TMCnews Featured Article

A global provider of integrated access technology for converged communications today is unveiling a new gateway that’s designed to make money for service providers by helping them deliver combined VoIP and data services to home office users.

 

Officials from U4EA (News - Alert) Technologies – an international company with U.S. offices in Fremont, California and Acton, Massachusetts and an exhibitor at the upcoming Internet Telephony Conference & Expo in Miami, to be held Feb. 2 to 4 – say their so-called “Horizon Home Office Gateway (News - Alert)” will save money on support and service through remote management.

 

According to Ray Selli, U4EA’s vice president of SOHO products, the Horizon home gateway will help carriers deliver a tailored and highly competitive product based on TR-069, a CPE WAN Management Protocol that’s become a standard for cost-effective management of customer premises equipment.

 

“The products are fully customizable, enabling service providers to remotely present their own logos, look-and-feel and customer messages,” Selli said. “In addition, flexible feature activation enables easy and cost-effective delivery of profitable new services to existing customers and to attract new business.”

 

The home gateway’s release dovetails with U4EA’s efforts to bolster its SMB-targeting strategies by hiring VoIP and unified communications industry veteran Jeff Dixon.

 

Recently, TMCnet spoke to Dixon about the importance of UC to SMBs, and the executive said that the ability to be come more agile and “available” through presence-aware applications, as well as more “carbon-conscious” in traveling, is a boardroom priority.

 

“This will hold true whether your company is geographically disperse or federated within a business community of common interests and it has the potential to become a great accelerant to business continuity,” Dixon told TMCnet. “For small or medium-sized businesses in particular, simple-to-use and affordable UC solutions will allow smaller companies to take advantage of capabilities once available only to large organizations with sophisticated IT infrastructures and diverse skill sets. U4EA’s role in UC will be to ensure that the multiple real time applications within UC-like Voice, Ad Hoc Video and Business Content (think Live Meeting or Share Point) operate in a secure and quality manner, using the existing broadband connections a given business already has.”

 

Officials from U4EA say their new home, plug-and-play gateway is easy to use and involves minimal installation costs. It includes VoIP and broadband features, WiFi (News - Alert), automatic Quality of Service, voice call conferencing, USB device support and emergency call prioritization.

 

“With U4EA’s HG1100, home-office customers are assured priority access to the home broadband network, while sharing the link other home users,” according to the company, which is a major sponsor of back-to-back British Open golf champion Padraig Harrington, whose group Europe golf team was vanquished by the United States at last weekend’s Ryder Cup. “U4EA’s advanced patent-protected QoS mechanism, GoS, uniquely delivers the most efficient use of the broadband connection – simultaneously guaranteeing reliable services while optimizing the bandwidth utilization.”