TMCnews Featured Article

This week, the VoIP Minute Watch brings you news from Vonage, BroadSoft (News - Alert), Vistula, Level 3 and AltiGen.

Circuit City Stores announced Monday it will now offer customers an instant $200 holiday gift card to use toward any in-store purchase when they activate Vonage’s VoIP-based telephone service and sign a year-long contract. The store will also make devices from select Vonage (News - Alert) hardware manufacturers available to customers free after a mail-in rebate.

Circuit City will make this offer available for customers until tomorrow in stores located in the U.S. When customers purchase Vonage-enabled devices they can also activate their phone service immediately in-store. Upon activation and commitment to one year of service they will receive a $200 gift card instantly.

This Christmas season will surely be a special one for children living at homes subscribed to Vonage’s VoIP service. The service provider announced also on Monday that it will let children listen to Santa Claus and leave him a message for the holidays. Throughout this Christmas season children will be able to dial 1-(700) CALLSANTA 1-(700-225-5726) from a Vonage line and hear a recording from Santa. Children will be able to leave a message telling him what they want for Christmas after hearing Santa's message.

The messages left for Santa are then forwarded to the account holder’s (parents) e-mail address. This will serve as a little hint for parents when they (or Santa) go Christmas shopping.

Thanks to a newly expanded coverage area announced Wednesday by Vonage Canada, 700,000 more Quebecers will be able to replace their legacy home phone with VoIP-based technology services. Vonage’s expansion will bring its service to 19 additional communities in Quebec.

Vonage Canada’s new service coverage area expansion includes the following new cities: Beloeil, La Prairie, Varennes, Laval East, Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Sainte-Genevieve, Lachine, Boucherville, Saint-Bruno, Longueuil, Laval Ouest, Pont-Viau, Roxboro, Chambly, Sainte-Julie-de-Vercheres, Laval/Chomedey, Sainte-Rose, Pointe-Claire, and Saint-Lambert.

VoIP communication products and systems provider Aastra Telecom announced on Tuesday that it has joined forces with BroadSoft to streamline VoIP deployments by service providers. Specifically, Aastra will join BroadSoft and a consortium of other customer premises equipment (CPE) to access equipment vendors and build systems that integrate equipment with hosted applications to ease the deployment of new services for providers.

Also on Tuesday, BroadSoft announced that it joined forces with VoIP Solutions to announce the opening of the new BroadSoft European Operations Center in Belfast and enabled Irish ISP Digiweb to deploy VoIP services based on the BroadWorks VoIP application platform.

The new European Operations Center is located at the Northern Ireland Science Park, and it is said to expand BroadSoft’s capabilities in order to provide technical support, service and training to Digiweb and its other European customers.

VoIP services supplier Vistula Communications (News - Alert) announced on Tuesday that it joined forces with Envox IP to open a series franchised retail call shops across Venezuela. The move follows several months of trial deployments of Vistula’s VoIP technology platform, V-Cube in the South American country.

The agreement calls for Envox and a group of Venezuelan equipment and software providers to deploy proprietary VoIP-based telephony systems that will run on the country’s most commonly used "call shop" equipment and software.

Envox will offer proprietary V-Cube-based VoIP systems which will be deployed across a number of call shops in Venezuela by the first week of December. The company plans to install Vistula’s V-Cube-based VoIP system in least 60 call shops within the next six to twelve months.

Level 3 Communications (News - Alert) announced on Wednesday that Oregon-based cable operator BendBroadband has deployed the company’s VoIP Enhanced Local Service. The deal calls for Level 3 to serve as BendBroadband’s underlying service provider for the company’s new Business Voice Service offering.

Level 3’s VoIP Enhanced Local service will be used by BendBroadband to provide small and medium-sized businesses with a new option for local and long-distance calling. BendBroadband’s new service dubbed BendBroadband Business Phone will include enhanced voicemail, E-911 service and popular calling features such as caller ID, call waiting and 3-way calling.

VoIP business phones manufacturer AltiGen Communications (News - Alert) announced Thursday that it was tapped by the Legal Services Society (LSS) in British Columbia, Canada to deploy the company’s AltiContact Manager VoIP Phone System and Call Center. The initial deployment included 200 phones.

The new system was installed by Optinet Systems, an AltiGen reseller. Optinet ported all key phone functions to the AltiGen solution in just a week. The company also ported all multilingual voice prompts from the old system.

There you have it folks, another exciting week in the VoIP industry! Stay tuned and read the VoIP Minute Watch for the latest news… Have a great Thanks Giving holiday weekend!

-----

Johanne Torres is contributing editor for TMCnet and Internet Telephony magazine. To see more articles by Johanne Torres, please visit her columnist page.