpiece of this strategy, but this complete vision goes beyond that to include CCaaS, Video Meetings as a Service, Collaboration, CPaaS, etc., so this recognition is exciting for Sangoma, our partners, and our customers.”

  To read the full report, fill out the form on this page.

  The post Sangoma is Recognized in the Gartner UCaaS Magic Quadrant appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

December 06, 2022

• Jitsi Trust, but verify: introducing user verification

  It’s been a while since we introduced End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) over two years ago. Back then we started with a simple model consisting of a passphrase everyone needed to type and later migrated to a model with randomly generated keys per participant. Each have different characteristic and we ultimately chose to stick with the latter. Today we are introducing a missing piece in the E2EE puzzle: user verification.

  User verification was not previously possible in Jitsi Meet. Just like our core E2EE we are basing our implementation on the Matrix protocol. Matrix’s libolm / vodozemac provide a Short Authentication String (SAS) mechanism implementation which developers can use. They even have great documentation on how it works, thanks Matrix!

  So, how does it work?

  First, you’d gather in a meeting and turn E2EE on.

  

  Now you’ll see a new option for each participant in their tile menu that allows you to verify them:

  

  After choosing to verify a user a dialog will open with a list of emojis:

  .

  Wait what? Emoji? These emojis conform the SAS. They have been carefully chosen to avoid ambiguity and make the process more user friendly than comparing random numbers. You can find more information in the Matrix spec.  You must verbally compare them with the other participant and if they match, mark it as verified.

  Once a user is verified this will be reflected in the user information tooltip:

  

  At this point you can be sure that not only your data is encrypted end-to-end, but also that there is no man-in-the-middle (MITM) attach happening.

  Availability

  User verification is currently available in Jitsi Meet master and deployed in beta. It will be part of the next stable release, but expect more improvements specially in the UX front.

  Thanks

  We’d like to thank Robertas Maleckas (ETH Zurich), Prof. Kenny Paterson (ETH Zurich) and Prof. Martin Albrecht (Royal Holloway, University of London) for their work researching Jitsi Meet’s E2EE and encouragement, and Matrix for their tools, which make implementing E2EE a much better experience.

   

  ---

  Please note that we still consider our E2EE experimental and are still working on improvements. Please make sure you check out our post on how end-to-end encryption in general does NOT offer a meaningful level of trust and protection when it comes to modern meetings services.

  Your personal meetings team.

  The post Trust, but verify: introducing user verification appeared first on Jitsi.

December 01, 2022

• Jitsi Introducing whiteboards in Jitsi Meet

  Trying to explain something to someone and they just don’t get it? If an image is worth a thousand words how about a diagram? Today we’re excited to announce the availability of whiteboards in Jitsi Meet – the missing piece for all those seeking an educational meeting solution and not only!

  

  We decided to stand in the shoulders of giants on this one. The core implementation comes from Excalidraw, an excellent whiteboarding piece of software, which is Open Source, of course. We made some tweaks and adjustments to have it fit in with our vision. We seek to provide an easy to use feature that enables participants to share ideas and brainstorm without having to seek a third party solution. From now on, meeting moderators can open a whiteboard and have everyone in the call sketch away.

  

  The interface supports a number of tools and settings that keep the collaboration interesting and effective. During a meeting, changes that a participant makes locally via the whiteboard are sent to a server to then distribute those updates only to devices of other participants in the meeting. The whiteboard content can be exported as a png or svg at any time during the meeting, so all that hard work doesn’t go to waste.

  

  If you’re using meet.jit.si, you can go ahead and play with the whiteboard in your meetings right away! For those self-hosting, it can be enabled from the config file, and you’ll need to deploy this simple backend.

  As you might already know, we’re firm believers in the power of Open Source, we seek to collaborate with other communities to build solutions everyone can use and we’re excited to bring more to this feature in the future!

  Your personal meetings team.

  ---

  Author: Mihaela Dumitru

  The post Introducing whiteboards in Jitsi Meet appeared first on Jitsi.

November 22, 2022

• Digium Multi-Location UCaaS and Multi-Location Connectivity Services

  Sangoma is very proud and honored to be able to service multi-location businesses with our UCaaS system and MSP services. A common dialing plan among the different physical businesses, physical phones that are tightly tied to the UC system, mobile and desktop clients to augment the desk phone, and having a CPaaS system that can enable multi-location business unique requirements to be added to our UCaaS solution has enabled Sangoma to service these businesses well with our UCaaS solutions.

  Beyond UCaaS, though, Sangoma, through its acquisition of NetFortris, now offers connectivity and security services that can be tailored to bring the best connectivity solution to the needs of the overall multi-location business and each of the specific physical buildings. It is hard to manage what is the best connectivity solution, which provider to get it all from, all the different bills, etc. That’s understandable, for sure. The IT department needs to be expert at everything, and that’s downright impossible.

  Someone like Sangoma can determine the best price, the best type of connectivity solution, and the best provider for each location and manage the network for you. You likely do not need the same bandwidth for each building, and the network provider may most likely offer a different economical service all around. Let someone else figure that all out for you and take care of all that for you.

  As your UCaaS provider, it makes sense to get all this from us. We understand the networks, and we’re monitoring the UCaaS anyway, so why not have us manage and monitor your internet connectivity as well?

  And we can also offer you SD-WAN services with this connectivity so that you can get the most efficient routing, a more stable internet (because of the use of multiple connections), and cost savings. And, of course, monitoring by Sangoma. Learn more about our MSP services here.

  The post Multi-Location UCaaS and Multi-Location Connectivity Services appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

November 21, 2022

• Digium As a Voice Service Provider, How Has the FCC’s Updated Deadline on STIR/SHAKEN Compliance Affected Your Business?

  A few months ago, the FCC released a public notice reminding non-facilities-based “small voice service providers”, that they must implement the STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication framework in their Internet Protocol networks no later than June 30, 2022.

  Is this a surprise to you? Well perhaps, considering a 2 year extension was granted to small VPS (those with 100,000 or fewer voice access lines) from the original deadline of June 30th, 2021. So why the sudden change in deadline? What happened was an overwhelming amount of robocalls were observed to be originating from these small VSP from the time that deadline was announced, so much so, the FCC decided to cut the extension by 1 year, significantly moving up the deadline.

  In summary, as a small voice service provider you are no longer subject to a two year extension and must update your certifications and associated filings in the Robocal Mitigation Database (RMD) and implement the authentication framework by June 30, 2022 (which of course has passed at this point in time) or be subject to ”appropriate enforcement action” by the FCC.

  We know that it’s a lot of work, time, and money spent to become compliant. To implement STIR/SHAKEN into your voice network, you’ll likely need to provision a cost-prohibitive session border controller (SBC) or a SIP proxy, which can significantly alter the way you route traffic to your partners. This can create unexpected consequences for you, such as billing, for instance, not to mention the network maintenance and monitoring that’s required for these new points of failure.

  The deadline for compliance has already passed for non-facilities-based providers. Don’t risk waiting for the FCC to contact you and be put under extreme pressure. We have a Zero-maintenance call signing solution for you!

  VI Communication Services’ Call Signing Services help you become compliant, simply by sending your phone calls to our voice network. On our side, we will provision a dedicated server to host your unique certificate and sign calls on your behalf, using the attestation rules that you yourself configured. That’s all! No additional hardware or network maintenance required. We take care of everything for you so that you can focus on running your business. View our product slick.

  Learn more about our Call Signing Service today. We are sure it will save your business the unwanted hassle of STIR/SHAKEN compliance!

  The post As a Voice Service Provider, How Has the FCC’s Updated Deadline on STIR/SHAKEN Compliance Affected Your Business? appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

November 10, 2022

• Digium What are Managed IT Services?

  A managed IT service is an information technology (IT) task provided by a third-party service provider and delivered to a business customer.

  “Managed services” refers to outsourcing information technology (IT) processes and functions to improve operations and reduce expenses. It’s a way to augment your company IT staff with access to specialized expertise and not worry about the cost and complexities of hiring and staffing for 24/7/365 critical business functions.
  Managed services are ideal for companies that:

  • Rely on IT infrastructure to support their daily business operations
  • Have training or specialty gaps in their IT staff or have teams that have become bogged down in routine maintenance and cannot focus on value-generating objectives
  • Need IT budget predictability and scalability

  What are Managed IT Solutions?

   
  Businesses outsource a plethora of IT-related services to managed IT solutions providers, including:

  • Cloud Communications – This encompasses multiple communications technologies from business phone systems, VoIP calling, email, chat, video conferencing and collaboration, unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS), virtual call centers, SIP trunking, and more.
  • Networking – A service provider typically develops, controls, and manages communication networks. Services typically offered include:
    • Internet access
    • SD-WAN for network optimization and traffic prioritization
    • Network switches
    • Wireless local area networks (LANs)
    • Wide area networks (WANs)
    • Virtual private networks (VPNs)
    • Wi-Fi and other forms of connectivity
  • Security – Cybersecurity is a specialized field with a range of services encompassing a comprehensive solution that secures an organization’s network and devices on (or off) that network. Services typically include:
    • Next-generation firewalls (NGFW)
    • Backup and disaster recovery
    • Endpoint detection and response (EDR)
    • Managed detection and response (MDR)
    • Remote monitoring and management (RMM)
    • Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
    • Unified threat management (UTM)
    • Patch management
    • Email security
    • DNS protection
    • Security awareness training

  What is a Managed IT Service Provider?

   
  In a managed service arrangement, the managed service provider (MSP) is responsible for the functionality of IT services and equipment for the client, who typically pays on a monthly retainer basis.

  Companies that offer managed services are called managed service providers (MSPs). MSPs are third-party companies that remotely manage IT infrastructure and systems. Small and medium businesses (SMBs), nonprofits, government agencies, and enterprises across various industry verticals leverage MSPs to deploy and manage technology solutions.

  Typically, an MSP delivers applications and management services through the Internet under a contractual service-level agreement (SLA). The SLA details qualitative and quantitative performance metrics that govern the MSP and customer engagement.

  Key Benefits of Managed IT Service Providers for Businesses

  • Reduced technology costs
  • Domain expertise
  • Specialized talent
  • Scalability
  • Emerging tech know-how
  • Future-proof environments

  MSPs handle complex or repetitive tasks required to maintain a client’s IT infrastructure and typically are engaged in managing the following activities:

  • Sourcing and managing IT infrastructure
  • Delivering managed communications and collaboration services
  • Offering technical and software training and support
  • Sourcing and managing security solutions
  • Managing client user accounts in applications and portals
  • Handling contract management for underlying technology vendors
  • Assisting with compliance and risk management
  • Managing third-party contractors
  • More

  Why Outsource to a Managed IT Service Provider?

   
  Businesses of all sizes typically offload the management of select IT services for these key reasons:

  • Issue-Resolution Ownership – MSPs working with you in an ongoing capacity are incented to focus on preventing problems and quickly address issues to continue to win your business each month.
  • Solution Stability – MSPs provide 24/7/365 monitoring and proactive maintenance, which means they can respond to issues quickly and head off system failure and downtime in advance.
  • Predictable Costs – Expenses fit neatly into monthly payments, eliminating the need for significant capital outlays to deploy services. Likewise, you never get an unforeseen bill for something that breaks.
  • Infrastructure Modernization – MSPs go beyond just fixing your existing systems. They provide recommendations and create migration plans for upgrades to new and modernized versions of your underlying network infrastructure components while keeping them up to date and in alignment with your technical and business objectives.

  Ready for Worry-Free Managed IT for Your Business?

   
  Sangoma makes it painless to access a complete suite of managed networking, security, and business communications solutions customizable to your organization’s unique needs.

  The post What are Managed IT Services? appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

• Jitsi Low-latency conference streaming to very large audiences

  Jitsi today supports life-streaming conferences to large audiences through our Jibri tool – this tool renders all the media from the conference, and forwards it to a streaming service such as YouTube.

  This approach works, but it has limitations.  In addition to being computationally expensive, it also introduces substantial latency to the media.  This can be a problem when interaction is needed between the participants in the conference and the audience, for example for a text-based question-and-answer session.

  This article will describe a new approach to live-streaming media, which uses Jitsi’s builtin functionality, without transcoding, to reach potentially very large audiences with latency comparable to that of a live conference.

  Overview

  The basic approach to media distribution for this solution is straightforward – simply forward media to all the audience members in the same way that they are forwarded today to conference participants – i.e. as individual RTP streams over WebRTC.  This can re-use Jitsi’s existing well-tested technology to distribute the media and have it arrive at receivers and be played out to viewers.

  The challenge, of course, is to scale Jitsi’s back-end services so they can support sending media to very large numbers of viewers, potentially in the hundreds of thousands or more.  The rest of this article will discuss some of the architectural enhancements we need to make to Jitsi to support this.

  The first insight that will make this possible is to realize that in a streaming scenario, while the conference’s active participants need to know that they are being watched by an audience, they don’t need to know all the audience members’ identities or presence in real-time; nor do the audience members need to know about each other.  Thus, the system can be modified such that presence information about individual audience members is not sent to other conference participants, or to unnecessary parts of the backend; this reduces the amount of signaling traffic substantially.

  The second substantial change that we are making to the backend is to be able to have more sophisticated topologies for the Jitsi Videobridges to relay media among them.  Currently, when more than one Jitsi Videobridge is used in a conference (in Jitsi’s Octo/Relay technology), the bridges are connected to each other in a full mesh.  This topology minimizes the latency for media, but would not scale to very large conferences, where e.g. hundreds of thousands of participants might need several hundred bridges.  If every bridge in such a conference were connected to every other one, the bridges could be overloaded just sending media out.

  Instead, we are developing technology that can arrange bridges into more elaborate topologies.  In particular, our plan for very large conferences is to still have the conference’s active participants be connected to bridges which are arranged in a mesh; but the audience members would then be connected to bridges whose interconnection forms a tree extending from various nodes of the core mesh, so that the core media servers would only need to send media out to a limited number of connections to the audience’s bridges, which would then be forwarded out to the audience, possibly relaying through multiple bridges on the way.

  

  Finally, changes need to be made for the signaling servers used by the Jitsi back-end.  While information about audience members only needs to be propagated to selected back-end infrastructure servers, information about a conference’s active participants needs to be forwarded to the entire audience.  The existing XMPP servers that the Jitsi back-end uses aren’t designed for this level of load.  Thus, we are developing solutions such that this participant information can be mirrored from one XMPP server to another, allowing each server to handle only a manageable number of client connections while still getting the information to the entire audience quickly.

  Stay tuned!

  Your personal meetings team.

  ---

  Author: Jonathan Lennox

  The post Low-latency conference streaming to very large audiences appeared first on Jitsi.

November 08, 2022

• Digium UCaaS as PBX Replacement: Part 2

  In my last blog, I wrote about a customer just wanting basic PBX features from “25 years ago” and whether it was possible to buy a business phone system today that would be able to effectively replace one of these older systems.

  The answer is “of course you can get a phone system” that handles the PBX feature requirements from 25 years ago. And it will do exactly what you want it to do, and are used to doing, in terms of calling and call routing and audio conferencing and voice mail, etc. And it can still be on-premises if you wish, but it can also run in the cloud. And you can use a handset just like your current system has. If this is what you want, we have it.

  But it will also come with other features, or the ability to add these features, because that is what many customers want today:

  • Chat
  • Presence
  • Video calling
  • Mobility (Calling to and from your smartphone and laptop)
  • Integrations to CRM systems
  • Ability to customize via adding applications (such as notification apps)

  So don’t be confused and don’t be afraid to upgrade because of the marketing buzzwords used today. You’ll have all your old features, but you’ll be able to use these new features as well. For instance, the mobility feature allows your business phone number to follow you around on your laptop and Smartphone – it will make you “look bigger” to your customers since you’ll be reachable more easily.

  Upgrade so you don’t put your business at risk because of a potentially failing old system. Come talk to us and we’ll be happy to help. PBXs are there today, just in different clothing.

  The post UCaaS as PBX Replacement: Part 2 appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

November 03, 2022

• Digium Business Voice+ Named Cloud Computing Product of the Year by Cloud Computing Magazine

  We proudly announce that Business Voice+ was named the Cloud Computing Product of the Year Award, presented by Cloud Computing Magazine.

  Business Voice+ is Sangoma’s pure cloud deployment platform. Designed for businesses who want peerless call quality, communications flexibility, and exceptional system support, Business Voice is the perfect, zero-hardware option. With Business Voice, your business can leverage the power of a complete, end-to-end system from an intuitive, browser-based interface.

  The Cloud Computing Product of the Year Award honors vendors with the most innovative, practical, and beneficial cloud products and services deployed within the past year.

  Learn more about Business Voice+!

  The post Business Voice+ Named Cloud Computing Product of the Year by Cloud Computing Magazine appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

October 31, 2022

• Digium UCaaS and the Education Industry: Equip Your School with Cutting-Edge Communications

  With Sangoma’s Education Solutions, School is Never Out for the Summer

  Education requires total commitment, and for good reason. After all, it involves nothing less than preparing young people for lifelong personal and professional success. Considering the stakes, school systems should prioritize high-quality and worry-free communications, but all too often they face challenges implementing and supporting the latest in telephony. Let’s explore why.

  Barriers to High-Quality School Communication

  School administrators are often confronted with funding shortfalls and end up scrapping IT investments. If that isn’t bad enough, many schools don’t have a permanent IT professional on staff, which means critical communications infrastructure goes unmaintained and improvements fall to the wayside.

  On top of this, user-friendliness inhibits the successful implementation of next-generation communications systems. Educators need systems they can easily pick up and run with, especially given the fact that “13.8 percent of U.S. teachers are either leaving their school or the profession altogether.” With this in mind, it’s clear that successful systems can’t require a steep learning curve. Educators need a solution that lets them focus on what matters most: teaching! 

  Thankfully, there is a solution that overcomes these not-so-insignificant barriers: Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). 

  What is UCaaS?

  Educators require an easy way to interact with parents, administrators, students, and coworkers. Many schools have answered that call by discarding existing telephony for cutting-edge voice over internet protocol (VoIP) solutions that pair high-quality voice with unified communication (UC) tools to create UCaaS systems. Uniting technologies like voice, video conferencing, instant messaging, email, SMS, and fax into a single platform, UCaaS is an affordable and customizable system that adapts to the needs of any school network. It can also have hugely positive implications for an organization’s overall effectiveness and culture, with recent survey data showing UCaaS translating to better productivity for 72% of respondents, higher collaboration for 91%, and faster problem solving for 88%.

  Ditch “Old-School” Methods

  “Parent notes” are a critical tool for keeping parents informed, but how often are they left in backpacks, found on the floor of the bus, or worse – eaten by the dog? With UCaaS in an educator’s corner, teachers can ditch these types of archaic communication methods in favor of crystal-clear voice or high-resolution video. Whether it be a one-on-one call with a co-worker or student, or a group video conference with parents, the flexibility maximizes the effectiveness of a school’s messaging by supporting whichever channel works best for the stakeholders involved. And this is just one example; the possibilities are practically endless when technology is on your side. 

  User-Friendly, Affordable Communications are as

  Easy as 1, 2, 3

  As a seasoned IT vendor successfully equipping schools with the best communication solutions for years, Sangoma has discovered an ideal way forward. By striking a much-needed balance through “must have” features while also remaining affordable, we ensure that schools will never be “out for the summer” or any other season when they work with us. 

  “It looks like we are saving about $400 a month so far,” said Sadie O’Brien, IT director for the Shiocton School District, after deciding to transition to [Sangoma] Switchvox.

  By eliminating up-front costs, Sangoma UC expertly walks the fine line between offering advanced communication features without straining an institution’s IT funding. Additional savings are gained from low annual fees, and the solution operates through an all-inclusive pricing model. This fixed, consistent, subscription-style billing structure fits comfortably within school system budgets. 

  What’s in it for You?

  Sangoma UC doesn’t just solve problems created by sparse technology budgets, it also addresses the administrative challenges faced by these institutions. The system can be administered via a single computer connected to the network – with no coding required. Everything is geared toward lowering the learning curve and easing the burden for education professionals right from the get-go. Let’s take a closer look at how it can impact some of the primary stakeholders within a given school district: 

  IT Professionals: IT support staff gain major advantages with Sangoma UC in that it requires no special software, hardware, or license keys – meaning there’s nothing to download or install. The entire system can be managed through a single pane of glass with customizable views and widgets. With a subscription-based model, dealing with lengthy updates or cumbersome maintenance becomes a thing of the past, instead transitioning to the vendor’s responsibility. 

  Teachers: The typical teacher is overworked and overwhelmed, meaning that any technology they use must always help, never hinder. Sangoma UC is simple and intuitive enough that teachers can simply pick it up and immediately start taking advantage of its mobility features, dedicated conference rooms, and more. 

  Administrators: Administrators within school districts have a lot on their plates – from tracking absences, to managing calls from parents and staff, to sending out alerts and emergency messages. Sangoma streamlines these workflows considerably with a full suite of easy-to-learn features, such as IVR, auto attendant, receptionist console, mobile and desktop apps, and RAY BAUM compliance.

  Move Education into the Future with Sangoma

  As a 100% web-based system, Sangoma UC centralizes communications and ensures access to all messages, applications, and tools, regardless of where users are or what device they’re using. 

  Having equipped more than 1,000 schools, we’re well aware of the communication challenges faced by school districts. This includes chronic problems with funding, adequate IT support, and the pressing need for high-quality anytime/anywhere connections between students, teachers, and parents. However, through our UCaaS system, schools can equip themselves with cutting-edge communications that provide comprehensive benefits for less time and effort. 

  Want to learn more about Sangoma and how it can transform your district? Download our free eBook today!

  The post UCaaS and the Education Industry: Equip Your School with Cutting-Edge Communications appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

October 25, 2022

• Digium UCaaS as PBX Replacement: Part 1

  Yes, there are still business systems called “PBX’s” out there. These are on-premises business phone systems that basically just did calling in and out of a building, offered voice mail, could perform an audio conference call, could forward a call, and had a some ‘advanced” calling features like ring groups, or sending group messages (i.e. recording a message, and then sending it to a group of people – like an email but you recorded the email), or call screening. The phone system that ran the business if you will.

  And they ruled the roost at one time. You learned many of the intricacies of these systems to be the most effective communicator out there, augmenting your email with these phone systems features.

  These systems are out there still. Not all have been upgraded yet. But they are old, and many of these systems are even out of maintenanace. Still chugging along…until they are not….
  As VoIP marched on and the internet networks became faster, other communication modes such as chat and video entered the fray, and the need to have the systems on-premises dissipated. Today’s UCaaS systems were born.

  And with it it came newfangled terminology. No more analog and digital. Seats, bandwidth, Unified Communications, trunking, hosted, cloud, multi-tenant, single-tenant, collaboration, single sign-on, UCaaS, mobility, and CPaaS are now typical words used.

  But this doesn’t mean the requirements of the PBXs of 25 years ago are different. The need to have a phone system that “runs the business” is still there. And I’ve had some prospects / customers kind of wondering what is going on – “can’t we just get a phone system?”. And these prospects have not upgraded since it’s kind of confusing to them. They want to, because they know the “chugging along” at some point will simply stop, but they don’t want to make a mistake, or buy something they won’t be able to work well.

  The answer is “of course you can get a phone system”. I’ll talk about this more in my next blog.

  The post UCaaS as PBX Replacement: Part 1 appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

October 11, 2022

• Digium Let’s Revisit Hot Desking

  Back in June, I wrote a blog about hot desking. And I wrote at the time “But is hot desking of a physical phone an obsolete concept with Unified Communications? Does it even need to be in RFPs anymore? Because with UC, you can make and take phone calls with your work extension from your computer, or from your smartphone, via a UC client. I can do that no matter where I sit in the office.”

  Now, 4 months later, I got an email from a reader asking if I wanted to take that back because with the return to the office, many companies are going to hybrid models. Hybrid, to many, in addition to working both in the office and at home, means there are fewer offices. Because companies have downsized the physical space to save money.

  And now when you show up to the actual office, instead of going to a specific office or cubicle, you might just have to go find a place to sit. And so the phone at the “place to sit” is not hard wired with your extension. What I wrote is still valid and maybe even more-so if this is what hybrid means.

  What I will acknowledge, though, is that maybe there are some specific jobs where the company wants you on a deskphone, instead of on your smartphone, or the UC app. Security issues, for instance might come into play. So yes, I can see this being a part of RFPs with a hybrid environment if the use demands a physical phone while at the office.

  But if the UC client is used when working from home, what’s the difference if you are at home or in the office? Mobility is mobility. That’s all I’ll say.

  The post Let’s Revisit Hot Desking appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

October 04, 2022

• Digium Sangoma Announces Several Executive Appointments Including Chief Financial Officer Transition

  MARKHAM, Ontario, Oct. 03, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Sangoma Technologies Corporation (TSX: STC; Nasdaq: SANG) (“Sangoma” or the “Company”), a trusted leader in delivering cloud-based Communications as a Service solutions for companies of all sizes, today announced several executive appointments to help position the company for ongoing growth.

  Mr. Larry Stock, the Company’s former Chief Corporate Officer, has been appointed Chief Financial Officer effective October 3, 2022. He succeeds Mr. David Moore, who is transitioning into the role of EVP, Corporate Development, to lead Sangoma’s merger and acquisition efforts. And Mr. Jamie Minner has been named Sangoma’s new Chief Revenue Officer.

  “I would like to congratulate Larry, David and Jamie on their new executive appointments,” said Bill Wignall, Sangoma’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “With David’s contributions to our growth over several years, his deep knowledge of Sangoma, and his M&A experience, we are counting on him to lead our acquisition efforts. Larry’s appointment as CFO is one of the many steps we are taking to deepen our executive team, in order to prepare for our continued growth as a dual-listed public company. And I am very confident that Jamie will really drive that growth, in his new role as Sangoma’s CRO.”

  Larry Stock was the CFO of Star2Star when it was acquired by Sangoma in March 2021 and prior to that, had a 22-year career at Jabil (NYSE: JBL), a company with over $20 billion in revenue, where he held a number of executive finance and leadership roles including Chief Audit Executive, Divisional Chief Financial Officer, VP of Risk & Assurance, and Chief Risk Officer. David Moore has been with Sangoma for over a decade in his capacity as Sangoma’s CFO, contributing to the company’s exceptional progress. And Jamie Minner joined the Sangoma family through the NetFortris acquisition, prior to which he held executive sales and leadership roles in the cloud communications industry for over 20 years with such companies as TPx Communications, Momentum Telecom, Comcast, and Cbeyond.

  About Sangoma Technologies Corporation
  Sangoma Technologies is a trusted leader in delivering value-based Communications as a Service (CaaS) and Managed Service Provider (“MSP”) solutions for businesses of all sizes. Sangoma’s cloud-based communication services include Unified Communication (UCaaS) business communications, Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), Video Meetings as a Service (MaaS), Collaboration as a Service (Collab aaS), Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS), Trunking as a Service (TaaS), Fax as a Service (FaaS), Device as a Service (DaaS), and Access Control as a Service (ACaaS). In addition, Sangoma offers a full line of communications Products, including premise-based UC systems, a full line of desk phones and headsets, and a complete connectivity suite (gateways/SBCs/telephony cards). Sangoma’s products and services are used in leading UC, PBX, IVR, contact center, carrier networks, office productivity, and data communication applications worldwide. Sangoma is also the primary developer and sponsor of Asterisk and FreePBX, the world’s two most widely used open-source communication software projects.

  Sangoma Technologies Corporation is publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: STC) and Nasdaq (Nasdaq: SANG). Additional information on Sangoma can be found at: www.sangoma.com.

  CONTACT: Sangoma Technologies Corporation
  Samantha Reburn
  General Counsel
  (905) 474-1990 ext. 4134
  sreburn@sangoma.com

  The post Sangoma Announces Several Executive Appointments Including Chief Financial Officer Transition appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

September 27, 2022

• Digium Sangoma Announces Shipment of Its One Millionth Desk Phone

  

  Wow, we just shipped our one millionth phone! Over 10 years ago, Sangoma (and Digium) decided that having a seamless end-to-end Unified Communication system was important. And at that time, end to end system meant just the phone and the UC systems. So, we decided to release our own phones.

  These days, a UC system includes Sangoma’s UCaaS service (or on-premises version), the desk phone, mobile and desktop client software, Sangoma’s collaboration-as-a-service client (TeamHub), and Sangoma’s video meetings service (Sangoma Meet).

  The UC industry has come quite a long way in 10 years, but the phone is still part of the system, especially for brick-and-mortar businesses. And we are proud to serve all of these customers.

  As I said in the press release about this news, “Many of our customers use both desk phones as well as our mobile and desktop clients to communicate. And since we manufacture our own desk phones and develop our own cloud communications software, we are able to provide deep integration between our phones and our cloud communications services, in a way that other phone manufacturers or UCaaS companies simply cannot do. This kind of integration has contributed to the successful growth of this important product line at Sangoma, differentiating us from our competitors and leading to this one-million-unit milestone.“

  So, thank you to all the users of these phones, the distributors who fulfilled these phones, and the resellers who put our solutions into the end-user businesses. Let’s count the next million.

  The post Sangoma Announces Shipment of Its One Millionth Desk Phone appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

September 15, 2022

• Digium Sangoma’s New Logo

  Sangoma is constantly evolving. And with it, our logo is evolving along with us.

  

  When we purchased Digium in 2018, we made a change to our logo and at that time, incorporated part of the Digium logo. But since that time, we’ve purchased VoIP Innovations, Star2Star, and now NetFortris. We are a different company since 2018, and we figured it was time for our logo come along. While our logo has changed, we still have the same pride and commitment to Asterisk (and FreePBX). Nothing has changed in that regard.

  What has changed is we’ve now grown into being a world-class Communications as a Service provider with over 70% recurring revenue. And through our partners we serve businesses ranging from SMBs to multi-location regional and national retail chains. It’s been truly awesome to have been part of this growth.

  And while we are probably most associated today with UCaaS and it’s nice to get accolades from Gartner and Frost and Sullivan about UCaaS, we also offer cloud services that complement UCaaS – Contact Center, Video Meetings, Collaboration, MSP services, CPaaS / Applications, Desktop as a Service, Access Control and Fax for example. We offer a wide range of Communications-as-a-Services, one we think is the broadest in the industry.

  And so we wanted to incorporate some kind of cloud element into our logo – to always have that in the background when people come to our website, when we’re presenting, etc. Because that’s who we are and who we will continue to be. We are also a strong company in many ways – fiscally, determined, intrepid – and that steel blue color is meant to evoke that.

  Welcome to the new logo.

  The post Sangoma’s New Logo appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

August 30, 2022

• Digium UCaaS & the Concept of “One-stop-shopping” for Other Required Communications Services

  Over the summer, I’ve written a few blogs about the Frost and Sullivan whitepaper called “Modern Cloud Communications Empower the Hybrid Workforce�. This will be my final blog about it. One other part of that whitepaper talked about Unified Communications and then about other communication services beyond just UC.

  Organizations adopting unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) show strong preference for one-stop shopping. They choose to purchase an array of correlated services from their cloud private branch exchange (PBX) provider:

  • 91% integrated meetings and messaging
  • 88% cybersecurity solutions
  • 88% device as a service
  • 85% SIP trunking
  • 84% MPLS
  • 82% SD-WAN
  • 78% integrated contact center
  • 42% calling plans

  This is really interesting since this has been Sangoma’s strategy for a long time!

  

  We have everything Frost and Sullivan writes about in our chart above. The three to the right on the chart (managed SD-WAN, managed network connectivity, and managed security) were obtained via our acquisition of NetFortris in March of this year.

  And that’s how I’ll end this blog series. Frost and Sullivan validating our strategy.

  To download the full Frost and Sullivan whitepaper to learn more about this, please go here.

  The post UCaaS & the Concept of “One-stop-shopping� for Other Required Communications Services appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

August 29, 2022

• Digium Maximize Profitability and Boost Collaboration with Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS)

  Grow Business Benefits with a Full Suite of Customizable CaaS Solutions from Sangoma

  Communication is the lifeblood of every business, and thanks to recent technological innovations, global disruptions, and shifting market demands, virtual environments are essential for effective communication in the modern workplace. More companies are turning to the cloud to improve remote and hybrid collaboration, introduce new customer service channels, and lower IT costs. To explore what CaaS offers, download our new, free eBook today!

  Why CaaS?

  The key to achieving a seamless experience in the cloud is integration. Navigating between multiple applications, platforms, and cloud providers is cumbersome and creates silos that hinder communication and add complexity. Disparate systems also introduce security risks and associated costs to protect every application and device. Without integration, simply doing business is a recipe for profit loss.

  Gain a Competitive Advantage with a Complete CaaS Portfolio

  Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS), also called Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS), brings together voice, video, presence and chat, conferencing, virtual desktop, and other applications to create a simplified, interconnected environment where every communication tool works together effectively.

  With CaaS, companies can create and customize a secure, seamless digital workspace that improves collaboration and maximizes profitability with no hidden costs – all from a single cloud provider.

  CaaS Deployments for Any Business

  Whether an organization needs a single solution or a full suite, Sangoma’s end-to-end CaaS portfolio can address business communication needs and provide the right hardware and accessories to maximize performance and productivity. Customizable and comprehensive, Sangoma’s platforms offer flexible deployment options, secure integrations, and unified applications accessible from any device.

  With Sangoma’s one bill, one vendor approach, organizations no longer need to devote time and energy to navigating multiple cloud vendors with their own policies, procedures, and workflows. When businesses partner with Sangoma, they enjoy a reliable, consistent partnership with expert support when and where they need it.

  Collaboration Solutions

  Effective communication tools help companies collaborate effectively, which improves employee morale, productivity, and long-term profitability. Thankfully, Sangoma’s CaaS solutions are geared specifically toward enhancing collaboration amongst on-site and off-site teams, regardless of how they operate.

  Business Phones, Hardware, and Communities

  In addition to its many software and as-a-Service products, Sangoma stands apart from other providers by offering an array of hardware, phones, and other devices to support business goals. What’s more, Sangoma maintains an open-source community to help small businesses, enterprises, government agencies, and other organizations create and deploy communications apps.

  Businesses are constantly evolving, and with these additional services, Sangoma can act as a trustworthy, end-to-end partner as companies’ technology needs grow and change.

  Read More: Download our brand-new, free eBook to explore all that CaaS can do for your business

  The post Maximize Profitability and Boost Collaboration with Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS) appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

August 16, 2022

• Digium Considerations for a Unified Communications Prem to Cloud Migration

  Some companies are considering the transition from an on-premise unified communication system to a UCaaS system. There could be various reasons, ranging from the age of the prem system, to not wanting to manage the on-site system anymore (manually update the system, etc.), to it being part of your company’s strategy to move as much support systems to the cloud, to you are growing and you want your system to scale better and support remote offices.

  No matter what, there are considerations.

  One consideration is are the features the same? Some UC features are “easier” in an on-prem system, and some features are older and maybe not available on a newer UCaaS system (fax, analog phones anyone?, hot desking/hoteling for example) so if you have some favorite features or key older technology to support, make sure you ask.

  Or maybe you’ve built some of your business processes to work with the on-prem system very tightly. Make sure you ask about that and don’t assume it will work.

  Also, maybe you already paid for your phones, so does the UCaaS system support the phones you have already invested in?

  And you should create a plan once you’e decided to do it. Make sure there is a transition period where the prem system and the cloud system are both there, and start the data migration (voice mails, etc.) first. Then there are the applications that interface to the phone system that need to be migrated over as well. And make sure your network can support this.

  If you are considering a migration, Sangoma is here to help you. Give us a call. We offer both on-premise and cloud Unified Communication systems, and have literally helped migrate hundreds if not thousands of businesses from prem to cloud.

  The post Considerations for a Unified Communications Prem to Cloud Migration appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

August 09, 2022

• Digium What is UCaaS?

  Introduction

  Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) is a cloud-based solution that integrates communication features, applications, and services into one cohesive platform. By moving to a UCaaS platform, businesses can utilize the cloud’s mobility and scalability while reducing costs and increasing productivity. This article will go over what Unified Communications as a Service really means (and why it matters).

  What is UCaaS

  UCaaS is a term that refers to unified communications as a service. It’s an umbrella term for different communications services, including video conferencing and collaboration tools such as SangomaMeet and TeamHub.

  Businesses can utilize the cloud’s mobility and scalability by moving away from legacy components such as on-premise PBX systems. Additionally, most UCaaS systems enable your business phone number to be used by your smartphone and your laptop, enabling employees to work remotely very effectively.  By moving to a UCaaS platform, companies can save on upfront costs by deploying a pay-as-you-go approach to their business communications. The monthly cost of a UCaaS platform is usually lower than the monthly maintenance and service costs associated with on-premise systems, and there is no capital expenditure required for hardware or software purchases.

  Furthermore, with UCaaS, you don’t need to worry about purchasing new hardware or software every time you want to add new features; instead, you simply upgrade your subscription plan to gain access to new capabilities!

   

  Features of a UCaaS Platform

  A UCaaS platform has several features that make it stand out from other types of business phone systems. Let’s look at a few of the most important ones:
  

  • • Presence: This feature allows you to see which users are currently logged into the system and where they’re located in relation to your office, so you can call them when needed. It also displays indicators, such as, Do Not Disturb, Active, and Out of the Office.  
    • Mobility: The mobility feature allows you to stay connected regardless of your location. Through your office extension, you can make and receive calls, chat, and more with a softphone application on any device with an internet connection—a smartphone or tablet, for example—no matter where they are located as long as they have an internet connection. So you can work from home or from a remote location and still be able to use your office phone number!
    • Collaboration: Collaboration tools are designed specifically for sharing information among team members within one organization; these include chat rooms where people can type messages back-and-forth using text whenever needed instead of calling each other individually over the phone.
    • Unified Messaging: With unified messaging, users can manage many types of messages from a single application and switch communication modes on demand.
    • Video Conferencing: Stay connected with multiple users with conferencing. Conferencing allows a group of users to meet and speak via voice and/or video from multiple locations. This option is also available to outside organizations, partners, or clients. 

  UCaaS Benefits

  UCaaS offers a competitive advantage to businesses by reducing the number of independent tools, platforms, and solutions. It can streamline communications for organizations, regardless of size or industry. Because UCaaS integrates and optimizes all interactions, team collaboration and productivity are significantly improved, and the engagement of sales prospects, vendors, and customers. UCaaS facilitates: 

  • Increased collaboration between teams and departments
  • Improved security through centralized management of various communications devices and apps
  • Reduced costs due to the consolidation of messaging platforms into one centralized service
  • Reduced IT overhead since the cloud subscription enables security and other updates to be done by the cloud service, not by you.

  Why it Matters

  Businesses rely on communication tools to stay productive and competitive, and when it comes to motivating employees and increasing productivity, integrating communication tools empowers workers to handle multiple tasks quickly and efficiently. By integrating communications into one platform, companies can improve team collaboration and productivity while reducing costs. Brighten your future and improve your business communications with Sangoma’s UCaaS solutions and full-suite communication suite: (list products here?) 

  

   

  The post What is UCaaS? appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

July 28, 2022

• Digium How to Deploy or Migrate to UCaaS the Smart Way

  Let’s face it: launching a UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) system from scratch can seem pretty daunting. This type of cloud phone system incorporates many different types of communication / collaboration services to help your business succeed. Whether you’re talking about voice, video, messaging, meetings, presence or team-based collaboration, they’re all traditionally available as options.

  And while the hallmark of a UCaaS environment is its ability to bring together all of these elements, there are many (frequently overwhelming) considerations you have to make on the back end to determine if and how it can work for you. Then, there are past investments. Over the years, many businesses like yours have spent significant time and money toward implementing many traditional communication and collaboration options that are now outdated for the modern landscape.

  Previous choices, however, should not complicate matters when considering when, how and why to make that jump to an all-encompassing UCaaS infrastructure.

  Choose the UCaaS for YOUR Needs

  In most cases, your provider may be able to handle the dirty work for you. The key is to select the specific features and elements that your organization needs, and see what sorts of deployment options are available from the host.

  So … whether you’re starting out from scratch or migrating to a full-on – or even hybrid – UCaaS environment, most of this rollout involves the streamlining and automation of a la carte options.

  Consider Scalability …

  Communications and collaboration options abound, but are not all necessary in every business case. From a UCaaS perspective, it can be scaled as necessary, with features added or taken away in an a la carte fashion as your organization’s needs change. In other words, UCaaS allows you to establish custom communications infrastructure exactly as you need while also supporting future growth initiatives.

  For that reason, you should carefully evaluate the options and capabilities made available to you by the various providers, weighing them against your own unique needs.

  … While Embracing Flexibility

  One of UCaaS’ best traits is how optimal it is for remote and telework environments. This cloud-based system can be deployed across many different types of communication channels and devices. The flexibility it extends to YOUR deployment, however, should run so much deeper.

  In particular, focus on factors such as extending customer communications channels and streamlining CRM services with these options.

  Assessing Reliability

  With flexibility comes the need for reliability, a factor that can largely be out of many organizations’ control. Sadly, the stability of a UCaaS is largely tied to the state of your – and your remote workers’ – internet connection, as well as the relative strength of the service provider and UCaaS architecture that it provides.

  In most cases, the smart move is to choose a deployment that guarantees virtually unlimited uptime and availability, as well as geo-redundancy for better backup integrity. Many vendors claim accessibility to these. Reading customer and peer reviews, however, can often tell a different story.

  Focus on Real Time

  UCaaS users tend to be the most productive when they can communicate and collaborate consistently in real time, as if seated in the same room as one another.

  Weigh Cost Versus Benefit

  Like most extensive software deployments, the price tag will almost always play a factor. Choose a UCaaS system that gives you the most proverbial “bang for your buck,” weighing the critical features that you need against the feasible cost of their implementation.

  While it’s often good to take a chance, gaining access to the most sought-after features and elements for the lowest-available cost is almost always prudent.

  Have you considered the numerous features, capabilities and benefits that come as part of a comprehensive Sangoma UCaaS deployment? Visit www.Sangoma.com or call (877) 344-4861 for more information.

  The post How to Deploy or Migrate to UCaaS the Smart Way appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

• Jitsi Enhanced noise suppression in Jitsi Meet

  For a while now Jitsi Meet has been using the RNNoise library to calculate voice audio detection scores for audio input tracks and leveraging those to implement functionality such as “talk while muted” and “noisy mic detection”. However, RNnoise also has the capability to denoise audio.

  In this article we’ll briefly go through the steps taken to implement noise suppression using RNnoise in Jitsi Meet.

  What’s RNNoise anyway?

  RNNoise, as the authors describe it, “​​combines classic signal processing with deep learning, but it’s small and fast”, this makes it perfect for real time audio and does a good job at denoising.

  It’s written in C which allows us to (relatively) easily use it on the Web by compiling it as a WASM module, that combined with a couple of optimizations gets us noise suppression functionality with very little added latency.

  Working with Audio Worklets

  Previously Jitsi Meet processed audio using ScriptProcessorNode which handles audio samples on the main UI thread. Because the audio track wasn’t altered and we simply extracted some information from a copy of the track, performance issues weren’t apparent. With noise suppression the track gets modified, so latency is noticeable, not to mention that any interference on the main UI thread will impact the audio quality, so we switched to audio worklets.

  Audio worklets run in a separate thread from the main UI thread, so samples can be processed without interference. We won’t go into the specifics of implementing one as there are plenty of awesome resources on the web such as: this and this. Our worklet implementation can be found here.

  Webpack integration

  Even though using an audio worklet looks fairly straightforward there were a couple of bumps along the road.

  First off, and probably the most frustrating part was making them work with webpack’s dev server.

  Long story short, the dev server has some neat features such as hot module replacement and live reloading, these rely on some bootstrap code added to the output JavaScript bundle. The issue here is that audio worklet code runs under the AudioWorkletGlobalScope’s context which doesn’t know anything about constructs like window, this or self, however the aforementioned boilerplate code makes ample use of them and there doesn’t seem to be a way to tell it that the context in which it’s running is a worklet.

  We tried several approaches but the solution that worked for us was to ignore the dev server bootstrap code altogether for the worklet’s entry point, which can be configured in webpack config as follows:

  module: { rules: [ ...config.module.rules,
              { test: resolve(__dirname, 'node_modules/webpack-dev-server/client'),
                loader: 'null-loader' } ] }

  That took care of the dev server, however production webpack bundling also introduced boilerplate which made use of the “forbidden” worklet objects, but in this case it’s easily configurable by specifying the following output options:

  output: { ...config.output, globalObject: 'AudioWorkletGlobalScope' }

  At this point we had a working worklet (pun intended) that didn’t break our development environment.

  WASM in audio worklets.

  Next came adding in the RNnoise WASM module. Jitisi uses RNnoise compiled with emscripten (more details in the project: https://github.com/jitsi/rnnoise-wasm). With the default settings the WASM module will load and compile asynchronously, however because the worklet loads without waiting for the resolution of promises we need to make everything synchronous, so we inline the WASM file by passing in  -s SINGLE_FILE=1 to emscripten and we also tell it to synchronously compile it with -s WASM_ASYNC_COMPILATION=0. With that in place everything will be loaded and ready to go when audio samples start coming in.

  Efficient audio processing.

  Audio processing in worklets happens on the process() callback method in the AudioWorkletProcessor implementation at a fixed rate of 128 samples (this can’t be configured as with ScriptProcessorNodes), however RNnoise expects 480 samples for each call to it’s denoise method rnnoise_process_frame.

  To make this work we implemented a circular buffer that minimizes copy operations for optimal performance. It works by having both the buffered samples and the ones that have already been denoised on the same Float32Array with a roll over policy. The full implementation can be found here.

  To summarize, we keep track of how many audio samples we have buffered, once we have enough of them (480 to be precise) we send a view of that data to RNnoise where it gets denoised in-place (i.e. no additional copies are required). At this point the circular buffer has a denoised part and possibly some residue samples that didn’t fit in the initial 480, which will get processed in the next iteration. The process repeats until we reach the end of the circular buffer at which point we simply start from the beginning and overwrite “stale” samples; we consider them stale because at this point they have already been denoised and sent.

  The worklet code gets compiled as a separate .js bundle and lazy loaded as needed.

  Use it in JaaS / using the iframe API
  

  If you are a JaaS customer (or are using Jitsi Meet through the iframe API) we have added an API command to turn this on programmatically too! Check it out.

  Check it out!

  In Jitsi Meet this feature can be activated by simply clicking on the Noise Suppression button.

  

  Since in this case a sound file is probably worth more than 1000 words, here is an audio sample  demonstrating the denoising:

  Original audio:

  
  

  Denoised audio:

  ---

    Your personal meetings team.

  Author: Andrei Gavrilescu

  The post Enhanced noise suppression in Jitsi Meet appeared first on Jitsi.

July 21, 2022

• Digium 10 Things Organizations Should Look for in Cloud-based Mobile Access Control

  In an earlier blog, we wrote about how cloud-based Mobile Access Control is disrupting the market at break-neck speed. Nowadays, savvy small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have discovered that cloud-based systems can deliver benefits for workplace security just as they do for business phone systems and communication tools. In fact, data shows that nearly 40% of end users have already deployed wireless door locks as part of their access control solution.

  There’s no doubt that users today demand seamless digital experiences, and cloud-native mobile access controls certainly help organizations satisfy these needs. Gaining quick access to doors, elevators, and turnstiles with a simple tap or swipe can make a big difference to users. And since most employees already have a smartphone on them at all times, it makes perfect sense. What’s more, administrators can more easily manage frequent activities such as adding or revoking privileges for new and departing employees or providing guest access. It’s a win-win!

  Like any technology, however, not all solutions are made equal. To ensure organizations get the most bang for the buck, we’ve put together the top ten things they should look for when considering different solutions. Let’s explore below:

  Innovative, All-in-One Solutions

  You’re likely already familiar with access control systems. But while legacy systems are cumbersome, requiring lag time to collect and distribute access components, cloud-based systems are quick and efficient, particularly when dealing with multiple job sites. Cloud-native controls are all-inclusive, including wireless door locks, sensors, software and controllers, which lets organizations implement a complete smart office system in one fell swoop.

  Easy Onboarding & Control

  Frequent tasks like onboarding employees or removing access can be tedious and time-consuming for a system administrator. But, on the other hand, cloud-native access control lets organizations automate processes for greater speed and efficiency. Administrators can also save time and effort with a system that can be controlled from the palm of their hand – from adjusting configurations to reviewing events. If the unlikely scenario occurs where an employee shows up without their phone, administrators can even remotely unlock the doors.

  User-friendly Mobile Apps

  With today’s access control systems, there is no need to purchase technology like key fobs. Instead, employees access their office through a designated mobile app, which works well considering that 93% of the U.S. population currently uses smartphones. Most people these days are already accustomed to conducting business with their personal devices: such as paying bills, sending money or verifying their identity – making it an easy learning curve. Within an app, employees can view the status of each door and swipe a small button to open it. The system then automatically resets the door status and logs the activity through the cloud.

  Flexible Access

  Administrators should be able to effortlessly add users, assign different permissions and access levels, or move access privileges to a different job site. Following installation, they should also enjoy significant flexibility in terms of how their employees enter their job site, as the system can work seamlessly – whether a business chooses to deploy a mobile app or distribute more traditional access control technology like cards or fobs.

  Cost-effective

  Adopting a completely wireless access control system, also referred to as Access Control as a Service (ACaaS), is typically an affordable option for businesses concerned with security. Cost-savings come from the system being quite simple to install and configure – never exceeding four hours! Oftentimes, ACaaS can leverage a business’s existing infrastructure, like using already-installed locks, which eliminates the need for extra wiring and their associated costs.

  Complete Workplace Security

  There is no need to fret about cybersecurity when implementing cloud-native access control. Seek out ACaaS technologies that use encrypted cloud-based technology to authenticate employee devices and activity. The system’s integrity is further enhanced by existing smartphone safety technology like facial and fingerprint recognition. Modern access control solutions are “contactless,” which also contributes to overall workplace safety. These systems reduce the need to touch key cards, fobs and door readers – reducing the spread of contagious contaminants.

  Integrated or Standalone Installation

  You’ve probably already realized that ACaaS is flexible enough to work well for any operation, even with pre-existing security setups. Whether you or your customer wants a fully wireless ACaaS solution or would prefer to seamlessly build upon previously installed infrastructure, it’s all possible with modern access control.

  Remote Management

  Administering modern access control technology should be done independent of location and from any connected device. Talk about the perfect option for the hybrid workforce! Whether in-office, at home or on the road, admins should have complete visibility into their system and total control over who’s accessing the office – all from their mobile phone.

  User Directory Integration

  Having an access control system that integrates with a user directory is a must. It allows for the intuitive configuration of user permissions, the establishment of groups and enables automatic provisioning via emails sent to users’ mobile devices.

  Smart & Secure! Smart Office Solutions from Sangoma

  Sangoma SmartOffice brings the best of advanced access control to users’ smartphones. Nearly every business has security considerations; yet many lack advanced access control. Employees may have a key or fob to get into the building, but this falls far short from the efficiency, security and affordability of Sangoma SmartOffice.

  Managed entirely through the convenience of the smartphone, SmartOffice operates over Wi-Fi or cellular connections to physically open locks. And since it is integrated with the Sangoma unified communications (UC) system, administrators can access user directory information to easily manage users, groups, and permissions for office access and the PBX from any location.

  Sangoma Cloud service powers SmartOffice, ensuring that every user and every action is properly authenticated within the system. Seeing as the solution also uses employee smartphones, SmartOffice integrates common mobile security features like password protection. These security protections work together seamlessly to guarantee only certified persons have access to the premises.

  Finally, as businesses grow, so too will SmartOffice. There is no limit to the number of wireless doors or mobile users that can be included. No matter how a company develops over time, SmartOffice can remain the foundation of its operational security.

  Want to explore improving your company’s security with SmartOffice? Contact us today!

  The post 10 Things Organizations Should Look for in Cloud-based Mobile Access Control appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

July 19, 2022

• Digium Why Collaboration Tools Are Important

  In my last blog, I discussed “digital channels”, one of which are collaboration tools. Let’s take a closer look the importance of collaboration tools. Just take a look at this graphic.

  We’ve all been using collaboration and messaging tools as we’ve been working remotely. Or maybe we’ve been using them anyway since we work in a distributed workforce. For sure, I can say productivity is enhanced by messaging someone, and sharing documents.

  Frost and Sullivan feels the same way. As the whitepaper says: “Communications provide the connective tissue among diversified workforces—across departments, project teams, job roles, work locations and worker generations. Enabling a collaborative work environment can considerably strengthen employee bonds, enhance morale, improve the customer journey and drive workflow efficiencies.

  And this is why Sangoma has invested quite a bit in our own collaboration platform, TeamHub, which is part of our UC platforms. While an essential part of UC is certainly the smartphone and laptop business phone number mobility aspect, it is becoming increasingly apparent that collaboration and video meetings also now need to be part of the essential to UC offering. And if you are getting these from different vendors, you don’t truly have an integrated UC platform.

  To download the full Frost and Sullivan whitepaper to learn more about this, please go here.

  The post Why Collaboration Tools Are Important appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

July 14, 2022

• Digium Envision it. Enable it. Control it. Wholesale SIP Trunking Lets Businesses Work Their Way

  There’s no doubt video conferencing and remote working have garnered a lot of attention over the last few years. Despite this, SIP-based voice services are still critical for businesses that are responsible for high volumes of call traffic. And because the SIP protocol enables internet-based telephony services to integrate with data networks and cloud-based services, businesses can build a more robust unified communications system.

  Wholesale SIP trunks are scalable and configurable on-demand connections for MSPs and ITSPs that wish to provide or sell hassle-free, high-value services to employees and customers. What’s more, those who manage communications for call centers and enterprise businesses can work directly with a SIP Trunk Provider or an MSP/ITSP to keep their organizations running seamlessly as they change or grow.

  Here are just a few of the benefits of Wholesale SIP Trunking and what you should look for when selecting a vendor:

  Flexibility is Key! Easily Curate Your Offerings

  If you’re responsible for procuring carrier services, wholesale SIP trunking provides freedom of choice so you can curate your offering, unlike retail SIP trunking with bundled offerings. SIP-related services can be selected à la carte and packaged together to deliver SIP services across geographically dispersed locations.

  Look for solutions with a single point of entry with wide coverage. We can’t stress this enough! Plus, avoid providers that require large minimum spending, carrier negotiations, or contracts to maintain. Flexibility enables you to deliver or achieve a high-performance unified communications network that creates value for businesses.

  Whether you’re an enterprise customer, ITSP or MSP, seek out a complete set of SIP trunking features to meet your requirements.

  Instantly Take Control of Day-to-Day Functions

  At the end of the day, flexibility and ease of use are worth their weight in gold. When selecting a vendor for wholesale SIP trunking services, ensure their solutions allow you to instantly take control of provisioning SIP trunks; adding, deleting or modifying services; porting local numbers; and managing billing and account changes.
  What’s more, look for vendors offering back-office access via a self-service portal or API so you can easily respond to shifting business requirements, adapt to new market conditions, and capitalize on new opportunities.

  Seek Out Turnkey Solutions

  Large enterprises use wholesale SIP trunking for their own purposes unlike ITSPs and MSPs that need to create offerings to sell to retail customers. MSPs should choose a solution they can trust to be ready on time and function with minimal disruption and risk. Having completed hundreds of deployments, Sangoma turnkey solutions and processes have proven to be reliable.

  Turnkey solutions will include all the service offerings the provider chooses, as well as hosted billing, wrapped together – fully integrated, complete, and ready to operate.

  The key benefits of turnkey solutions are:

  • Services that are easy to choose, configure and maintain
  • Reduced costs
  • A utility model lets you pay for what you use
  • Business continuity and resiliency
  • Fraud preventions
  • Texting
  • 911 Emergency services
  • Gets you up and going fast
  • Consolidated infrastructure
  • Hosted billing to handle number porting, billing, tax calculations, reporting and compliance (for service providers)
  • Self-serve portal (branded for the MSP)

  Achieve Your Vision

  Our wholesale SIP trunking team is focused on client satisfaction and helping you achieve your business goals. We respond quickly, give you professional advice, and ensure that every interaction with us is a great experience.

  Are you in an urgent situation? We can help you get up and running in under a day. Here’s a case study of a one-day turnup.

  If you have questions or need additional information, we have an extensive base of resources that are accessible to you, including subjects such as the Modern Approach to SIP trunking or why we’re The Leading Wholesale SIP Trunking Provider.

  Get in touch with a specialist or request a free demo!

  
  https://carrierservices.sangoma.com/request-a-quote/

  Useful information specific to enterprise customers or service providers:

  
  Break the Boundaries of Typical SIP Trunking Service Providers
  7 Reasons Why Your Enterprise Needs Wholesale SIP Trunking
  9 Reasons Why You Need to Sell Wholesale SIP Trunking

  The post Envision it. Enable it. Control it. Wholesale SIP Trunking Lets Businesses Work Their Way appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

July 05, 2022

• Digium Your UC / UCaaS Platform Needs “Digital Channels”

  Frost and Sullivan has written a white paper called “Modern Cloud Communications Empower the Hybrid Workforce”. It’s an interesting paper all around. To download the full paper, please go here. In the meantime, I picked 4 interesting parts of the paper to write a little bit about and I’ll do that in the next four blogs I write.

  So, let’s get to the first topic. One concept Frost and Sullivan writes about is the impact of the pandemic on IT and what IT must do in terms of supporting employees going forward. Obviously (or maybe not so obviously depending on your point of view), a hybrid work remote / work at the office is here to stay.

  How do you function as the best “team” in this kind of environment? By now, we’ve all gotten used to video meetings and collaboration messaging tools. And continuing those are important for sure. But Frost and Sullivan argues that there needs to be “more”, and integrating digital channels to deal with not only remote employees, but customers (who now have also been exposed to messaging tools) wanting to connect with you digitally is critical for success.

  The paper goes into this in much more detail, but the takeaway I have from reading this is collaboration tools, and other types of “digital channels” that work both with employees and reach out to customers will be critical. Like I said above, to download the full paper, please go here.

  The post Your UC / UCaaS Platform Needs “Digital Channels” appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

June 21, 2022

• Digium The Benefits of a Managed Security / Unified Threat Management Service

  Before discussing the benefits of a managed security service for your business, let’s discuss what threats we are talking about. As an IT manager for your business, you are likely worried about attacks on your corporate network in the form of viruses, spam, phishing attempts, malicious content, unapproved website access where “bad” files can be accessed, etc.

  So how to do something about this and manage this better? Maybe you can tackle different parts of this by adding virus checkers or spam filtering or defending against network attacks, for example. But that tactic, while addressing specific areas, that tactic would leave some vulnerabilities, and you’d have to manage each area yourself anyway. It might become complicated, and you wouldn’t have everything covered. You’d cover what you thought was necessary or what you had the budget to cover.

  So how can you best tackle addressing all kinds of threats to your network economically? That’s how Unified Threat Management came to be – a single device to be put in place that inspects the incoming data – looks at packet headers, looks for known virus/malware, etc., and identifies these threats to an administrator.

  And that’s great. But what if you are a larger company with many locations. It starts to get even more complicated. The next step would be to get help – have a managed service help you do this, or maybe even manage this for you. While a unified threat management device might be put at your location, or if you have multiple locations placed at each location, you could have someone manage this for you. Or you could decide you don’t want any devices on-prem, and all of this can also be done via the cloud.

  Either way, someone could help you manage this. An expert team of people would work with you to set up profiles, help you figure out whether an all-cloud solution could work for you, and potentially fully manage your threat management system or co-manage it with your team. And Sangoma, through our acquisition of NetFortris, provides managed security to companies of all sizes.

  The post The Benefits of a Managed Security / Unified Threat Management Service appeared first on Sangoma.

June 17, 2022

• Jitsi A stepping stone towards end-to-end encryption on mobile

  It has been a while since our first release of end-to-end encryption for the web app and ever since we have tried to enhance and improve it. One of these enhancements was the introduction of The Double Ratchet Algorithm through libolm and automatic key negotiation.

  

  Each participant has a randomly generated key which is used to encrypt the media. The key is distributed with other participants (so they can decrypt the media) via an E2EE channel which is established with Olm (using XMPP MUC private messages). You can read more about it in our whitepaper.

  Even though the actual encryption/decryption API is different on web and mobile (“Insertable Streams” vs native Encryptors/Decryptors), the key exchange mechanism seemed like something that could be kept consistent between the two (even three, considering Android and iOS different) platforms. This took us to the next challenge: how can we reuse the JS web implementation of the double ratchet algorithm without any major changes, while also keeping in mind the performance implications it might have on the mobile apps.

  Since our mobile apps are based on React Native the obvious solution was to wrap libolm so we could use the same code as on the web, but not all wrappers are created equal.

  The “classical” approach – using Native Modules

  

  Source: talk by Lorenzo S.

   

  There are three major drawbacks while using this approach:

  1. Performance – the communication through the bridge can be quite slow and it also requires some very specific data as parameters that would be converted to JSON (serializable, WritableArrays, etc).
  2. Lots of glue code is required, both on Android and iOS. Also, every future change will have to be implemented both in Java and ObjC.
  3. Since there are two different threads that run the native and the JS code, the bridge methods are asynchronous, this means that offering synchronous APIs is not possible (without using sync methods, but that is discouraged as it kills performance).

  The first issue might not have had such a major impact on this specific use case, since the key exchange happens not too frequently. The fact that every change has to be implemented twice is very likely to be a problem in the future, while the last issue, the asynchronicity of the bridge methods is definitely a showstopper since it would break the consistency of the web and mobile interfaces.

  JavaScript Interface – JSI

  JavaScript Interface (JSI) is a new layer between the JavaScript engine and the C++ layer that provides means of communication between the JS code and the native C++ code in React Native. Since it doesn’t require serialization is a lot faster than the traditional bridge approach, in addition to allowing us to provide a performant sync API.

  

  Source: talk by Lorenzo S.

   

  As we’ll show in the what follows, it also solves the other two problems the classical approach poses, the implementation has to be done/modified only once (most of the time, since some glue code is still required) and, most importantly, the native methods called thought JSI can be synchronous.

  Android

  The first challenge was to find the proper way of initializing the C++ libraries and exposing the so-called “host functions” (these are C++ functions callable from the JS code).

  For this we took advantage of the mechanism for native modules and the way they are initialized by the RN framework, thus creating OlmModule.java and OlmPackage.java. OlmPackage is just a simple ReactPackage that has as native modules OlmModule.

  OlmModule.java

  Within the lifecycle of this ReactContextBaseJavaModule, the actual magic happens: loading the C++ libraries and exposing the necessary behavior to the JS side.

  The C++ library is loaded inside a static initializer.

  Exposing the host functions to the JS is done in the initialize method of the OlmModule, through the JNI native function nativeInstall. This method is implemented in cpp-adapter.cpp, where, besides some JNI-specific code, the jsiadapter::install is called, where the host functions will actually be exposed. It is here where the Android-specific glue code ends, the jsiadapter being platform agnostic, used, as we’ll show, by the iOS as well.

  iOS

  We also used the iOS native bridge mechanism for initialization, but here the implementation is even easier: Olm.h and Olm.mm contain the module, where, in the setBridge method, jsiadapter::install is called, exposing the host functions.

  Exposing the host functions

  As stated above, both Android and iOS specific code ends up calling the platform agnostic jsiadapter::install method. It is here where the C++ methods are exposed, i.e. JS objects are set on jsiRuntime.global with methods that call directly into the C++ code.

   Object module = Object(jsiRuntime);
   //…add methods to module
   jsiRuntime.global().setProperty(jsiRuntime, "_olm", move(module));

  This object will be accessible on the JS side via a global variable. For our use case only one object is enough, but it is here where as many objects as necessary can be exposed, without having to change any of the platform specific code.

  Adding methods to the exposed object

    auto createOlmAccount = Function::createFromHostFunction(
        jsiRuntime, PropNameID::forAscii(jsiRuntime, "createOlmAccount"), 0,
        [](Runtime &runtime, const Value &thisValue, const Value *arguments,
           size_t count) -> Value {
          auto acountHostObject = AccountHostObject(&runtime);
          auto accountJsiObject = acountHostObject.asJsiObject();
  
          return move(accountJsiObject);
        });
  
    module.setProperty(jsiRuntime, "createOlmAccount", move(createOlmAccount));
  
    auto createOlmSession = Function::createFromHostFunction(
        jsiRuntime, PropNameID::forAscii(jsiRuntime, "createOlmSession"), 0,
        [](Runtime &runtime, const Value &thisValue, const Value *arguments,
           size_t count) -> Value {
          auto sessionHostObject = SessionHostObject(&runtime);
          auto sessionJsiObject = sessionHostObject.asJsiObject();
  
          return move(sessionJsiObject);
        });
  
    module.setProperty(jsiRuntime, "createOlmSession", move(createOlmSession));

  Two methods are exposed: createOlmAccount and createOlmSession, both of them returning HostObjects.

  HostObject

  It’s a C++ object that can be registered with the JS runtime, i.e. exposed methods can be called from the JS  code, but it can also be passed back and forth between the JS and C++ while still remaining a fully operational C++ object.

  For our use case, the AccountHostObject and SessionHostObject are wrappers over the native olm specific objects OlmAccount and OlmSession and they contain methods that can be called for the JS code (identity_keys, generate_one_time_keys, one_time_keys etc. for AccountHostObject, create_outbound, create_inbound, encrypt, decrypt etc. for SessionHostObject).

  The way this methods are exposed from C++ to JS is again through host functions, in the HostObject::get method:

   

  Value SessionHostObject::get(Runtime &rt, const PropNameID &sym) {
   if (methodName == "create_outbound") {
      return Function::createFromHostFunction(
          *runtime, PropNameID::forAscii(*runtime, "create_outbound"), 0,
          [](Runtime &runtime, const Value &thisValue, const Value *arguments,
             size_t count) -> Value {
            auto sessionJsiObject = thisValue.asObject(runtime);
            auto sessionHostObject =
                sessionJsiObject.getHostObject<SessionHostObject>(runtime).get();
            auto accountJsiObject = arguments[0].asObject(runtime);
            auto accountHostObject =
                accountJsiObject.getHostObject<AccountHostObject>(runtime).get();
            auto identityKey = arguments[1].asString(runtime).utf8(runtime);
            auto oneTimeKey = arguments[2].asString(runtime).utf8(runtime);
  
            sessionHostObject->createOutbound(accountHostObject->getOlmAccount(),
                                              identityKey, oneTimeKey);
            return Value(true);
          });
    }
  }

  Example:

  const olmAccount = global._olm.createOlmAccount();
  const olmSession = global._olm.createOlmSession();
  olmSession.create_outbound(olmAccount, “someIdentityKey”, “someOneTimeKey”);

  As shown, global._olm.createOlmAccount() and global._olm.createOlmSession() will return a HostObject. When calling any method on it (create_outbound in the example) the HostObject::get method will be called with the proper parameters, i.e. the Runtime and the method name, so we use this method name to expose the desired behavior.

  Note that the calling HostObject can be fully reconstructed on the C++ side,

    auto sessionJsiObject = thisValue.asObject(runtime);
    auto sessionHostObject =
      sessionJsiObject.getHostObject<SessionHostObject>(runtime).get();

  Parameters can also be passed from JS to C++, including other HostObjects:

    auto accountJsiObject = arguments[0].asObject(runtime);
    auto accountHostObject =
      accountJsiObject.getHostObject<AccountHostObject>(runtime).get();
    auto identityKey = arguments[1].asString(runtime).utf8(runtime);
    auto oneTimeKey = arguments[2].asString(runtime).utf8(runtime);

  Fully consistent interface

  As mentioned from the very beginning, keeping the web and mobile interfaces consistent was the main goal, so, after implementing all the necessary JSI functionality, it was all wrapped into some nice TypeScript classes: Account and Session.

  Their usages are shown in the example integration that comes with the SDK:

    const olmAccount = new Olm.Account();
    olmAccount.create();
    const identityKeys = olmAccount.identity_keys();
  
    const olmSession = new Olm.Session();
    olmSession.create();
    olmSession.create_outbound(olmAccount, idKey, otKey);

  This is the exact same API that the olm JS package exposes. Mission accomplished!

  Next steps

  Implementing this RN library that exposes the libolm functionality is just a piece of the bigger mobile E2EE puzzle. It will be integrated in the Jitsi Meet app and used for the implementation of the E2EE communication channel between each participant, i.e. for exchanging the keys.

  Key generation

  Since the WebCrypto API is not available in RN, we have to expose a subset of the methods for key generation (importing, deriving, generating random bytes) and again we plan to do it through JSI.

  Turn out the olm library contains these methods, so it is possible we’ll expose them in the react-native-olm library.

  Performing the actual media encryption/decryption

  WebRTC provides a simple API that allows us to obtain the same result that we do on the web with “insertable streams”: FrameEncryptorInterface and FrameDecryptorInterface, in the C++ layer.

  The encryptor is to be set on an RTPSender, while the decryptor on the RTPReceiver and they will basically act just as a proxy for each frame that is sent/received, making it possible to add logic for constructing/deconstructing the SFrame out of each frame that is sent/received.

  The fact that this code will run on the native side is of major importance, since the performance issues caused by the communication between the JS and native would be major in this case, since those operations would have to be done many times a second, for each frame, probably making the audio and video streams incoherent.

  The only operations that will be done from the JS side is the enabling of the E2EE, as well as the key exchange steps. We will have to expose the methods for setting the keys for the AES-GCM from the JS to the native FrameEncryptors and FrameDecryptors, most likely using the JSI path.

  Oh hey there vodozemac!

  While we were busy working on this the good folks over at Matrix have created* vodozemac, a new libolm implementation in Rust and it highly recommends migrating to this SDK going forward. At the moment it only provides bindings for JS and Python, while the C++ is still in progress. We’ll keep a close eye here and update to vodozemac after we have all the pieces in place.

  Get it!

  You can start tinkering with it today, here is the GitHub repo.

  ---

    Your personal meetings team.

  Author: Titus Moldovan

   

  The post A stepping stone towards end-to-end encryption on mobile appeared first on Jitsi.

June 13, 2022

• Jitsi Bridge cascading with geo-location is back

  Back in 2018 we first released cascaded bridges based on geo-location on meet.jit.si. Then in 2020 as we struggled to scale the service to handle the increased traffic that came with the pandemic we had to disable it because of the load on the infrastructure. And now it’s finally back stronger and better!

  In this post we’ll go over how and why we use cascaded bridges with geo-location, how the new system is architectured, and the experiment we ran to evaluate the new system.

   

  Why use cascaded bridges?

  We want to use geolocation for the usual reason – connect users to a nearby server to optimize the connection quality. But with multiple users in a conference the problem becomes more complex. When we have users in different geographic locations, using a single media server is not sufficient. Suppose there are some participants in the US and some in Australia. If you place the server in Australia, the US participants will have a high latency to the server and an even higher latency between each other – their media is routed from the US to AU and back to the US! Conversely if you place the server in the US the Australian participants have the same issues.

  We can solve this by using multiple servers and having participants connect to a nearby server. The servers forward the media to each other. This way the “next hop” latency is lower, and so is the end-to-end latency for nearby endpoints.

  

   

  Architecture

  There are many new things in our backend architecture!

   

  1. JVB pools

  We used to have shards consisting of a “signaling node” and a group of JVB (jitsi-videobridge, our media server) instances. In order to make bridges in different regions available for selection, we just interconnected all bridges in all shards. And this is exactly what broke when we had to scale to 50+ shards and 2000+ JVBs.

  In the new architecture JVBs are no longer associated with a specific shard. A “shard” now consists of just a signaling node (running jicofo, prosody and nginx). We have a few of these per region, depending on the amount of traffic we expect. Independently, we have pools of JVBs, one pool in each region, which automatically scale up and down to match the current requirements.

  In addition we have “remote” pools. These are pools of JVBs which make themselves available to shards in remote regions (but not in their local region). For example, we have a remote pool in us-east which connects to signaling nodes in all other regions. This separation of “local” vs “remote” pools is what allows us to scale the infrastructure without the number of cross-connections growing too much

  As an example, in the us-east region (Ashburn) we have 6 signaling nodes (“shards”) and a pool of JVBs available to them. This is the us-east “local” pool. We also have multiple “remote” JVB pools connected to the shards — one from each of the other regions (us-west, eu-central, eu-west, ap-south, ap-northeast, ap-southeast). Finally, we have a us-east “remote” JVB pool connected to shards in all other regions.

   

  

   

   

  2. Colibri2 and secure octo

  In late 2021 we completely replaced the COLIBRI protocol used for communication between jicofo and JVBs. This allowed us to address technical debt, optimize traffic in large conferences, and use the new secure-octo protocol.

  In contrast to the old octo protocol, secure-octo connects individual pairs of JVBs. They run ICE/DTLS to establish a connection, and then use standard SRTP to exchange audio/video. This means that a secure VPN between JVBs is no longer required! Also, we can filter out streams which are not needed by the receiving JVB.

   

  3. Region-group selection

  In the experiments we ran in 2018 we found that introducing geo-located JVBs had a small but measurable negative effect on round-trip-time between endpoints in certain cases. Notably endpoints in Europe had, on average, a higher RTT when cascading was enabled. We suspected that this was because we use two datacenters in Europe (in Frankfurt and London) and many endpoints have a similar latency to both. In such cases, introducing the extra JVB-to-JVB connection has almost no impact on the next-hop RTT, but increases the end-to-end RTT between endpoints.

  To solve this problem we introduced “region groups”, that is we grouped the Frankfurt and London regions, as well as the Ashburn (us-east) and Phoenix (us-west) regions. With region groups, we relax the selection criteria to avoid using multiple JVBs in the same region group.

  As an example, when a participant in London joins a conference, we will select a JVB in London for them. Then, if a participant in Berlin (closer to Frankfurt than London) joins we will use that same JVB in London instead of selecting a new one in Frankfurt.

  Experiment and results

  The new meet-jit-si infrastructure allowed us to easily perform an experiment comparing the case of no bridge cascading (control), cascading with no region groups defined (noRG) and cascading with region groups (grouping us-east and us-west, as well as eu-central and eu-west). We had 3 experimental “releases” live for a period of about two weeks, with conferences randomly distributed between them and the main release. We measured two things: end-to-end round trip time between endpoints and round-trip-time between an endpoint and the JVB it’s connected to (next-hop RTT).

  By and large the results show that cascading works as designed and the introduction of region groups had the desired effect.

  With cascading we see significantly lower end-to-end RTT in most cases. When the two endpoint are in the same region:

  

  When the two endpoints are in different regions we see a slight increase when region groups are used, but the overall effect of cascading is positive.

  

   

  The next-hop RTT is also significantly reduced with cascading. Overall we see a 29% decrease (from 223 to 158 milliseconds) when the endpoint and server are (were) on different continents.

  

   

  You can see the full results here.

  The post Bridge cascading with geo-location is back appeared first on Jitsi.

June 07, 2022

• Digium Is telephone Hot Desking really needed anymore?

  Before we get to that question, and why I even asked it in the first place, we need to define what hot desking is. Hot desking is going to the office and sitting where you want. Maybe your company doesn’t have assigned offices or cubes, and you go in. And remember, people, if we’re going to live in this hybrid work from home / go into the office 2 or 3 times a week, companies will start doing this. Count on it. And if you don’t like it, go in every day to claim your space. The company can take a smaller footprint at the physical location since everyone isn’t there every day. So you sit wherever. But you need your office phone number, so when you get calls on the phone at the physical location you sit at, they are phone calls for you.

  In terms of communications, which I write about, this means taking your phone number to wherever you go sit. And if there is a physical phone at the place you sit, that means you need to log in somehow and tell the phone system that you are at that place and that the physical phone at that place should be using my company phone extension.

  Putting this feature into a Unified Communication system is not the simplest thing. We have multiple Unified Communication systems, and some support hot desking, and some do not. If an RFP comes in with hot desking requirements, we can respond positively with one of our systems.

  But is hot desking of a physical phone an obsolete concept with Unified Communications? Does it even need to be in RFPs anymore? Because with UC, you can make and take phone calls with your work extension from your computer, or your smartphone, via a UC client. I can do that no matter where I sit in the office, from any hotel room, from my patio at my house, or from the Giants game (which I have done). So there is built-in hot desking with modern Unified Communications systems. But if you still need it for physical phones, we can do that too.

  The post Is telephone Hot Desking really needed anymore? appeared first on Sangoma.

May 24, 2022

• Digium The Benefits of a Managed SD-WAN Service

  Before we talk about the benefits of a managed SD-WAN service, let’s talk about what SD-WAN is. In my last blog, we discussed a Managed Internet Service, whereby a company like Sangoma could manage the internet connections to all of the buildings in an enterprise. And these internet connections could take various forms such as cable, DSL, fiber, wireless, etc.

  SD-WAN leverages these different transport mechanisms so that enterprises can connect securely to the cloud applications that the enterprise is running. Sure, a VPN could do that but a VPN manages the connection, and would not transfer the IP address to another of the transport mechanisms in case of a failure. As such, SD-WAN benefits over VPN, or MPLS, or some other dedicated connections mechanism is utilization of different types of transport mechanisms, centralized management for the enterprise, higher bandwidth given aggregations of links, and typically reduction in cost of your networks.

  Enterprises may choose to run their own SD-WAN services, or may choose to go to a managed services provider to offer managed SD-WAN to the enterprise. Why would an enterprise do that? What are the advantages to such an arrangement?

  Well, first, there is an expert team of people to fully manage your SD-WAN, or co-manage it with your team. And Sangoma, through our acquisition of NetFortris, provides Managed SD-WAN Services to companies of all sizes. We are not just a reseller of an SD-WAN solution as we have our own international SD-WAN backbone with 40+ PoPs and growing. And our cloud UC platform is also on that network, for a seamless experience. We also host and manage all headend and cloud orchestration components for your deployment.

  The post The Benefits of a Managed SD-WAN Service appeared first on Sangoma.

May 12, 2022

• Digium RAY BAUM’s Act & 911 Dynamic Location Routing

  On January 6th 2021, the deadline for RAY BAUMs act compliance for fixed Interconnected VoIP, Multi-line Telephone systems, and Telephone Relay Services had hit. Requiring “dispatchable location” to be shared when making a 911 call from fixed services, or services with a physical address associated with it (e.g. wired phones).

  Now, a year later, on January 6th 2022, we reached the deadline for RAY BAUM’s for non-fixed services. Non-fixed just refers to service that is not tied to a physical location (also known as “nomadic” or “mobile” devices) that can be readily moved by the user to multiple locations and/or be used while in motion. This would include things like softphones on laptops/mobile phones.

  What is a “dispatchable location”?

  The goal of the act is to provide specific location information for the emergency services personnel to allow them to quickly locate the caller. There are ultimately 2 components to a dispatchable location:

  1. Civic Address or coordinate-based location information that can be used to determine the civic address
  2. In-building location such as Suite, Apartment, Room #, or Floor

  Practically, the information sent should be the most specific information that you can give as to the caller’s whereabouts. In a building with marked rooms, that would mean a room number, but if a large building has unmarked rooms, the floor should be sent at the very least.

  How can I be compliant?

  While the deadline for fixed devices has already past a year ago, we’ll discuss those as well. There are a few different options in terms of compliance for fixed devices. Since fixed devices won’t change their location, it’s much easier to handle compliance on them (hence, the faster deadline for them).

  Using traditional E-911 service, a fixed device can have a specific ANI assigned to it that has that phone’s specific location registered to it. For example, one device would have 412-555-1111 registered as 123 Sesame Street Suite 101 and another device would use 412-555-2222 registered to 123 Sesame Street Suite 202. This is the simplest way of handling compliance under the limitations of traditional E-911 service.

  However, traditional E-911 service will not work for non-fixed devices since it’s not typically possible to update registered addresses in real time. For non-fixed devices, you will need to utilize a Dynamic Location Service. Fixed devices can certainly benefit from a Dynamic Location service as well, as it would allow you to manage a single 911 phone number instead of assigning a different number to each possible fixed line.

  What is Dynamic Location Routing?

  Dynamic Location Routing utilizes technology like PIDF-LO (Presence Information Data Format – Location Object) to allow for location data to be created and sent at the time a call is made. This means instead of assigning a location to a phone number before the call is made, the device or PBX can send its location at the time of the call either based off input from the user/administrator or using GPS location information.

  For non-fixed devices, this could be used to send the devices GPS coordinates at the time the call is made, or it allows the user to keep updated address information as they move the device around (e.g. between work and home). This could even theoretically be used to update the devices’ location within a building.

  Dynamic Location Routing isn’t just useful for non-fixed devices; a PBX can use dynamic location routing to fill in the in-building location of the specific device making the call. In a multi-line telephone system utilizing traditional E-911 service, you need to manage different numbers for each different location (room/suite/floor/etc.) that you have. However, with dynamic location routing, a PBX could instead use the same number for any device making a 911 call and simply append the sublocation data based off the extension making the call.

  Looking back to our previous example, instead of needing 412-555-1111, 412-555-2222, and 412-555-3333 for suites 101, 202, and 303 respectively, the administrator can simply use 412-555-1111 and have the PBX use PIDF-LO to send the Suite # based off the phone that is making the call.

  Currently, there are not many PBXs that inherently support PIDF-LO, but the teams at Sangoma are working on implementing the feature in most Sangoma PBXs. This is likely to become a staple feature of VoIP devices moving forward and will allow for better management and compliance for your multi-line telephone systems.

  Have more questions?

  VI Communication Services currently offers dynamic location routing with our E-911 service. If you currently have our E-911 service, documentation for the feature can be found in our knowledge base. If you don’t use our E-911 service or have additional questions about it, please contact us.

  The post RAY BAUM’s Act & 911 Dynamic Location Routing appeared first on Sangoma.

May 10, 2022

• Digium The Benefits of a Managed Internet Service

  We all need the Internet. Many of us can’t do our jobs without that access. And for long-time readers of this blog who have read many things from me about UC and UCaaS, those systems can not operate without access to the Internet.

  And for larger companies, with either a few or even a slew of different offices, there is a hodge-podge of Internet access. Someone at the site figures out how to buy it, and they buy it. It may not be the best price, but maybe it was easy to do. And the bills are paid somehow. And the access works, or it doesn’t. And whoever bought it has to deal with the ‘issues’ of slow Internet or the Internet being down. And at this point, it’s impacting business. And that is not good. So, what to do?

  Many companies now turn to Managed Internet Providers to obtain the Internet that best suits each location and proactively manage the uptime to ensure your business has connectivity.

  What types of access are out there? Fiber, Cable, T1, 4G, and Ethernet over copper are some of them. And each of them may make the most sense for different physical locations. Maybe you don’t need fiber at each location. You don’t need one size fits all for your entire company, and you need what’s suitable for your company.

  If this sounds interesting, let’s go through some of the benefits of using a Managed Internet Provider. As indicated above, the provider obtains the best type of access for each site, gets the best price, and does QoS configuration. So the provider would set up your network for your whole company.

  The provider would also perform up/down circuit monitoring and alerting and be there for support so that the provider would manage and maintain it. The provider could also provide network backup, so you wouldn’t have to worry about that either.

  And the company would get one single unified bill from the Managed Internet Provider, so you wouldn’t have to sort through all kinds of invoices that you don’t understand.

  Through our acquisition of NetFortris, Sangoma provides Managed Internet Services to companies of all sizes. In short, we build a customized solution to provide the best connectivity, security, and reliability options for your organization.

  The post The Benefits of a Managed Internet Service appeared first on Sangoma.

• Jitsi Introducing Car Mode!

  Virtual / hybrid meetings are part of our everyday life now. Some meet in their home office, kitchen, slouching in the couch, while taking a walk, or even while driving! We won’t encourage you to have meetings while driving since any distraction can be fatal, but we know many are doing it and decided to implement a distraction free mode for those who choose to have a meeting while in the car.

  On the latest Jitsi Meet beta version (22.2.0) you will notice a new button in the drawer: Car Mode. This will open the car mode screen, a brand new in-meeting experience which has the basic meeting controls like ending the meeting, selecting sound device and microphone muting, but with enhanced sizes so you can easily use them without much distraction.

  

  Car mode also saves you bandwidth as it disables all incoming/outgoing video streams, for a distraction free meeting experience.  Another useful feature in car mode is push-to-talk: simply long-press the un-mute button to keep the microphone active and release it to automatically mute again. Push to talk is especially useful for passengers in the car, or when joining a conference while having a stroll. That’s right, you don’t need to be in a car to use this feature!

  

  CarPlay

  Those of you with Apple CarPlay enabled vehicles may have noticed the car did not show up in the sound devices selection and this created some confusion. This has been fixed and you’ll now see an entry in the audio device selection drawer:

  

  More to come

  This first iteration of the feature only opens the car mode when selected from the toolbar button. We are planning to add automatic detection for the user being in a car and automatically offering to switch to this mode in that case.

  Android users: worry not, better Android Auto integration will come!

  ---

  Your personal meetings team.

  Author: Horatiu Muresan

   

  The post Introducing Car Mode! appeared first on Jitsi.

May 03, 2022

• Digium What is MSP and UCaaS all about?

  As many of you know by now, Sangoma has purchased NetFortris, and now we have added some new “Managed Services” offerings. What are managed services? It’s no surprise that IT is getting more and more complex. As an IT manager, you have cybersecurity concerns; there are many ways to get connectivity. Your company wants to run all kinds of cloud applications, and now it’s even hard to get the required hardware you need.

  As an SMB or even medium-sized business, it’s hard to keep up. Add onto that you may have outdated/old systems that you constantly have to keep adding “patches” on. And add onto that the ability (or inability) to get enough IT staff. It’s just too much, and as an IT manager, you cannot support the business. As such, another model was born. This model is outsourced IT, offering managed services in an MRR or ARR pricing model.

  And there are all kinds of managed services being offered. You might already have UCaaS, which is a managed service. And you get the benefits of not having to worry about upgrades and the service provider taking care of everything for you. So why not add more? As I said, there are all kinds – from device management and tracking to IoT analysis, security, storage, and disaster recovery.

  And so we get back to the NetFortris acquisition. With this, Sangoma adds the following managed services, in addition to the ones we already have:

  Managed Internet includes mixing and matching connectivity types by location and provides network monitoring, analytics, up/down circuit monitoring, and wireless backup.

  Managed SD-WAN includes:

  • Being able to handle multiple internet connections from multiple providers so that if one connection fails, the customer does not lose connectivity, resulting in uninterrupted uptime
  • The ‘aggregation’ of bandwidth from those two different internet providers makes the customer kind of ‘see’ those as one pipe
  • Traffic shaping whereby certain types of traffic can be given priority or forced down in priority

  Managed Security, or unified threat management, for all traffic into the business network. This service helps protect customers against attacks and losses from spam, viruses, ransomware, botnets, etc.

  In the following few blogs, I will go into more detail on each new managed service.

  The post What is MSP and UCaaS all about? appeared first on Sangoma.

• Jitsi Jitsi as a Service: a two-way street, by Tsahi Levent-Levi

  

  Tsahi Levent-Levi, also known as BlogGeek.me, has established himself as, arguably the most prominent WebRTC analyst. He has been commenting on the industry for the past decade, while also training WebRTC professionals, co-running the testRTC business and that’s without even getting into his prior real-time comms experience with Amdocs and Radvision. We asked Tsahi if he could share his thoughts on RTC CPaaS and specifically how Jitsi as a Service fits into the space. The following is what he wrote. Enjoy!

  ---

  In the past two years I’ve seen many service providers and enterprises run their own video meetings based on Jitsi. It is one of the easiest ways to get video meetings implemented today – with all the bells and whistles.

  After 8×8’s acquisition of Jitsi, the Jitsi team has been hard at work on 4 different tracks:

  1. Continuing to develop Jitsi as an open source community project
  2. Integrating Jitsi into the 8×8 meetings app
  3. Growing and improving their meet.jit.si Jitsi Meet service
  4. Introducing JaaS – Jitsi as a Service – a managed CPaaS offering of Jitsi

  The introduction of JaaS is a very interesting angle to Jitsi, especially when coupled in with the open source project itself.

  Today’s Video API solutions

  Look at today’s video API solutions – the CPaaS vendors who happen to offer video APIs so you can develop your own communication applications. What you’ll find is great platforms for developing your services, with the small caveat of being vendor-locked. The APIs of these vendors are specific to them. Any decision to switch from one vendor to another would necessitate a rewrite of the code communication aspects of the application. And they offer no open source alternative of their own – one where you can just install, host and maintain your environment on your infrastructure of their technology.

  That’s not something bad or new. It is how money is made in many of the cloud API vendors across all sectors of the software industry.

  Lowcode/nocode and video APIs

  In recent years, we have seen a shift and focus in lowcode solutions with video APIs.

  Video APIs were mostly about publish and subscribe. You could publish your microphone, webcam and/or screen, and subscribe to other publisher’s content. While this approach is quite flexible, it is also daunting and prone to performance issues. As they say, with great power comes great responsibility, only that the responsibility here was shifted towards the developers using the APIs.

  Now, it is understood that this approach can’t scale and a different approach is needed. One such approach is to reduce the complexity by offering a higher level abstraction that handle the complexities on their own. These can come in the form of a reference application, new API set or a UI widget that can be embedded into applications.

  Jitsi was similar in a way. It always offered a video bridge (the open source media server), but also the Jitsi Meet experience – a complete implementation of video meetings provided in open source and as a hosted end-user service.

  JaaS – the WordPress of video

  Enter JaaS – Jitsi as a Service

  Jitsi officially announced JaaS in January 2021. It added another layer to the Jitsi story – one of CPaaS and Video APIs.

  With the Jitsi ecosystem, you now had 3 different ways to make use of Jitsi:

  1. Take the Jitsi open source project and build your own application
  2. Use Jitsi Meet’s set of open source projects, install and host it on your own, making whatever changes you see fit to it
  3. Brand and modify the Jitsi Meet experience while having the Jitsi team host and manage the video infrastructure for you

  This reminds me of the way WordPress works – you could take the WordPress framework, install, host and maintain it on your own – or you can use Automattic’s or other vendors managed hosting service for WordPress, removing a lot of that headaches and focusing on what’s important to you – the actual site content.

  With Jitsi, you can decide to run and host everything on your own or use JaaS, having the Jitsi team manage and host it for you, removing a lot of the infrastructure headaches.

  What I love most about this is the dogfooding part. This isn’t only about taking an open source project and making Video APIs out of it. Jitsi Meet is a managed service that has seen its own growing pains as it needed to scale in recent years. A lot of the work done in the Jitsi codebase and the DevOps scripting around it comes directly from end users who communicate and complain directly to the Jitsi team.

  Jitsi a la carte

  As if this weren’t enough, in November 2021, Jitsi announced a kind of an a la carte hosting offering. As that announcement states:

  We are currently working on a service that would let Jitsi users easily connect their self-hosted Jitsi  deployments to 8×8’s PSTN, LiveStreaming, Recording and transcriptions clouds.

  This means that developers can now run their own Jitsi deployment, but then connect it to managed “features” of JaaS on a case by case basis. Want to have PSTN? Push a meeting to a live stream on YouTube? Record a session? Transcribe it? All of these things add complexity to a deployment and can now be abstracted out and “outsourced” to JaaS while maintaining your own hosted Jitsi cluster.

  In a way, Jitsi unbundled their JaaS offering, making it simpler to adopt.

  Towards a two-way street

  From Jitsi, to JaaS through the new a la carte offering, a flexible solution has emerged for developers needing video meeting solutions. One that can be consumed in many different ways.

  This reduces the vendor lock-in challenge that many video API vendors have, simply because you are never bound to the JaaS offering in any way other than them offering the best possible service. Not happy? Take your code and host it on your own. No rewriting or vendor migration necessary.

  I think this gives developers a very compelling solution that is a kind of a two-way street:

  1. From self hosted to managed

  Developers can start by self hosting their own Jitsi Meet service.

  This keeps control in the early days as they get acquainted with the platform and its nuances. At some point as they grow, it makes sense to think about a more global and scalable deployment. And one easy way to get there is to simply switch from the self hosted path towards the managed one by using JaaS.

  2. From managed to self hosted

  Developers can also start from the managed JaaS solution.

  The beauty of it here is that if they are unhappy, or decide they want to do things differently, they can simply install their own Jitsi servers and start maintaining their own infrastructure – without changing the actual application code as they do that.

  With Jitsi and JaaS you can move from a self hosted to a managed service or vice versa.

  Check out the Jitsi offering

  Here’s the thing. If you’re looking for a video meeting service to make your own, and only care about a bit of customization to the video experience itself, then Jitsi is a great solution.

  It enables you to go the route of a self hosted open source solution or to go with a fully managed video infrastructure and video APIs approach. All that wrapped with one of the most popular WebRTC media servers on the market.

  By Tsahi Levent-Levi

  May 5, 2022

  Interested in Jitsi as a Service? Try it out!

  The post Jitsi as a Service: a two-way street, by Tsahi Levent-Levi appeared first on Jitsi.

April 26, 2022

• Digium How is UCaaS Priced?

  Every once in a while I’ll get asked by an end-user customer about how “UCaaS is priced”. I get this question since the end-user sees all kinds of pricing, from under $20/seat to quite a bit over that. It’s really important to understand pricing and what you get with that price, before you pick a vendor.

  So, let’s start with that – $20/seat. That means $20 per user per month. And a lot of this kind of pricing comes with 3-year contracts, and over 100 seats. So, when you see pricing under $20 per user per month, you need to understand for how many seats and for the length of time of the contract. And you also need to consider what I’m writing about below. What actually is included in the monthly per user charge?

  The second thing to ask is about the desk phones. Are the phones included in the per user pricing or not? They might be part of the per user per month charge, or you might be able to buy the phones outright at a one-time charge, or you might also be able to pay for them per month. And maybe you also want the mobile and/or desktop client. Is that also part of the monthly per user charge as well. Or is that an add-on charge to use the mobile and / or desktop client?

  Speaking of voice, are you having to pay for the phone numbers (DIDs)? You need to ask about this as well. Or if you have them already, is there is cost to “port” them to your new UCaaS system?

  So, let’s talk about the client. Is it just voice? What about the video part? If video is involved, the UCaaS vendor may be using a 3rd party like Zoom – that likely means yet more additional fees. (Note: Sangoma has its own video meeting service, called Sangoma Meet).

  And the client also probably has a collaboration part. The client referenced above may or may not also include collaboration features (ability to instant message and share files and have workstream channels).

  I also frequently get asked about maintenance costs. When you buy equipment outright, such as buying a PBX or UC system for your premise, typically you will also have a yearly maintenance charge so you can get software updates, etc. In a cloud system, there should not be a separate maintenance charge. It should be included in the monthly price per user.

  There might also be an option for alternative networking. For instance, if your internet connection goes down, do you want the system to be able to switch into a wireless backup? With 4G and 5G, this is possible as well. How much does this cost?

  Sangoma offers UCaaS offerings with easy to understand pricing, and a range of feature options as well.

  The post How is UCaaS Priced? appeared first on Sangoma.

April 15, 2022

• Kamailio Development For v5.6.0 Is Frozen

  Here is the formal announcement that the development for the next major version 5.6.0 is now frozen. The focus has to be on testing the master branch.

  Also, the master branch should not get commits with new features till the branch 5.6 is created, expected to happen in 2-4 weeks, a matter of how testing goes on. Meanwhile, the commits with new features in the C code can be pushed to personal branches, new pull requests can still be done, but they will be merged after branching 5.6.

  Can still be done commits with documentation improvements, enhancements to related tools (e.g., kamctl, kamcmd), merging exiting pull requests at this moment, exporting missing KEMI functions and completing the functionality of the new modules added for 5.6.

  Once the branch 5.6 is created, new features can be pushed again to master branch as usual. From that moment, the v5.6.0 should be out very soon, time used for further testing but also preparing the release of packages.

  If someone is not sure if a commit brings a new feature, just make a pull request and it can be discussed there on github portal or via sr-dev mailing list.

  A summary of what is new in upcoming 5.6 is going to be built at:

  • https://www.kamailio.org/wiki/features/new-in-5.6.x

  Upgrade guidelines will be collected at:

  • https://www.kamailio.org/wiki/install/upgrade/5.5.x-to-5.6.0

  Everyone is more than welcome to contribute to the above wiki pages, especially to the upgrade guidelines, to help everyone else during the migration process from v5.5.x to 5.6.x.

  Thanks for flying Kamailio!

  The post Development For v5.6.0 Is Frozen first appeared on The Kamailio SIP Server Project.

April 13, 2022

• TADHack Conner Luzier – seeking full-time or project work in programmable comms / WebRTC

  Conner Luzier is a TADHack regular. Check out his hacks from TADHack-mini Orlando in 2018, 2019, and 2020. He’s also presented at Enterprise Connect several times, how many soon to be graduates have such industry exposure!

  He’s looking for work, ideally full-time, but is happy for project work to build his references in the industry. Conner has shown his abilities and get-up and go time and again at TADHack. So please get in contact with Conner, thank you.

  https://github.com/cluzier

  https://cluzier.github.io

  From TADHack-mini Orlando 2020. TeleQuest (Garrett Curtis, Conner Luzier, Jenn Gibson, Eric Good) – won Apidaze and Intelepeer prizes. TeleQuest is a phone-based adventure game, perfect to keep your social distance while connecting with others.

  From TADHack-mini Orlando 2019. SaveMe by Giancarlos Toro, Conner Luzier, Thiago Pereira, Vikki Horn won prizes from Flowroute, Telesign, and VoIP Innovations. It is a secure video reporting app using WebRTC and SMS.

  From TADHack-mini Orlando 2018. Polls IO by Conner, Paul, Giancarlos used VoIP Innovations to create a service that allows local government to be be more involved with their constituents and allows their constituents to be more involved with the local government by allow easy opinion polling on new projects, bills, etc. This will also allow the local governments to be able to easily send out updates on new legislature and its progress. This polling service can be generalized to be used for businesses and events. They won the VoIP Innovations prize and t-shirts from Code for Orlando. See their pitch video here, and their slides here, and a video of their demo at Enterprise Connect here.

  Conner Luzier's Resume from Alan Quayle

  Here’s Conner at Enterprise Connect in 2019, third from the right.

  

  The post Conner Luzier – seeking full-time or project work in programmable comms / WebRTC appeared first on Blog @ TADHack - Telecom Application Developer Hackathon.

April 08, 2022

• TADHack TADHack Global 2022 Launch, Save the Date, 15-16 Oct

  TADHack is the largest global hackathon focused on programmable communications since 2014. This year we are partnering with Network X (Broadband World Forum, 5G World, and Telco Cloud) as the pre-event hackathon. This is similar to what we do before Enterprise Connect with TADHack-mini Orlando in March.

  Thank you to STROLID, Symbl.ai, Telnyx, Jambonz, and Subspace for making TADHack possible.

  At TADHack Global 2021 Symbl.ai achieved an amazing result, 21 hacks, and Telnyx was even more impressive with 30 hacks; all created over one weekend by developers from around the world.

  The locations we anticipate running are: Chicago, Tampa, Colombia, South Africa, Berlin, UK, Sri Lanka, Amsterdam, France, and remote (anywhere in the world). We are adding new locations, e.g. TADHack France (run by Le Voice Lab), and Amsterdam as we are the pre-event hackathon to Network X (Broadband World Forum, 5G World, and Telco Cloud).

  We had great success with TADHack Teens in Sri Lanka in 2021 thanks to hSenid Mobile and Ideamart, and plan to expand this initiative to South Africa and the US. We’re training the next generation of programmable communications engineers and entrepreneurs, as well as excellent summer interns!

  We have two additional initiatives for 2022: 

  • Accessibility prize with judges Chris Lewis of Lewis Insight and Manisha Amin, CEO of The Centre for Inclusive Design. We’ll be providing resources to help the accessibility hacks.
  • TADHack Founders Academy to help hacks build product/market fit, seed financing, and preparing for series A using the experience of everyone involved in TADHack. More coming on that soon.

  The TADHack website is still in development, and definitely needs some accessibility improvements Save the date 15-16 Oct 2022, for the largest and longest running global hackathon focused on programmable communications. Thank you.

  

  The post TADHack Global 2022 Launch, Save the Date, 15-16 Oct appeared first on Blog @ TADHack - Telecom Application Developer Hackathon.

April 06, 2022

• TADHack Accessibility Resources for TADHack Global 2022

  Over the years we’ve had many accessibility hacks. Last year we had an excellent hack Colloquia11y by team Similarly Geeky, comprising Lily Madar and Steven Goodwin. Its an accessible conferencing solution (using Text To Speech and Speech To Text).

  For TADHack 2022 we’ve created an Accessibility Prize that will be judged by Chris Lewis of Lewis Insight and Manisha Amin, CEO of The Centre for Inclusive Design. Chris and Manisha are also providing some resources to help hackers better understand Accessibility, and how to pitch to a blind person.

  Interview with Chris Lewis, Accessibility Challenges, Straight from the Guide Dog Owner’s Mouth

  I’ve known Chris for several decades He’s been a telecom analyst for 38 years, legally blind for 25 years, and started a focus on accessibility about 7/8 years ago.

  Chris shares his real world experience of using the web as a blind person, getting to a video on a page can take 20-100 clicks. Its like accessing a web page through an IVR (Interactive Voice Response), serial access to what a sighted person accesses in parallel. He demos the challenges he faces using the latest TADHack.com website. I’ve got some work to do there!

  Chris also shares the challenges in using his fancy coffee machine. It has several error lights, e.g. no water, no beans, grounds tray full, drip tray full. But no way to know which one is lit. So he checks all 4 possible problems each time one of them has an error. Chris provides many wonderful insights into the everyday challenges he faces.

  Chris highlights the importance Alexa and Siri play in helping accessibility, for example he needed to know how to spell ‘curfew’. Another challenge is between Zoom, Teams, and many of the other conferencing platforms have different shortcuts, and one of the reasons he’s not yet used Android’s Accessibility tool TalkBack reader is its like learning yet another language, as he already uses iOS and Microsoft’s accessibility tools.

  This 18 min interview is a mine of insights on accessibility challenges and ways of thinking about accessibility. More than I cover in the written section of this weblog, so check out the video. For me, the take away on designing for the edge cases, means the center is free is powerful. And when giving your pitch, focus on the story, and avoid saying, ‘as you can see on the slide’

  Thank you Chris.

  Resources from Manisha Amin, CEO of The Centre for Inclusive Design.

  Coming soon.

  The post Accessibility Resources for TADHack Global 2022 appeared first on Blog @ TADHack - Telecom Application Developer Hackathon.

March 24, 2022

• Kamailio Freezing The Development For v5.6.0

  The Kamailio v5.5.0 was released about one year ago, therefore it is time to set the milestones for getting 5.6.0 out.

  It has been proposed to freeze the development on Thursday, April 14, 2022, test till mid of May or so, then release the next major version 5.6.0.

  There is a lot of development to existing components and a couple of new modules.

  If anyone wants a different time line towards 5.6.0, let’s discuss on sr-users@lists.kamailio.org mailing list and choose the one that suits most of the developers.

  Thanks for flying Kamailio!

  The post Freezing The Development For v5.6.0 first appeared on The Kamailio SIP Server Project.

March 21, 2022

• Kamailio Docker Container With Kamailio And Let’s Encrypt

  Giovanni Tommasini from Evoseed.io published a Github repository with resources about how to deploy Kamailio with TLS in a Docker container using Let’s Encrypt certificates. It can be found at:

  • https://github.com/evoseed/kamailio-tls-letsencrypt

  It should be a good starting point for anyone wanting to start a Kamailio instance with TLS enabled for secure and encrypted SIP signalling traffic.

  Check also Giovanni’s blog post about this project:

  • https://blog.giovannitommasini.info/voip-calls-and-tls-security

  

  We appreciate such contributions to the community, if you write or you are aware of interesting articles about how to deploy and use Kamailio, we are more than happy to publish news about them on kamailio.org website, just notify us about them via sr-users mailing list!

  Thanks for flying Kamailio!

  The post Docker Container With Kamailio And Let’s Encrypt first appeared on The Kamailio SIP Server Project.

March 10, 2022

• Tox qTox gets funded for a year

  Thanks to a generous sponsor, qTox development gets founded for a year! Anthony Bilinski got funded to work full-time for a year and sphaerophoria part-time for a few months. You can read more about this in qTox’s blog post, where Anthony goes into detail on his plans for the year.