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Free Real-Time Communications (RTC) Planet

November 30, 2023

• Enable Security November 2023: Advisories for VoIP systems and devices, WebRTC privacy and spying on your calls
  Welcome to the November edition of your favorite IP Communications Security Newsletter! In this edition, we cover: Asterisk fixing a PPE in their Github Cyber-criminals listening on telecommunications systems to learn how they were caught ARM’s MTE is going to protect your smartphones - Google Project Zero’s blog post about it Privacy and security of video conferencing on WebRTC LIVE And much more! RTCSec newsletter is a free periodic newsletter bringing you commentary and news around VoIP and WebRTC security.

November 07, 2023

• Digium Chatroom Etiquette: Navigating Online Conversations with Grace

  In an increasingly digital world, chatrooms and online communities have become essential spaces for communication and connection. Whether you’re engaging in casual conversations, seeking information, or participating in a niche interest group, it’s crucial to maintain proper chatroom etiquette. Just as we observe manners in face-to-face interactions, online spaces deserve the same level of respect and consideration. In this blog post, we’ll explore the dos and don’ts of chatroom etiquette to help you communicate effectively and foster positive online relationships.

  1. Choose the Right Chatroom:

  Before delving into chatroom etiquette, it’s essential to find a chatroom that suits your interests and communication style. Ensure the chatroom’s purpose aligns with your goals, and be aware of any specific rules and guidelines set by the community.

  2. Choosing Between New Messages and Threaded Replies:

  In many chatrooms and messaging platforms, you’ll have the option to respond to messages in two primary ways: as a new message or as a reply within a thread. Knowing when to use each method can greatly enhance the clarity and flow of the conversation.

  Using New Messages:

  Pros:

  • New messages are ideal for starting a new topic or introducing a fresh idea
  • They keep the main chatroom conversation organized and flowing
  • New messages are suitable for general comments, greetings, or announcements

  Cons:

  • Overusing new messages for responses can clutter the main chat feed and make it difficult for others to follow the conversation
  • Important points may get lost in the continuous stream of messages

  Using Threaded Replies:

  Pros:

  • Threaded replies are excellent for responding to a specific message, as they create a focused sub-conversation
  • They help maintain context, making it easier for others to understand the discussion
  • Useful for addressing or seeking clarification on a particular point without disrupting the main chat flow

  Cons:

  • Overusing threaded replies for every message can result in a highly fragmented conversation, making it hard to follow the main discussion

  When to Use Each:

  • Consider using new messages when introducing a new topic or responding to the most recent message when no specific thread is required
  • Use threaded replies when replying to a message with a distinct topic or when you want to maintain a separate, focused conversation within the main chat

  Tips for Effective Use:

  • Pay attention to the context and the ongoing conversation. Assess whether your response would benefit from being a new message or a threaded reply.
  • If multiple users are involved in a thread, be mindful of when it’s appropriate to switch back to new messages to avoid over-complicating the discussion

  3. Be Mindful of Language:

  Language is a powerful tool, and the way you communicate can significantly impact the atmosphere of the chatroom. Some key points to consider:

  • Avoid offensive language, hate speech, and derogatory remarks
  • Use proper grammar and spelling to enhance clarity and comprehension
  • Refrain from excessive use of profanity and all-caps, which can be interpreted as shouting

  4. Respect Others’ Privacy:

  Online communities often involve people from diverse backgrounds. Respect their privacy by not asking for personal information such as addresses, phone numbers, or financial details. Similarly, avoid sharing your personal information unless necessary for the conversation and the context of the chatroom.

  5. Stay on Topic:

  Many chatrooms have specific themes or purposes. Stay on topic, and avoid derailing conversations with unrelated discussions or excessive self-promotion. If you want to discuss a different subject, consider finding or creating a more appropriate chatroom.

  6. Use Emojis and Emoticons Thoughtfully:

  Emojis and emoticons can add nuance to text-based conversations, but use them sparingly. Overusing them can make your messages appear unprofessional or insincere. Be mindful of their tone and appropriateness in the context of your chatroom.

  7. Listen and Be Patient:

  Effective communication is a two-way street. Listen to others, acknowledge their perspectives, and be patient when waiting for responses. Avoid interrupting or dominating the conversation.

  8. Handle Disagreements Gracefully:

  In online discussions, disagreements can arise. When they do, handle them respectfully. Avoid personal attacks, name-calling, or aggressive behavior. Instead, focus on discussing the issues or differing viewpoints calmly and rationally.

  9. Report Inappropriate Behavior:

  If you encounter disruptive or offensive behavior in a chatroom, report it to the chatroom moderators or administrators. They can take appropriate action to maintain a healthy environment for all participants.

  10. Respect the Moderators’ Authority:

  Moderators play a crucial role in maintaining order and ensuring chatroom guidelines are followed. Respect their authority and follow their instructions when necessary.

  Conclusion

  Chatroom etiquette is an essential aspect of maintaining positive and constructive online interactions. By following these guidelines, you can create a welcoming and respectful environment in chatrooms, fostering meaningful connections, learning, and sharing experiences with others. Remember, online etiquette is an extension of common courtesy, and by being mindful of your behavior, you contribute to a more enjoyable online experience for all.

  Understanding when to use new messages and threaded replies in a chatroom is a crucial aspect of chatroom etiquette. It helps keep conversations organized, ensures clarity, and allows for more efficient communication within the digital space. By making informed choices about how you respond to messages, you contribute to a smoother and more enjoyable chatroom experience for yourself and others.

  The post Chatroom Etiquette: Navigating Online Conversations with Grace appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

October 26, 2023

• Digium 12 Reasons Businesses Should Deploy a Unified Communications (UC) Strategy Today

  In a Sangoma study it was found that; by adopting UC tools, companies can achieve an average 52% increase in workplace productivity, 45% better efficiency, and a 25% higher profit. Here are another dozen reasons to adopt a UC strategy!

  1. Enhanced Productivity:
  Unified communications consolidate various communication channels (voice, video, messaging, email, etc.) into a single platform, making it easier for employees to connect and collaborate. This streamlines communication and saves time, ultimately boosting productivity.

  2. Cost Savings:
  UC solutions often reduce operational costs. By using a single platform for voice, video conferencing, and messaging, businesses can reduce the expenses associated with managing multiple communication systems.

  3. Improved Collaboration:
  UC tools facilitate real-time collaboration by enabling employees to communicate seamlessly, regardless of their location. Video conferencing, screen sharing, and document collaboration tools enhance teamwork, even for remote or distributed teams.

  4. Flexibility & Mobility:
  With UC, employees can access communication tools on various devices (computers, smartphones, tablets), allowing them to work from anywhere. This flexibility is essential in today’s mobile and remote work environments.

  5. Customer Service & Engagement:
  UC solutions can enhance customer service by providing features like call routing, queuing, and integrated customer relationship management (CRM) systems. This enables businesses to offer better support and engage with customers more effectively.

  6. Scalability:
  UC solutions can scale with the growth of a business. Whether a company is small, mid-sized, or large, UC platforms can adapt to meet changing communication needs.

  7. Integration with Other Tools:
  UC systems can integrate with other business applications, such as CRM, email, and project management tools. This streamlines workflows and ensures data consistency across various applications.

  8. Competitive Advantage:
  Deploying UC can give businesses a competitive advantage by enabling efficient communication and collaboration. It allows companies to respond to market changes and customer demands more quickly.

  9. Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity:
  UC solutions often have built-in redundancy and failover capabilities, making them more resilient in the face of disasters or network outages. This ensures that critical communications can continue even in adverse situations.

  10. Improved Customer & Employee Satisfaction:
  With better communication and collaboration tools, businesses can improve both customer satisfaction (through improved support and engagement) and employee satisfaction (by enabling flexible work options and simplifying communication).

  11. Security & Compliance:
  Many UC platforms offer robust security features, including encryption and authentication protocols. This is especially important in industries with strict compliance requirements, such as healthcare and finance.

  12. Environmental Benefits:
  Reducing the need for physical meetings, travel, and paperwork through UC can have a positive impact on a business’s carbon footprint, contributing to environmental sustainability.

  In today’s fast-paced, interconnected business world, a unified communications strategy is a valuable asset and offer a range of benefits for companies from streamlining operations, increased productivity, cost savings and improved customer satisfaction. By deploying a UC strategy, businesses can stay ahead of the curve and maintain a competitive edge in the market.

  The post 12 Reasons Businesses Should Deploy a Unified Communications (UC) Strategy Today appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

• Enable Security October 2023: security theatre and PBX hacking, plus last month's advisories
  It’s the moment you’ve eagerly anticipated, that special time of the month. Yes, end of the month means salary time for many, and Halloween - but also - your favorite newsletter is out and about! In this edition, we cover: A presentation by good pseudonym at DEF CON about PBX and UC hacking The drama that ensued with regards to FreePBX vulnerabilities How our customers are enjoying access to the Attack Platform Security fixes in WebRTC and Skype for business Short news including MiTM attacks on XMPP, monthly vulnerability fixes and much more!

October 17, 2023

• Digium From Cart to Completion: CPaaS’s Role in Streamlining Retail Operations

  In the dynamic realm of retail, the power of seamless communication is paramount. CPaaS (Communication Platform as a Service) stands out as a game-changer, arming retail staff with the tools they need to excel in real-time, contextual customer interactions. The absence of such a platform can leave businesses trailing in the dust:

  • The CPaaS industry is on a trajectory of hyper-growth, with projections indicating a surge to over $34 billion in sales by 2026. Gartner further predicts that by 2025, a staggering 95% of global enterprises will be leveraging API-enabled CPaaS offerings to bolster their digital competitiveness.
  • The pandemic has accelerated the digital-first movement, with businesses increasingly turning to CPaaS for enhanced customer communications. This shift underscores the platform’s pivotal role in ensuring businesses stay connected with their customers.
  • A significant 85% of top-performing companies recognize the strategic importance of APIs, a core component of CPaaS, for business growth. Moreover, a survey in 2017 revealed that 81% of decision-makers had already deployed some form of CPaaS, highlighting its widespread adoption.

  Retail businesses that neglect the transformative potential of CPaaS risk operational inefficiencies and missed opportunities for enhancing customer relationships. Explore why CPaaS is not just an advantage but an essential cornerstone for retail triumph.

  Benefits of CPaaS

  Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) offers a cloud-based platform that enables businesses, including those in the retail sector, to embed real-time communication features into their own applications without the need to build backend infrastructure and interfaces. Here’s how CPaaS can be a game-changer for retail businesses.

  Enhanced Customer Interactions:
  Retail businesses can embed chat, voice, and video functionalities directly into their e-commerce platforms. This allows customers to seek immediate assistance while shopping online, simulating the in-store experience.

  Omnichannel Experience:
  With CPaaS, retailers can maintain consistent communication across different channels – be it SMS, email, app notifications, or others. This ensures that customers receive a unified shopping experience regardless of their touchpoint with the brand.

  Improved Marketing Campaigns:
  Retailers can use CPaaS to send customers targeted and personalized messages, promotions, or alerts based on their shopping behavior, preferences, and demographics.

  Order and Delivery Notifications:
  CPaaS allows for real-time notifications. Customers can be updated instantly about order confirmations, shipping details, delivery times, and any changes or delays.

  Enhanced Security:
  For online transactions, CPaaS can facilitate two-factor authentication processes via SMS or voice calls, ensuring that customer transactions are secure.

  Scalability:
  As the business grows, the communication needs also expand. With CPaaS, retail businesses can easily scale up or down based on demand without major changes to infrastructure.

  Customer Feedback and Surveys:
  Retailers can utilize CPaaS to solicit feedback post-purchase or after an online interaction. Immediate feedback helps in improving services and addressing concerns promptly.

  Cost Savings:
  By utilizing cloud-based communication tools offered by CPaaS providers, retailers can often reduce costs associated with traditional communication channels and infrastructure.

  Virtual Shopping Assistance:
  Retailers can offer a more personalized shopping experience by embedding video calls or chats where sales representatives can assist online customers, offer advice, answer questions, or even give live product demonstrations.

  Streamlined Operations:
  Internally, CPaaS can facilitate improved communication among staff, whether it’s coordinating between warehouses, communicating about stock levels, or arranging shift schedules.

  Integrations with Existing Systems:
  Many CPaaS solutions can seamlessly integrate with a retailer’s existing CRM, sales, or e-commerce platforms, ensuring that data flows smoothly across systems.

  Sangoma’s suite of CPaas-based applications is the perfect choice for businesses looking to streamline customer interaction and solve gaps within their business processes.

  Sangoma’s suite of CPaaS-based applications empowers retail businesses to evolve with the changing dynamics of the industry, especially as online shopping and digital interactions become the norm. By embedding real-time communication tools directly into their applications and platforms, retailers can offer improved customer experiences, streamline operations, and make agile business decisions.

  Want to learn more?
  Download our eBook to get an in-depth look at Sangoma’s product suite for retail businesses.

  The post From Cart to Completion: CPaaS’s Role in Streamlining Retail Operations appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

October 05, 2023

• Digium SD-WAN vs. MPLS: Comparing WAN Architectures and Solutions

  For years, the primary method of building a network architecture for business use has involved wide-area networks built with private connections and multiprotocol layer switching (MPLS). While this methodology is still prevalent, it finally has a serious challenger: software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN).

  By allowing companies to route traffic through multiple public internet connections with VPN tunnels, encryption, and firewalls, SD-WAN delivers a level of security and resources on par with traditional WAN, at a drastically reduced cost, especially when considering the expense and time needed to install a new edge device or application.

  Now, it’s time to take a serious look at SD-WAN and MPLS side by side and determine how your organization should proceed.

  What is the difference between SD-WAN and MPLS?

  The key feature that SD-WAN brings to the table is the aggregation of multiple circuits — private, public or even wireless— to run applications and services on a reliable, secure connection.

  MPLS is the industry standard for maintaining and overseeing network resources. In this digital age, companies need strong and reliable connections to run their applications, including those hosted on-premise and in the cloud. IT teams that use MPLS networking to manage the configurations of the apps and devices that make up their networks are realizing they can take similar functionality from SD-WAN.

  They are making this discovery because they are driven by the constant need to add bandwidth and capacity. MPLS delivers the application performance they need, but it can be slow and expensive to procure the necessary technology. Furthermore, with businesses operating from many locations, some potentially out of range for high-speed private network connections, there is a drastic need for a way to get MPLS-level performance faster and more affordably. SD-WAN fills this niche.

  Does SD-WAN replace MPLS?

  In some cases, SD-WAN does not replace MPLS — at least not all at once. Companies can get involved with SD-WAN deployment by adding the resources to serve as supplemental connectivity for smaller branch locations. Over time, they can increase their investment in SD-WAN, slowly adding more SD-WAN circuits so the balance of the overall environment tips toward the cloud.

  App-aware routing allows organizations to control which circuit they are using for traffic, even with some sites on SD-WAN and others on traditional WAN. Both types of circuits contribute to the overall network. In addition to choosing SD-WAN for new offices, personnel can convert older locations when it’s time for a network refresh at those sites.

  What are the benefits of SD-WAN vs. MPLS?

  The addition of SD-WAN to business networks would not occur without delivering important benefits. If you’re considering making changes to your configuration, it’s important to determine whether these advantages apply to your unique use case. Fortunately, the improvements associated with SD-WAN solutions are wide-ranging and largely in keeping with the way companies today use their networks. They include:

  Cost & Time Advantages:
  You cannot underestimate just how much easier it is to bring new edge devices and cloud applications into your network when using SD-WAN. Without the hardware scarcity and expense issues that trouble traditional WAN, there is a much clearer path to expansion.

  Centralized Network Control:
  Once you’ve brought a variety of new resources into your network, you can take control of them more easily with SD-WAN. No matter how many locations your business operates from, your IT team can manage every application, connection, and piece of hardware from a single pane of glass.

  App Performance Improvements:
  Whether using customizable app priority settings to give mission-critical software more bandwidth or setting up stronger fail-over capabilities, IT departments with SD-WAN can keep the company’s most important software online. The meshed architecture of public internet connections can also offer a lower-latency way to use SaaS apps.

  Greater Oversight of Data Use:
  Administrators who want to take a closer look at data usage within their companies can immensely benefit from SD-WAN. Better traffic visibility allows them to isolate locations, connections, devices, and users and analyze data usage. By disallowing certain types of traffic, IT pros can run a more secure, controlled network.

  Why is SD-WAN important for today’s companies?

  Businesses have to constantly be thinking about the future and looking one step ahead to stay competitive. When it comes to networking, this may mean increasingly investing in SD-WAN. The ability to add new services and locations in an agile and affordable manner lays the groundwork for growth, and the fact that SD-WAN is compatible with SaaS deployments is in keeping with the rising importance of the cloud across industries and regions.

  Since SD-WAN deployment requires significantly lower operating expenditures than investing in more private network connections for a standard MPLS network, the risk is low and the potential reward is great. You need to ensure your applications will be stable, reliable, and secure going forward — working with the right SD-WAN partner is a way to move toward this goal.

  Not every SD-WAN provider can deliver the same level of service, so it’s important to do your homework and go with the top source in the industry. The fully managed SD-WAN network solution from Sangoma is designed to aggregate and maximize all your connections and applications, not only saving you time and money but also making your network serve your needs more effectively.

  If you want to learn more, contact our SD-WAN experts — we can help!

  The post SD-WAN vs. MPLS: Comparing WAN Architectures and Solutions appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

October 04, 2023

• Digium From In-Store to Online: How UCaaS is Bridging the Retail Communication Gap

  In today’s digital age, the retail landscape is undergoing a seismic shift, and UCaaS is the unsung hero leading the charge. Imagine a world where seamless communication drives customer satisfaction and business growth. Here’s a glimpse into that reality:

  • By 2030, the UCaaS market is set to skyrocket to a whopping USD 85.77 billion from its 2022 valuation of USD 28.43 billion
  • The COVID-19 pandemic supercharged the demand for UCaaS, with businesses globally clamoring for top-tier online communication tools
  • A staggering 85% of modern companies are embracing the ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) trend, amplifying the call for integrated communication platforms

  Dive in with us as we explore how UCaaS is not just bridging but obliterating the communication gap in retail, crafting a harmonious blend of in-store and online experiences.

  Are you, your staff, or your business suffering from the following?

  • Overloaded customer support staff due to inefficient call routing or backend inventory look-up delays
  • High turnover, hurting your business revenue, along with almost half of US frontline retail employees and two-thirds of frontline managers saying they are thinking about leaving their jobs in the next few months
  • Delays due to leveraging multiple tools to process a single customer transaction
  • Failing to provide real-time purchase order updates damages your reputation
  • Inter-departmental communication challenges, delaying customer orders

  If your team has the tools they need to succeed, your business and customers will, too.

  When we delve into the advantages of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) for retail businesses, it’s important to highlight how these benefits translate directly to retail staff. After all, the employees are on the front lines, interacting with customers, managing products, and maintaining the overall shopping experience. Here’s how UCaaS benefits retail staff directly:

  Seamless Integration Across Devices:
  Retail staff can use tablets, smartphones, or store computers interchangeably to access information, communicate with colleagues, or assist customers, enhancing their flexibility and efficiency.

  Real-Time Information Access:
  With UCaaS, employees can access inventory data, customer profiles, and sales information instantly, enabling them to provide accurate and prompt assistance to shoppers.

  Improved Communication Among Teams:
  Whether it’s coordinating with the stock room, connecting with customer service reps at another location, or discussing daily targets, UCaaS enables instantaneous communication, reducing wait times and misunderstandings.

  Flexible Work Options:
  For staff roles that don’t require a constant in-store presence, UCaaS allows for remote work possibilities. This is especially beneficial for online customer support, inventory management, and digital marketing roles.

  Enhanced Training Opportunities:
  New hires or staff transitioning to different roles can benefit from video training sessions, webinars, and online workshops that are easily accessible through UCaaS platforms.

  Instant Customer Feedback:
  Staff can receive real-time feedback from online customers, helping them address concerns, answer questions, or even make product recommendations immediately.

  Unified Customer View:
  Employees can access a unified view of a customer’s interaction history, be it online chats, purchase history, or previous in-store interactions, allowing them to provide more personalized service.

  Efficient Task Management:
  Many UCaaS solutions come integrated with task management features, enabling employees to prioritize tasks, set reminders, and collaborate on projects more effectively.

  Reduced Infrastructure Hassle:
  With cloud-based UCaaS solutions, employees don’t have to deal with the complexities of maintaining hardware infrastructure, ensuring smoother day-to-day operations.

  Emergency Communications:
  In the event of unforeseen circumstances or emergencies, UCaaS enables swift communication to all staff members, ensuring everyone is informed and can take necessary precautions or actions.

  In essence, UCaaS empowers retail staff with tools that streamline their daily tasks, improve customer interactions, and foster a collaborative work environment. By adopting UCaaS, retailers not only invest in better customer experiences but also in the well-being and efficiency of their employees.

  Sangoma’s UCaaS – Value-Driven Solution

  Sangoma assists retail businesses in adopting these features. Our affordable, scalable solutions enable gradual integration as your business expands. We offer:

  Comprehensive Communication and Collaboration:
  Sangoma offers a single communication tool where your staff can enjoy voice, fax, video conferencing, messaging, and more from any device or browser of their choosing. This integrated approach ensures employees have all the tools they need at their fingertips.

  Scalability:
  As businesses grow or their needs change, Sangoma’s UCaaS scales accordingly. This is particularly beneficial for businesses that experience seasonal demand fluctuations, such as retail.

  Mobility and Remote Work:
  Sangoma’s collaboration tools are offered on desktop and mobile so that employees can communicate and collaborate from anywhere, using any wireless connection of their choice, catering to the growing need for remote and flexible work options.

  Integration Capabilities:
  With APIs and integration capabilities, Sangoma’s UCaaS can be integrated with other business systems like CRM platforms, enhancing workflow efficiencies and improving customer interactions.

  Enhanced Customer Experience:
  Features like Contact Center, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), call queues, and call recording can help businesses provide professional and efficient customer service.

  Security and Reliability:
  Sangoma places emphasis on security, ensuring that communications are encrypted and protected. Additionally, their cloud infrastructure often promises high uptime, ensuring business continuity.

  Cost-Effective:
  Migrating to UCaaS often results in cost savings for businesses. By consolidating communication tools and reducing the need for on-premise hardware, businesses can realize both direct and indirect cost savings.

  Analytics and Insights:
  Sangoma’s UCaaS comes with analytics capabilities, helping businesses understand communication patterns, call volumes, and more. This can be invaluable for decision-making and optimization.

  Dedicated Support:
  A reputable company like Sangoma means businesses can rely on dedicated support when they face challenges or need assistance with their UCaaS solutions.

  The Unsung Heros – Your IT and Infrastructure Team

  While you and your team have been struggling with your own set of unique challenges, your IT team has been stretched thin – especially as you transition to an online storefront model. Network downtime could severely impact your reputation and profits.

  Considering a UCaaS solution but concerned about your IT resources? That’s where Sangoma’s managed network infrastructure can help. Using cost-effective broadband, we can manage your internet connections across all locations and ensure 24/7/365 monitoring. This includes 5G Broadband and satellite options for remote sites.

  Our Managed service options also include SD-WAN, enhancing network performance by consolidating connections, ensuring maximum uptime, and unified threat management security. This is all over our PCI-compliant, fully-monitored network backbone.

  As the retail landscape shifts online, it’s crucial to support both physical and online shopping channels. Sangoma can assist in this transition. Our plug-and-play tools and services adapt to your growth needs. Trust in our expertise to ensure consistent connectivity and an optimal customer experience.

  Want to learn more?
  Download our eBook to get an in-depth look at Sangoma’s product suite for retail businesses.

  The post From In-Store to Online: How UCaaS is Bridging the Retail Communication Gap appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

October 01, 2023

• François Marier Connecting a VoIP phone directly to an Asterisk server

  On my Asterisk server, I happen to have two on-board ethernet boards. Since I only used one of these, I decided to move my VoIP phone from the local network switch to being connected directly to the Asterisk server.

  The main advantage is that this phone, running proprietary software of unknown quality, is no longer available on my general home network. Most importantly though, it no longer has access to the Internet, without my having to firewall it manually.

  Here's how I configured everything.

  Private network configuration

  On the server, I started by giving the second network interface a static IP address in /etc/network/interfaces:

  auto eth1
  iface eth1 inet static
      address 192.168.2.2
      netmask 255.255.255.0
  

  On the VoIP phone itself, I set the static IP address to 192.168.2.3 and the DNS server to 192.168.2.2. I then updated the SIP registrar IP address to 192.168.2.2.

  The DNS server actually refers to an unbound daemon running on the Asterisk server. The only configuration change I had to make was to listen on the second interface and allow the VoIP phone in:

  server:
      interface: 127.0.0.1
      interface: 192.168.2.2
      access-control: 0.0.0.0/0 refuse
      access-control: 127.0.0.1/32 allow
      access-control: 192.168.2.3/32 allow
  

  Finally, I opened the right ports on the server's firewall in /etc/network/iptables.up.rules:

  -A INPUT -s 192.168.2.3/32 -p udp --dport 5060 -j ACCEPT
  -A INPUT -s 192.168.2.3/32 -p tcp --dport 5060 -j ACCEPT
  -A INPUT -s 192.168.2.3/32 -p udp --dport 10000:20000 -j ACCEPT
  

  Network time synchronization

  In order for the phone to update its clock automatically using NTP, I installed chrony on the Asterisk server:

  apt install chrony
  

  then I configured it to listen on the private network interface and allow access from the VoIP phone by adding the following to /etc/chrony/conf.d/asterisk-local.conf:

  bindaddress 192.168.2.2
  allow 192.168.2.3
  

  Finally, I opened the right firewall port by adding a new rule to /etc/network/iptables.up.rules:

  -A INPUT -s 192.168.2.3 -p udp --dport 123 -j ACCEPT
  

  Accessing the admin page

  Now that the VoIP phone is no longer available on the local network, it's not possible to access its admin page. That's a good thing from a security point of view, but it's somewhat inconvenient.

  Therefore I put the following in my ~/.ssh/config to make the admin page available on http://localhost:8081 after I connect to the Asterisk server via ssh:

  Host asterisk
      LocalForward localhost:8081 192.168.2.3:80
  

  Allowing calls between local SIP devices

  Because this local device is not connected to the local network (192.168.1.0/24), it's unable to negotiate a direct media connection to any other local (i.e. one connected to the same Asterisk server) SIP device. What this means is that while calls might get connected successfully, by default, there will not be any audio in a call.

  In order for the two local SIP devices to be able to hear one another, we must enforce that all media be routed via Asterisk instead of going directly from one device to the other. This can be done using the directmedia directive (formerly canreinvite) in sip.conf:

  [1234]
  directmedia=no
  

  where 1234 is the extension of the phone.

September 29, 2023

• Enable Security September 2023: Security advisories, SIP & DTLS-SRTP interoperability and 5G infra attacks
  Welcome to the September edition of the VoIP and WebRTC security newsletter, RTCSec news! In this edition, we cover: our news, including the WebRTC & Video Delivery presentation we gave at CommCon, OpenSIPIt and our Attack Platform security fixes in FreeSWITCH, OpenScape, Stormshield and DLINK phones GPRS Tunneling Protocol user-plane (GTP-U) abuse, Signal upgraded for quantum computing and SBOMs RTCSec newsletter is a free periodic newsletter bringing you commentary and news around VoIP and WebRTC security.

September 28, 2023

• Digium Revolutionizing Communications for 25 Years – Asterisk

  Can you believe it? It’s been 25 years since Asterisk burst onto the scene and forever changed the communication landscape. This open-source software has revolutionized how we make phone calls, paving the way for voice-over IP (VoIP), unified communication, and more.

  In 1999, Mark Spencer, the founder of Digium, created Asterisk as a personal project to develop a PBX (Private Branch Exchange) system for his business. Little did he know that this humble beginning would spark a technological revolution. Check out “The Evolution of Asterisk� hosted by Joshua Colp, which takes you through the history of Asterisk.

  At its core, Asterisk is a robust communications platform enabling individuals and organizations to build phone systems. It empowers businesses to create feature-rich, scalable, cost-effective solutions tailored to their needs. Asterisk has become the go-to choice for companies worldwide, from small startups to large enterprises.

  One of the great things about Asterisk is its flexibility. It’s open-source, so developers can customize and extend its functionality to suit their needs. Asterisk can handle it all, whether you need call routing, voicemail, conference calling, or integration with other software systems!

  In the last 25 years, Asterisk has been evolving steadily. It’s seen countless updates, enhancements, and the introduction of excellent new features. The Asterisk community is incredibly vibrant and active, constantly pushing the boundaries of what we can do. Collaboration and sharing knowledge are at the heart of this community, inspiring innovation and propelling the platform forward.

  But Asterisk’s impact goes far beyond business communication. It has played a crucial role in bridging the digital divide, making affordable and easily accessible communication solutions available in underserved areas worldwide. In times of crisis, it has been a complete lifesaver, enabling quick deployment of communication infrastructure for effective disaster response.

  As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of Asterisk, it’s important to shout out to all the amazing people and organizations who’ve made it such a success! From developers and community members to businesses and users, each and every one of them has played a major role in shaping this incredible platform. Cheers to everyone involved!

  Looking ahead, the future of Asterisk is looking really bright. With all the advancements in technology, the possibilities are endless! We can expect to see even more incredible and innovative applications and integrations, which will solidify Asterisk as a top solution in the world of communication. Exciting times ahead!

  So, here’s to 25 years of Asterisk! Join us at AstriCon on February 15th for a day of networking, collaborating, and celebrating! Register now to attend!

  Let’s toast this incredible software’s past, present, and future. Cheers to the countless connections made, the problems solved, and the lives impacted.

  Happy anniversary, Asterisk! May your journey continue to inspire and transform the way we communicate.

  The post Revolutionizing Communications for 25 Years – Asterisk appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

September 20, 2023

• Digium SD-WAN, Explained

  What is SD-WAN and how can it benefit your network?

  The traditional means of setting up a business network have remained fairly static over the years — this has been a problem, limiting companies’ options. Businesses hoping to get up to speed with their computing needs have been forced to choose between expensive and difficult to obtain private connections and a loose collection of public internet resources. The emergence of software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) represents new possibilities.

  By leveraging multiple connections, whether private, public, or even wireless, SD-WAN represents an affordable and secure way to get the bandwidth your organization needs to run its systems and applications. With a centralized control layer in the cloud, SD-WAN provides a way to build a better business network that matches modern use cases.

  If you’re wondering about the best way to expand your network, it pays to learn the basics about SD-WAN: how it works, how it’s different from other types of networking, and what makes it so suitable for meeting organizations’ computing needs today. SD-WAN is largely defined by its ability to deliver the same capabilities companies have long taken from more traditional WAN options, but on a new technological and economic model, one with considerable upside.

  What is SD-WAN?

  SD-WAN is a wide-area network that is managed in the cloud instead of at the hardware level. Private networks, public broadband internet connections, mobile networks such as 4G, 5G, and satellite connections — all of these can become part of SD-WAN, with bandwidth aggregated through control systems in the cloud.

  Traffic over SD-WAN is wrapped in an encrypted VPN tunnel. This ensures that even when using a public internet connection, functionality is as secure as it would be on a traditional private connection employing multiprotocol label switching (MPLS). Combining multiple connections in a technology-agnostic SD-WAN network allows organizations to increase bandwidth to levels that rival those of private connections, without the time-consuming and costly installation.

  Every physical brand and digital service operated by a company are managed as part of a centralized SD-WAN network. This means offices, data centers, and critical cloud applications are all overseen through the same cloud-based software. This changes the way controls work — where previously, each site would have its own administrators, it is now possible to handle everything via the same IT personnel.

  The key features of SD-WAN are designed to allow businesses to take greater control over their networks. These include the following capabilities:

  • Bandwidth aggregation and hybrid WAN options: One of the most important traits of SD-WAN is its ability to coexist with other business connections, including standard MPLS WAN. Organizations can combine their private network with multiple commercial broadband internet connections, 4G/5G mobile networks, and more.
  • Link aggregation, dynamic path selection and forward error correction: These capabilities ensure that each data packet travels down the ideal path, so performance for mission-critical apps is as stable as it would be on a high-bandwidth private connection.
  • Continuous monitoring and automatic blackout correction: Automated features compensate for changes in the status of any of the individual connections that make up an SD-WAN network. When one internet resource stops responding, others automatically take up the slack, creating an environment with minimal downtime.
  • Link steering and QoS control: Administrators determine which applications have the highest priority, setting quality of service rules at a global or location-specific level. This ensures that the most important apps and services, such as voice and video, perform reliably with less jitter and latency.
  • Centralized network management: The fact that the control layer of SD-WAN resides in the cloud means its control panel is available from anywhere. Through this single view, administrators can drill down and work with the devices or applications running from any of a company’s offices.
  • Analytics capabilities: Because SD-WAN networks centralize the management of multiple connections across many locations, they provide IT teams with the ability to launch enterprise-spanning analysis operations, detecting the causes of issues and optimization opportunities.
  • Security posture: The security of an SD-WAN network is dependent upon the capabilities of the provider. These include firewalls and encryption to ensure traffic is as secure as it would be when passing through a standard MPLS network. Through the centralized control panel, companies can also manage the types of traffic disallowed on the SD-WAN, preventing potentially harmful application use throughout the organization.

  The net effect of these features is to create a solid and reliable business network solution that combines aspects of private connections — high bandwidth and data security—with advantages of public internet resources, namely low costs and flexibility regarding deployment. This is in keeping with the general trend of information technology today, with business users leaning toward cloud hosting rather than relying entirely on traditional hosting.

  How does traditional WAN compare with SD-WAN?

  It’s possible to break the comparison between WAN models down into a few categories. By defining SD-WAN against a model that only uses MPLS networking, you can determine which one fits your enterprise computing strategy most closely:

  Location specific vs. centralized: A traditional WAN network is often made up of disparate edge devices and managed via this hardware. The control for each office and data center resides locally. In SD-WAN, this management layer is entirely based on public cloud software and managed from a single location.

  The switch to using SaaS applications for critical business functions is a product of recent years, and it’s likely that longstanding enterprise leaders already have data center and office IT layouts in place on a traditional MPLS model. On the other hand, organizations going through rapid expansion could be wondering how to reach this level of tech maturity quickly. One answer may be SD-WAN.

  Separate vs. aggregated connections: Managing an MPLS network means working with individual private network connections. Your company can also opt to use the public internet, although reliability will decrease. Using SD-WAN, bandwidth from all sources is aggregated, with data packets sent via dynamic path selection.

  MPLS networks consisting of exclusively private internet resources have long been the gold standard for business networks, among companies that can afford them. These systems will not typically go away overnight when an organization begins using SD-WAN. The solutions may be used to complement one another, with the SD-WAN acting as a backup or extra bandwidth to support the MPLS network.

  Why are companies using SD-WAN now?

  Secure access to reliable, high-bandwidth connections has become an essential part of business today; companies have come to rely on mission-critical applications such as VoIP and video chat to coordinate their day-to-day activities. Furthermore, with common enterprise applications such as Salesforce, Hubspot, and more sold on a Software-as-a-Service model, it’s valuable to have access to a cloud-based solution that can deliver lower-latency connectivity to those apps.

  What are the top 5 trends in SD-WAN today?

  Growth is a universal goal, and it is another reason why SD-WAN has become so popular. Adding anything to a network — whether that is a new location, a cloud service, or piece of hardware — is simpler and more intuitive with an SD-WAN network, especially one that supports zero-touch provisioning from plug-and-play edge appliances.

  The challenges traditionally associated with provisioning a new private network connection, from the scarcity of necessary hardware to the high capital expenditures necessary to get the data center up to speed, are all eliminated when an organization uses SD-WAN. Therefore, when a business is interested in rapid growth, the math becomes simple: Use SD-WAN and get the capabilities now for less, or stay with a traditional MPLS-only model and wait 30 to 120 days.

  What are the key advantages of SD-WAN?

  While we have broken down the key selling points of our managed SD-WAN solution in detail elsewhere, a quick overview of how SD-WAN capabilities translate into business value can be instructive. In brief, the most compelling sources of SD-WAN value include:

  Cost management: There are a few distinct cost advantages to using SD-WAN. In one of the most direct examples, this method reduces capital expenditures associated with adding new resources to your network. Standing up a new enterprise-grade private network connection is costly, with scarce hardware and lengthy installation driving up the expense even further. SD-WAN’s agnostic approach to bandwidth enables you to turn to affordable commercial internet resources without sacrificing capacity or security.

  There are also operational expense reductions associated with the technology: Controlling all network resources from a centralized location is a more affordable approach to IT administration. The personnel operating these control panels can use their increased visibility to eliminate inefficiencies and get more performance from network resources.

  Ease of control: Controlling the whole network through a single pane of glass isn’t just a boon to cost-efficiency; it’s also a forward-thinking and effective way to operate. Your administrators can set policies that affect an application across every one of your offices, then zoom in and make exceptions where needed, ensuring perfectly tuned performance for the most important applications at each location.

  Why is Managed SD-WAN better than a DIY approach?

  With access to a deep analytic engine, personnel can detect possible sources of issues, then make minute changes to keep every service at peak performance. This level of oversight also enables better security, with the ability to choose which traffic to block on the network. While some apps receive priority access, others can be shut down altogether, all through a single centralized console.

  Quality of service: Your most mission-critical applications can perform better and with greater uptime when you’re using the managed SD-WAN solution from Sangoma. By setting QoS policies targeting VoIP, videoconferencing, and other essential cloud-based tools, you can make sure those solutions get priority, creating a better experience with less latency.

  When connections do fail, the SD-WAN solution offers many ways to compensate. Seamless failover via link aggregation is their key feature. Using automatic load balancing, application priority setting, and forward error correction, you can ensure that sessions do not drop when one of the connections making up your meshed architecture goes down.

  Increased reach and ease of deployment: Adding new offices or data centers to a business network is a common activity today, and implementing new SaaS applications is an important part of expanding your capabilities. These actions are simple and more cost-effective when you have a managed SD-WAN network instead of a pure MPLS solution. Bringing a new location online takes far less time when there is no need to set up a private connection — this process goes from months to minutes.

  When edge appliances support zero-touch provisioning, you don’t go through a complex configuration process for each new resource. Everything your organization needs to build a global network is easily available. Overseen by a combination of our network experts and your personnel, this new configuration will be available to grow alongside your business, regardless of the demands placed on your computing resources in the years ahead.

  What do you need to get started with SD-WAN?

  Beginning the journey to SD-WAN deployment involves a few key components as you set up new connections and create your network. This will likely take the form of a hybrid WAN, with some locations on SD-WAN and existing locations still on MPLS. Working with your provider of choice, you can assemble the following.

  • Internet connections: Depending on your budget, bandwidth needs, and what is available in your area, you can assemble a variety of public, private, and even mobile networks to form your SD-WAN.
  • Local appliances: Installing new primary and secondary edge devices in your data centers is an important part of creating an SD-WAN network. Higher throughput requirements will demand hardware with more advanced specifications. These components must also support key security features such as enterprise-grade firewalls and encryption to ensure your data remains protected at all times.
  • A design for the network: Creating an SD-WAN project that will provide lasting value takes planning and customization. By working with your networking partner, you can determine the types of circuits that make sense for each of your locations and assemble a cohesive strategy.

  It’s important to remember that your first SD-WAN deployment will likely not take the form of a full rip-and-replace of your current infrastructure. SD-WAN and traditional MPLS networks function effectively side by side, and it’s common to begin with SD-WAN circuits acting as affordable options for smaller branch locations.

  Over time, as contracts with your conventional network resources expire, your organization can move more capacity to the SD-WAN. In the years to come, as SaaS applications form an ever-larger part of companies’ IT deployments, this strategy could pay off in performance benefits alongside the cost advantages of using broadband internet circuits.

  Learning about SD-WAN is the first step in making it work for you. Next, it’s time to work with experts to assess your current infrastructure in detail and make a plan that fits your organization. If you’re interested in investigating further, contact our SD-WAN experts.

  The post SD-WAN, Explained appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

September 19, 2023

• Digium Celebrating Our 2023 Customer Experience Innovation Award

  We’re thrilled to announce that Sangoma CX has been honored with the 2023 Customer Experience Innovation Award by CUSTOMER Magazine. It’s a testament to Sangoma’s commitment to providing exceptional value, innovation, and customer support.

  The Sangoma CX solution is a full suite of products designed to level up customer interactions, offer speedy support, and foster brand loyalty for businesses of all sizes. And guess what? It comes with some pretty cool features, too!

  Multi-channel Support: Sangoma CX lets businesses communicate with customers through various channels like phone, SMS, email, and web chat, giving them a seamless experience.

  Analytics: With Sangoma CX, businesses gain helpful insights into customer behavior and preferences, enabling them to tailor products and services accordingly.

  Call Queuing & Routing: The CX solution offers advanced call queuing and routing capabilities, ensuring calls are directed to the right agents, reducing wait times, and improving customer satisfaction.

  The Sangoma CX solution takes customer experiences to the next level – shorter wait times, happier customers, and increased satisfaction guaranteed! It equips businesses with powerful tools for success, like multi-channel support. This award proves our dedication to customer-centric products and services. Check out Sangoma CX today for top-notch customer experiences and a competitive edge. Get in touch now to see how we can help you reach your goals.

  The post Celebrating Our 2023 Customer Experience Innovation Award appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

September 13, 2023

• Digium 3 Ways Cloud Communications Drive Value for the Healthcare Industry

  Cloud communications is a relatively new concept emerged in recent years as a key player in the world of telecommunications. It involves using cloud technology to facilitate real-time communication and collaboration between individuals and organizations, regardless of their location or device.

  With the healthcare industry evolving and embracing new technologies, cloud communications are poised to play an increasingly important role in facilitating communication and collaboration between healthcare providers, researchers, and patients. So, without further ado, let’s discuss how cloud communication benefits the healthcare industry.

  3 Ways Cloud Communications Drive Value for the Healthcare Industry

  Cloud communications technology has become increasingly popular in recent years, with the market expected to reach $1240 billion by 2027. Businesses can save up to 50% on communication costs by switching to cloud-based solutions.

  Additionally, cloud communications can improve employee productivity and collaboration, with 78% of employees reporting improved communication and collaboration after adopting cloud-based solutions.

  With the healthcare industry constantly evolving, it is crucial for healthcare providers to find innovative ways to improve efficiency and patient care. Cloud communications offer three key advantages:

  Improved Patient Experience
  An enhanced patient experience is a key benefit of cloud communication in the healthcare industry. Here are two examples of how cloud communication drives value for healthcare by improving the patient experience:

  Remote Patient Consultations. Telemedicine is a rapidly growing trend in healthcare, and cloud communication is vital in making it possible. Cloud communication technologies like video conferencing, instant messaging, and secure file sharing allow doctors to consult with patients remotely. It is particularly beneficial for patients who live in rural or remote areas where access to medical is quite limited.

  Appointment Scheduling. Cloud communication platforms can also schedule appointments. Patients can use an online scheduling system rather than calling a doctor’s office to schedule an appointment. It saves the patient’s time and streamlines the scheduling process for healthcare providers.

  Enhanced Communication with Cloud Technology
  A doctor can use cloud-based communication tools to access a patient’s medical records from the past, collaborate with other doctors or specialists in real-time, and provide immediate updates to the patient’s family members. This kind of communication can prevent errors, reduce wait times, and ultimately improve the quality of care.

  Increased Efficiency and Cost Effectiveness
  Cloud-based unified communication has brought about a revolution in the medical industry. Here are some ways it has transformed the industry:

  Improved Accessibility and Security of Healthcare Data. Cloud-based data storage and management ensure that healthcare data is secure and accessible only to authorized personnel. It uses security protocols such as encryption, firewalls, and two-factor authentication to safeguard patient data.

  Reduced Communication Costs. Cloud-based communication eliminates the need for traditional communication methods such as phone calls, faxes, and emails, which are time-consuming and costly. Cloud-based communication platforms such as video conferencing and messaging apps have significantly reduced communication costs in the medical industry.

  Conclusion

  To sum up, cloud communications offer significant benefits for the healthcare industry, including increased efficiency, improved patient care, and enhanced security for sensitive information. By leveraging cloud-based solutions, healthcare organizations can streamline communication processes, reduce costs, and provide better patient outcomes.

  The post 3 Ways Cloud Communications Drive Value for the Healthcare Industry appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

September 12, 2023

• Digium What is Unified Threat Management (UTM)?

  What is Unified Threat Management (UTM)?

  Unified Threat Management (UTM) is a collection of functions that capture threats at various stages of infiltration. This suite of tools works to protect customers against attacks and losses from cyberthreats including spam, viruses, ransomware, botnets and more.

  What is a Unified Threat Management (UTM) firewall?

  A UTM firewall is a comprehensive software solution that combines multiple security features into a single unified system with out-of-the-box policies, simplifying management and reducing the complexity of deploying multiple security solutions. Most UTM firewalls have functionalities like Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDPS), antivirus, antimalware, web filtering, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and basic firewall features like packet filtering, stateful inspection and access control.

  What are the benefits of a Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution?

  Businesses of all sizes use UTM solutions to provide these key benefits:

  • Centralized Integration and Management – A network security system contains multiple components (such as firewall, application control, among others) that can be cumbersome to control separately. UTM offers a framework that consolidates all the functions of the security system under one management console. This makes the system easier to monitor and gives operators the ability to pinpoint specific components of the UTM that may need attention for specific functions. Centralized security control allows businesses to monitor multiple threats affecting different components of your system simultaneously.
  • Adaptability and Flexibility – UTM offers a wide array of security technologies from which organizations can pick and choose what is most relevant to them. There is also the option to acquire a single licensing model with all the technologies included which helps avoid the purchase of multiple modules which can be difficult to manage. Constant updates ensure that an organization’s system is always current and equipped to provide effective security from threats.
  • Cost-efficiency – Organizations can benefit with significant cost savings by consolidating their network security management. A centralized framework reduces the number of devices that are needed, as well as the number of staff that were previously required to manage multiple devices.
  • Increased Awareness of Security Threats – The combination of a UTM’s centralization and faster operation results in an increased awareness of network security threats, enabling you to implement advanced threat protection (ATP). This equips your IT team to better manage advanced persistent threats (APTs) and other modern cyber threats.
  • Increased Threat Response Time – Integration of security functions under UTM allows for the coordination of functionality across various platforms. This allows for faster and streamlined processing of data while reducing resources required for threat inspection. This efficiency allows for network resources to be allocated to the needs of your business, such as resource-heavy applications, without compromising performance.

  How does a Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution work?

  A UTM solution identifies threats to an organizations’ network by using two inspection methods that address different types of threats:

  1. Flow-based inspection. Flow-based inspection, also known as stream-based inspection, samples data that enters a network security device, such as a firewall or IPS. The devices inspect the data for malicious activity, such as viruses, intrusions and other hacking attempts.
  2. Proxy-based inspection. Proxy-based inspection is a network security technique that can be used to examine the contents of packets that pass into and out of a network security device, such as a firewall, IPS or VPN server. By using a proxy server to inspect these packets, the network security device can act as a proxy to reconstruct the content entering the device.

  What are the features of a Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution?

  UTM solution features typically include:

  • Antispam – Antispam detects unwanted and malicious emails with global spam filtering that uses sender IP reputation and spam signatures.
  • Web Filtering – Web filtering blocks traffic to specific sites and domains that fit certain content types that are deemed as malicious. These settings can also be customized to filter out sites that make employees less productive.
  • Antivirus – Antivirus software detects, neutralizes and removes malware programs. Some providers like Sangoma use patented techniques to remove hundreds of thousands of malware programs.
  • Botnet and Domain Reputation – IP and domain address reputation tools block botnet command and control communication attempts daily. For reference, a botnet is a network of devices infected with malicious software and controlled as a group to send spam messages, initiate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and steal date.
  • App Control and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) – An intrusion prevention system (IPS) is a network security tool that continuously monitors a network for malicious activity and takes action to prevent it, including reporting, blocking or dropping the activity. Sangoma’s IPS service has blocked over 470,000 network intrusions with new IPS signatures deployed daily.

  Managed Unified Threat Management (UTM) Services by Sangoma

  Sangoma’s UTM service is designed to protect single and multi-location businesses from unwanted and malicious traffic coming into their environment. It includes advanced security features like antispam, web filtering, antivirus, app control, intrusion prevention and botnet blocking. The best part is that our service is a fully managed firewall solution, so that businesses offload all their security measures onto the Sangoma cloud network operations team, putting the responsibility and effort on us to ensure your networks are secured.

  To learn more about Sangoma’s Managed Unified Threat Management Services, please visit https://www.sangoma.com/managed-services/managed-network-services/managed-security/

  If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team. We’re here to help guide you through the decision-making process and ensure you find the best solution for your business.

  The post What is Unified Threat Management (UTM)? appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

September 06, 2023

• Digium Why Should Businesses Deploy a Unified Communications Strategy Today?

  Unified Communications (UC) has revolutionized businesses by consolidating multiple communication technologies and tools into a user-friendly platform. This integration has made collaboration and communication among employees more efficient and effective.

  UC enables employees to connect seamlessly, irrespective of their physical location. This seamless connectivity increases productivity, reduces costs, and improves customer service. Additionally, with all communication channels consolidated in one place, keeping track of conversations and ensuring everyone is on the same page has become effortless.

  Don’t wait to streamline your business communication. Invest in UC today and take your business to the next level!

  Why should businesses deploy a unified communications strategy today?

  Studies have shown that companies using UC solutions can boost productivity by an average of 52%. Moreover, research indicates that, on average, businesses make between 35,000 decisions per day.

  Additionally, businesses that have adopted UC solutions have a faster decision-making process and a 25% revenue increase compared to those that haven’t. A UC strategy can offer businesses several benefits, including the following:

  Increased Efficiency with AI
  Businesses can automate several tasks by deploying a Unified Communications strategy integrating AI, allowing employees to focus on more valuable work. For instance, AI-powered chatbots can help businesses handle customer inquiries more efficiently, freeing customer service teams to handle more complex issues.

  Improve Customer Service
  A Unified Communications strategy helps businesses provide better customer service by allowing employees to access customer information quickly and easily. For instance, when a customer calls, the employee can instantly access the customer’s order history, preferences, and other relevant information to provide personalized service.

  Connect Remote Employees
  A Unified Communications strategy allows remote employees to stay connected and collaborate with their colleagues. For instance, video conferencing can help conduct meetings, and virtual collaboration tools to enable workflow management.

  Streamline IT Operations
  A Unified Communications strategy can simplify IT operations by centralizing communication channels and reducing the need for multiple systems. It can reduce IT costs and make it easier for IT teams to manage and maintain communication systems.

  Increase Employee Productivity
  A Unified Communications strategy can help employees work more efficiently by streamlining communication channels and automating routine tasks. It can increase productivity and allow employees to focus on more valuable work. For instance, a salesperson can spend more time selling and less on administrative tasks.

  Conclusion

  A Unified Communications strategy is necessary for today’s digital-age businesses. UC solutions offer a range of benefits, from increased productivity to cost savings and improved customer satisfaction. By deploying a UC strategy, businesses can stay ahead of the curve and maintain a competitive edge in the market.

  The post Why Should Businesses Deploy a Unified Communications Strategy Today? appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

August 31, 2023

• Enable Security August 2023: Join OpenSIPit, learn about Zoom, Skype vulnerabilities, and more
  Hope you had some lovely holidays in August! And if not, what are you waiting for? This month we’re keeping the short news section and inviting people to participate in the upcoming edition of OpenSIPit! In this edition, we cover: our latest news and how to keep us in business Android security - 2G and VoLTE Zoom and AudioCodes vulnerabilities revealed at Blackhat Skype IP leak and how this is more common in RTC than assumed Memory corruption in Qualcomm chipsets handling VoLTE EVS audio (CVE-2022-40510) RTCSec newsletter is a free periodic newsletter bringing you commentary and news around VoIP and WebRTC security.

August 22, 2023

• Jitsi Authentication on meet.jit.si

  What’s going on?

  Starting on August 24th, we will no longer support the anonymous creation of rooms on meet.jit.si, and will require the use of an account (we will be supporting Google, GitHub and Facebook for starters but may modify the list later on). This is a first for us, so users may encounter a few bumps here and there as we are tweaking the experience to make sure there is as little friction as possible on the way into a meeting. 

  Why make a change?

  When we started the service back in 2013, our goal was to offer a meeting experience with as little friction and as much privacy as possible. We felt and still feel that both of these goals are very important and one of the main reasons that justified the existence of “yet another meeting service.” We wanted people to be able to converse easily and freely, without fear of expressing their views and opinions.

  Our “one tap and you’re in” experience was a big part of our strategy to eliminate friction. We didn’t want people to have to worry about “creating” meetings in advance, remembering passwords, codes or long complicated sequences of numbers for a meeting ID. We wanted users to be able to think of a name and just go there. Through the years we’ve had to compromise on this a little bit. We ended up introducing a pre-meeting device check screen. We felt that checking your camera and microphone before you entered a room could save everyone some hassle so it was worth the pause. 

  As for privacy, we previously made sure all communication was always encrypted and we retained no data beyond what is necessary to actually provide a decent meeting service. 

  Offering the possibility to anonymously use the service felt like a good way to help with both its privacy and the usability.

  Our commitment to both goals remains as strong as ever but anonymity is no longer going to be one of the tools we use to achieve them.

  Earlier this year we saw an increase in the number of reports we received about some people using our service in ways that we cannot tolerate. To be more clear, this was not about some people merely saying things that others disliked. 

  Over the past several months we tried multiple strategies in order to end the violations of our terms of service. However in the end, we determined that requiring authentication was a necessary step to continue operating meet.jit.si.

  How does this impact user privacy on meet.jit.si? 

  It is a good time to have a look at our privacy terms. 8×8 will now store the account responsible for creating rooms. Aside from the changes to our privacy terms referenced above, there is no other change to our meetings. We are still very much committed to holding user privacy in the highest regard and we still have no tools that would allow us to compromise the privacy of the actual audio or video content of a meeting, nor do we intend to create any.

  That said, it is completely understandable that some users may feel uncomfortable using an account to access the service. For such cases we strongly recommend hosting your own deployment of Jitsi Meet. We spend a lot of effort to keep that a very simple process and this has always been the mode of use that gives people the highest degree of privacy.

  If you see content that violates the jit.si terms of service you can always report it.

  That’s all we’ve got for now!

  The Jitsi Team

  The post Authentication on meet.jit.si appeared first on Jitsi.

August 03, 2023

• Jitsi Introducing the Jitsi Meet Flutter SDK

  Flutter‘s initial release occurred in 2017, the same year as the introduction of our mobile apps and mobile SDKs. For those who are unfamiliar with it, Flutter is one of the most popular frameworks for developing cross-platform applications.

  Now a few years after their first release, we are thrilled to announce that our mobile SDKs and Flutter cross paths as the Jitsi Meet Flutter SDK. Yes that’s right, after multiple requests, an official Jitsi Meet Plugin for Flutter is now available.

  As of now, our family of mobile SDKs is more complete than ever.

  Android and iOS are supported, of course. The plugin serves as a wrapper for the iOS and Android SDKs, on top of which a Flutter API was created with functionality similar to those found in native APIs.

  Add Jitsi Meet to your Flutter app

  The plugin is available on pub.dev under the jitsi_meet_flutter_sdk name. Discover it there, follow the instructions, and you’ll be able to utilize the API to the fullest extent.

  Here is a sneak peek of how simple it is to add a meeting to a fresh page.

  

  Here is how that looks like:

  

  In your own Flutter app, you’ll have the same view as the one from the Jitsi Meet mobile apps, with just a few additional lines of code, amazing, right?

  Have a look at the sample apps

  We developed two apps using the Jitsi Meet Flutter SDK, one of which is the example app in the plugin repository and primarily acts as a tester app by displaying the majority of the plugin’s features in the user interface, and the other of which is an official sample app in the repository that contains all of our samples for all mobile SDKs and is just a straightforward example of integrating Jitsi Meet.

  Flutter is new to us, and we hope this new SDK will make it easier for our users and JaaS customers to embed video meetings into their existing Flutter apps we agerly await your feedback!

  Your personal meetings team.

  ---

  Author: Gabriel Borlea

  The post Introducing the Jitsi Meet Flutter SDK appeared first on Jitsi.

July 28, 2023

• Enable Security July 2023: VoIP and WebRTC attack surface, pentesting for 2023 and VoIP DDoS attacks
  Welcome to the July edition of the RTC security newsletter! For this month, we brought back the short news section making this edition a bit shorter than usual. Do you prefer the longer form or is this more to your liking? In this edition, we cover: Our own recent presentation about the VoIP and WebRTC application attack surface Booking us for your pentest this year and our involvement with the upcoming OpenSIPIt DDoS threat report and VoIP SentryPeer news, STIR/SHAKEN problems and malware using RTC!

July 20, 2023

• Jitsi Introducing the Jitsi Meet React Native SDK

  Ever since we introduced our mobile apps to the world back in 2017 they have been backed by React Native.

  Using React Native allowed us to reach feature parity quickly since all logic is shared between our web and mobile codebases, because they are not 2 different things, it’s a single codebase

  Later that year, we released our native mobile SDKs to the world. These SDKs werer a thin wrapper over our React Native application, so our users could embed the entire meeting experience into their own mobile apps, with little effort.

  This has been our guiding priciple since the inception of the iframe API: to privide a high-level and fully-featured component that can be integrated into other apps.

  Today we are taking another step in our mobile jouney by releasing a React Native SDK.

  What does this mean? Before today if you had a React Native application we provided you with no way for embedding Jitsi Meet. Now we do!

  As mentioned above, our mobile apps are built using React Native and over time we received a number of requests from our community and customers to have an actual React Native SDK. We finally managed to expose it as a React Native library. It’s not that we didn’t have it in the back of our minds, but we focused on native first to cater the needs of our internal consumers.

  Exposing a React Native app as a component seems easy on the surface, but being so complex and having so many dependencies made it a lot harder han we had thought. Fortunately, this all changed thanks to Google Summer of Code. We were fortunate to have Filip Rejmus take on the project and kickstart it. After his amazing work, we took over and added the final touches and now it’s available on npm.

  How can I start using it?

  First go and grab our package from npm and follow the setup instructions.

  In the screenshot below you can see how easy it is to integrate and enable different meeting options into your app, by simply importing the JitsiMeeting component and adding it to your code:

  

  You will have access to the same features as the Jitsi Meet app.

  

  Test the sample app!

  We created a sample app which integrates our brand new SDK together with react-native-navigation, check it out!

  This new SDK will make it easier for our users and JaaS customers to embed video meetings into their existing React Native apps, we agerly await your feedback!

  Your personal meetings team.

  ---

  Author: Calin Chitu

  The post Introducing the Jitsi Meet React Native SDK appeared first on Jitsi.

July 19, 2023

• Digium Demystifying 10DLC: Unpacking Trust Scores and Campaign Registration

  10DLC (10 Digit Long Code) has evolved into a potent tool for application-to-person (A2P) corporate messaging, but new registration mandates from carriers have emerged. What’s the reason for registration? How does it work?

  Just like your commitment to delivering stellar service to your customers, carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile are keen on ensuring their customers’ satisfaction. This means they’re intent on curbing spam and unwanted messages from businesses – a protective measure for their brand.

  With the application of these A2P 10DLC rules, carriers are proactively identifying the senders and the content of the messages. The process begins with the one-off registration of your organization, referred to as the brand. Following this, you’ll need to register for a campaign – your use case that demonstrates your intended use of SMS.

  While the decline in spam is positive, customers might not see much difference in the A2P messages they receive from businesses. A crucial aspect of the 10DLC Campaign Registry is to build trust. You register your brand, detailing your business and its intent, which gives carriers an understanding of whether they can trust you or not.

  Multiple elements contribute to a brand’s trust score, including the brand’s industry, the intended use of SMS, and the brand’s compliance history. Carriers are keen to understand the nature of your business and the intent behind your messages before you start sending A2P messages.

  Registering for a 10DLC campaign can be a significant first step in proving to carriers that you are not a spammer and can be trusted. Carriers use a 1 to 5 scale to rate brands, which is then stored in their database. Here’s a simple guideline for understanding this score:

  1. High Risk: Unfortunately, you’re seen as a threat. Your messages will be sent at the lowest rate.
  2. Moderate Risk: You’re not seen as entirely reliable. Your messages will be sent at a slightly higher rate than the lowest.
  3. Low Risk: There’s a level of trust. Your messages will be sent at a standard rate.
  4. Trusted: You’re seen as reliable. Your messages will be sent at a high rate.
  5. Very Trusted: You’re seen as highly reliable. Your messages will be sent at the highest rate.

  Being in the process of registering your brand and campaign, there are a few things you need to be aware of. You can’t just start sending out messages – there are steps to follow that will determine the success of your campaign or your messaging ability.

  The process of getting a trust score is designed to ensure that you’re not seen as a risk. Once you’ve registered your brand and campaign, you’ll have to wait to receive your trust score. Once you do, your messages will be sent.

  In case you have restrictions, you might want to consider talking with your carrier to get approved. But if you decide to apply for the highest trust score, you’ll have no restrictions on your messaging, provided you’re not seen as a high risk.

  The main advantage of 10DLC is that it provides a better balance between high throughput rates and more reliable delivery. However, it’s important to note that your trust score can directly influence your carrier fees and your message throughput ability.

  How Sangoma Makes it Easy For You To Register for 10DLC

  To comply with 10DLC, every organization sending text messages is required to register their brand (the legal entity responsible for the content of the messages) with The Campaign Registry. If you are using one of Sangoma’s UCaaS platforms, we’ve taken care of this registration process for you with a simple form you can complete online.

  If you are a voice or communication service provider using Sangoma’s wholesale carrier services (formerly known as VI Communication Services), we’ve integrated the registration process directly into our BackOffice portal. This allows you to quickly collect information from your customers and get their numbers registered on their behalf. If you’d like more information on 10DLC and how Sangoma can help you and your customers, feel free to reach out to us!

  The post Demystifying 10DLC: Unpacking Trust Scores and Campaign Registration appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

July 18, 2023

• Digium The Top Gun Video Podcasts

  I’ve done several video and voice podcasts over my career, and I wanted to single out a fun one I did recently with Steve Farmiloe on “The Top Gun Show” / #topgunshow.

  

  This show is the most widely viewed and followed video podcast on LinkedIn in the telecommunications, VAR, and MSP industries. So it gets a good following, and I can see why. If you have 6 or 7 minutes, listen. It takes little time. And one thing Steve does differently is asking some non-business questions, which, to me anyway, makes it all interesting.

  Steve understands the channel quite well and asked us relevant questions. A central theme, and why we decided to go on this show in the first place, was that Sangoma is getting a “buzz” in the channel.

  What and why? So you can hear myself, Jamie Minner (CRO), Aaron Kanahale (VP of Strategic Relationships), Dan DeLozier (VP of Sales), and David Hardy / Chris Holloway (SVP Sales and SVP Channel Sales, respectively) talk about why we think this is so.

  To go to the video podcasts, please go here and scroll down.

  The post The Top Gun Video Podcasts appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

July 12, 2023

• Digium Hold the line, caller…you’re about to be switched off!

  Tick, tock, tick, tock…time is running out for your outdated business telephony.

  In 2017 BT announced it intended to Switch Off ISDN and PSTN in the UK; from 2025, traditional phone lines will stop working, and all calls will be made over the Internet.

  It’s the biggest and most important modernisation of the public phone network ever, and your business needs to ACT NOW to ensure a smooth transition.

  Thankfully, there’s no need to worry about how it will all work, as we can get you to where you need to be.

  There are four options, all suitable for businesses ranging in size from as few as three employees to many thousands of employees. All you have to do is decide which is the best fit for you, and we’ll help you do the rest…

  Option 1 – Adapt What You Have

  Extend the life of your current phone system by connecting it to the internet. This is done by adding hardware known as a VoIP Gateway and a link known as a SIP Trunk, which uses your existing Internet connection. It’s easy, and affordable, and users notice no difference – no new cables, handsets, or training.

  Option 2 – Upgrade What You Have

  Replace your installed on-premise system with the latest feature-rich digital technology known as a Unified Communications (UC) Platform; this can be installed as hardware or software. All your telephony is now on the internet and seamlessly aligned with your email, messaging, and chat applications via an easy-to-use, easily accessible user interface. Plus, it can all be replicated on employees’ desktop computers, laptops, and mobile devices for super-convenience.

  Option 3 – Migrate to the Cloud

  Follow hundreds of millions of organisations worldwide by replacing your on-premise system with a powerful, cloud-powered Unified Communications (UC) solution. All your calls, email, chat, and messaging now via the internet; zero line rental; limitless ability to add the latest new features at will; and pay monthly only for the services you use.

  Option 4 – Blend It All Together

  Mix options 1, 2, and 3 to suit your needs—for example, an on-premise system at your head office and a cloud-based system serving your remote sites. Or connect a cloud-based unified communications platform to an on-premise VoIP Gateway or SIP Trunk-powered system. Whatever the blend, enjoy the same seamlessly-integrated user experience.

  Click here for more background information about the Switch Off!

  The post Hold the line, caller…you’re about to be switched off! appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

July 06, 2023

• Digium Exploring 10DLC: A Comprehensive Insight Into Its Significance In Application-to-Person Texting

  A2P, or application-to-person texting, involves using an SMS service provider to send and receive messages. This used to be limited to automated messaging but has now expanded to resemble more personal conversations as more customers respond to business texts through 10DLC. This progression has led carriers like AT&T and T-mobile to step in to regulate these use cases.

  The Need for 10DLC Regulations

  The primary reason carriers are implementing 10DLC regulations is to prevent spammers from exploiting this medium. By requiring you to specify the A2P use cases for which you’re using texting, carriers aim to maintain text messaging as a quality channel for both customers and businesses. Complying with these regulations involves registering your organization and the texting use cases. Failure to do so may result in your messages being filtered and not delivered to customers.

  The Effects of 10DLC Brand Registration

  Registering your brand under 10DLC will improve the throughput of your messages, leading to faster delivery. This initiative by carriers is designed to ensure that SMS remains a reliable communication channel as more businesses start texting customers. The registration process helps to reduce spam and improve deliverability, thus enhancing the credibility of your messages with customers.

  Registration Requirements

  The 10DLC registration process requires you to provide the following details:

  • Your company’s legal name
  • Your company’s country of registration
  • The type of your organization (private, publicly traded, nonprofit)
  • Your company’s tax number/ID/EIN
  • Your business’s website
  • Descriptions of each campaign you text for
  • Sample messages for each campaign you text for

  While this may seem extensive, the information will be gathered via a form and submitted to The Campaign Registry, ensuring minimal work for you and contributing to your texting success.

  Understanding the Campaign Registry

  The Campaign Registry is a central platform for registering A2P 10DLC messaging campaigns. They help verify your business to prevent your messages from being filtered by carriers. They act as a liaison between your business and mobile carriers, and we work closely with them to represent your business and ensure your texts are delivered.

  Preventing Your Texts from Being Marked as Spam

  We’ve compiled a comprehensive guide to help you craft professional text messages that don’t get flagged as spam. Here are a few key tips:

  • Avoid sending mass messages with shortened URLs
  • Do not end a message with a link
  • Refrain from sending naked links (include the “https://”)
  • Avoid using ALL CAPS in your message
  • Limit the use of special characters (especially $ signs or emojis)
  • Don’t repetitively send the same exact message to large groups
  • Avoid sending texts the length of emails
  • Ensure your messages are well-written, free of spelling or grammatical errors and sound human

  You can sell your SMS service as wholesale just like you can with SIP trunking. However, you should be aware of a few key considerations:

  1. Industry Standards: As with SIP trunking, when you’re selling SMS services, you should aim to work with a reliable and reputable provider. The provider should offer services that meet industry standards and have a proven track record of reliability and quality.
  2. Carrier Regulations: One of the main differences when selling SMS services wholesale, particularly in the context of Application-to-Person (A2P) messaging, is the need to comply with carrier regulations. For example, in the United States, carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile have implemented regulations around the use of 10-digit long codes (10DLC) for A2P messaging. These regulations aim to prevent spam and maintain the quality of text messaging as a communication channel. As a wholesaler, you’ll need to register your organization and the use cases (campaigns) you text for, otherwise, your messages may begin to be filtered, and thus not delivered to customers. This registration process involves providing information about your organization, such as its legal name, country of registration, type of organization (private, publicly traded, nonprofit), tax number/ID/EIN, business’s website, and descriptions and sample messages for each campaign you text for.
  3. The Campaign Registry: A2P 10DLC messaging campaigns are registered through The Campaign Registry, a central hub that verifies your business to ensure your messages don’t get filtered by carriers. They serve as a conduit between your business and mobile carriers.
  4. Avoiding Spam: To avoid having your messages marked as spam, you should follow best practices when sending text messages. These include avoiding the use of shortened URLs, not ending a message with a link, avoiding sending the same message to large groups over and over again, avoiding sending texts the size of emails, and ensuring your messages sound like an actual human wrote them and are free of spelling or grammatical errors.
  5. Fees and Costs: With the implementation of new 10DLC regulations, mobile carriers have also introduced new fees. These registration fees are often pass-through costs, and service providers may incorporate them into the cost of their service plans.

  If you are a voice or communication service provider using Sangoma’s wholesale carrier services (formerly known as VI Communication Services), we’ve integrated the registration process directly into our BackOffice portal. This allows you to quickly collect information from your customers and get their numbers registered on their behalf. If you’d like more information on 10DLC and how Sangoma can help you and your customers, feel free to reach out to us!

  The post Exploring 10DLC: A Comprehensive Insight Into Its Significance In Application-to-Person Texting appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

July 05, 2023

• Digium Communications and the Hospitality Market

  I used to wonder why phones were in hotel rooms anymore. You don’t need to call out or receive phone calls from outside the building anymore, given we all have cell phones now. But I started learning more about this market, and guess what – you need a phone in the room. People call for room service, and people call for more towels; you never know when you might need to call 911, etc. Just because I haven’t used the hotel room phone in a while doesn’t mean no one else does. So you need a phone

  Last month, you might have noticed that Sangoma announced a partnership with GrayMatter Networks. They have built a specific hospitality module that works in conjunction with Sangoma’s UCaaS platforms PBXact and FreePBX.

  GrayMatter’s BrainBox interfaces with hospitality property management systems to enable a comprehensive suite of hospitality-centric features, including enhanced wake-up calls, call accounting, voicemail, housekeeping room status, next-generation 911 compliance, and more.

  Sangoma historically has supported different vertical communication markets, and we’re happy to work with GrayMatter Networks to provide best-in-class solutions that enable hospitality businesses to improve operational efficiency, enhance guest services, and streamline communication workflows.

  The post Communications and the Hospitality Market appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

June 30, 2023

• Enable Security June 2023: Talks on VoIP security, WebRTC server-side attacks and WISH/WHIP
  It is finally conference season and so this newsletter covers 3 different events focused on RTC and opensource communications as well as the latest and greatest security fixes related to VoIP and WebRTC. In this edition, we cover: Kamailio World, CommCon and OpenSIPS summit presentations of interest Our own work especially on WebRTC and WISH (WHIP) security More open SIP relay attacks in the wild DDoS, botnets and VoIP RTC vulnerabilities and fixes in MacOS, iOS, WebRTC and more RTCSec newsletter is a free periodic newsletter bringing you commentary and news around VoIP and WebRTC security.

June 21, 2023

• Digium Harnessing the Power of Wholesale SIP Trunking: A Guide for Communication Service Providers

  Introduction

  In the increasingly digital landscape of business and communication, staying ahead of the curve is paramount. As communication service providers, we’ve seen firsthand the evolution of our industry. From the humble beginnings of the telephone to the booming era of mobile devices, the change has been rapid and relentless. Today, we find ourselves at the precipice of another transformation – wholesale SIP trunking. But what does it mean, and more importantly, how can it drive growth for communication service providers and voice service providers? This article will illuminate the path to understanding and harnessing the power of wholesale SIP trunking.

  The Dawn of SIP Trunking: A Brief History

  The Evolution of Telecommunications
  Our journey begins decades ago, in a time when the concept of instant communication was just a dream. Over the years, we’ve seen the advent of the telephone, the proliferation of mobile devices, and the rise of internet-based communication. In each of these phases, the core objective remained the same – to make communication quicker, clearer, and more efficient. As we stand in the era of digital communication, SIP trunking has emerged as a technology that encapsulates these objectives. Born out of the need for more efficient voice communication, SIP trunking bridges the gap between traditional telephony and digital communication, offering a hybrid solution that combines the best of both worlds.

  Why Wholesale SIP Trunking?

  The Predictable Revenue Stream: A Business Dream
  As seasoned communication service providers, we understand the importance of stable, predictable revenue. It serves as a backbone for our operations, helping us plan better and strategize more effectively. By providing low-cost SIP services, we can tap into a burgeoning market, providing a service that is in high demand. This creates a recurring, predictable revenue stream, giving us the stability and confidence to grow our operations.

  Loyal Customers: The Heart of a Successful Business
  Customer loyalty is not just about retaining customers, it’s about strengthening relationships and establishing trust. By introducing customers to SIP and VoIP, we can offer them a more cost-effective, efficient solution to their communication needs. This not only enhances our value proposition but also helps us earn a more significant portion of their telecommunications expenditure. This strengthens the customer relationship and engenders loyalty, an invaluable asset in today’s competitive business landscape.

  The Ease of Deployment & Administration
  In a world where speed and efficiency are of the essence, the quick deployment and easy administration of wholesale SIP trunking come as a boon. Unlike traditional telephone systems, which involve physical lines and lengthy installation processes, SIP trunks and channels can be provisioned in real-time and configured on-demand. This agility enables us to serve our customers better, getting them up and running in no time.

  The Profitability Potential
  Wholesale SIP trunking isn’t just about providing a service; it’s also about maximizing profitability. By offering value-added services along with SIP trunking, such as call recording, automated attendant, and disaster recovery, we can increase the profitability of each account. This allows us to diversify our revenue streams and leverage cross-selling opportunities, thereby bolstering our bottom line.

  Flexibility: The Key to Customer Satisfaction
  Every customer is unique, with their own specific needs and wants. The most successful service providers are those that can cater to this diversity. With wholesale SIP trunking, we can offer multiple pricing models, including unlimited minutes per channel, unlimited number of channels with a set number of minutes, and a per-minute rate for an unlimited number of channels. This flexibility ensures that we can meet the needs of all our customers, providing a personalized and tailored solution that leaves no one out.

  The Importance of a Reliable Network
  In the world of telecommunications, quality and reliability are non-negotiable. Customers expect, and rightly so, a service that is high-quality and dependable. As such, it’s crucial to work with a wholesale SIP provider that leverages a Tier-1, SAE 16 Type II certified network with real-time replication and total redundancy. This ensures that we can offer our customers a reliable service, enhancing our reputation and credibility in the market.

  The Power of Versatility: Compatibility Across Platforms
  One of the greatest advantages of wholesale SIP trunking is its compatibility with a variety of PBX solutions. This enables us to serve customers across multiple platforms, increasing our potential customer base. And with the popularity of open-source PBX platforms like Asterisk and FreePBX, it’s crucial to choose a wholesale SIP trunk solution that is compatible with these platforms.

  Branding: More Than Just a Logo
  In today’s digital world, branding is more important than ever. It’s not just about a logo; it’s about creating a consistent, recognizable identity that resonates with customers. With wholesale SIP trunking, we can reinforce our brand by white labeling our services. This means adding our logo and branding to the SIP system we offer, creating a consistent customer experience that builds brand recognition and loyalty.

  The Significance of Support in SIP Trunking
  In any business, support is a crucial element that can’t be overlooked. This is particularly true in the world of SIP trunking, where technical issues can arise. Understanding the level of support offered by wholesale SIP trunking platform providers is essential to ensure that you can tackle any challenges that may come up.

  Tax & Billing Handling: The Unsung Hero of Business Operations
  Tax and billing might not be the most glamorous part of business, but it’s certainly one of the most important. Managing telecommunications-related taxes and fees can be a complex and tedious process. Luckily, some wholesale SIP partners take care of this for you, handling the nitty-gritty of taxation and billing so you can focus on growing your business.

  Conclusion

  Wholesale SIP trunking represents a promising opportunity for communication service providers and voice service providers to grow their brand and scale their operations. By offering predictable revenue, fostering customer loyalty, simplifying deployment, increasing profitability, and providing a flexible and reliable service, wholesale SIP trunking can be a game-changer in the world of telecommunications.

  To learn more about our wholesale sip trunking services please visit: https://carrierservices.sangoma.com/

  Frequently Asked Questions

  1. What is wholesale SIP trunking?
  Wholesale SIP trunking is a technology that allows communication service providers to offer SIP services at a lower cost. It bridges the gap between traditional telephony and digital communication, providing a hybrid solution that offers the best of both worlds.

  2. How can wholesale SIP trunking create a predictable revenue stream?
  Wholesale SIP trunking creates a predictable revenue stream through its subscription-based model. By offering low-cost SIP services, communication service providers can tap into a growing market and generate recurring, stable income.

  3. What role does wholesale SIP trunking play in customer loyalty?
  Wholesale SIP trunking enhances customer loyalty by providing a cost-effective and efficient solution to their communication needs. This strengthens the customer-provider relationship and engenders trust, thereby fostering customer loyalty.

  4. How does wholesale SIP trunking enhance profitability?
  Wholesale SIP trunking enhances profitability by allowing providers to offer value-added services alongside SIP trunking. These additional services provide cross-selling opportunities, diversifying revenue streams and increasing the profitability of each account.

  5. What makes a high-quality, reliable wholesale SIP trunking service?
  A high-quality, reliable wholesale SIP trunking service is one that leverages a Tier-1, SAE 16 Type II certified network with real-time replication and total redundancy. It should also offer a high level of support to handle any technical issues that may arise.

  6. What role does branding play in wholesale SIP trunking?
  Branding in wholesale SIP trunking is about creating a consistent, recognizable identity that resonates with customers. Through white labeling, providers can add their branding to the SIP system they offer, reinforcing their brand and building customer loyalty.

  7. How does wholesale SIP trunking handle tax and billing?
  Some wholesale SIP partners take care of tax and billing for providers, handling the complex and tedious process of managing telecommunications-related taxes and fees. This allows providers to focus on growing their business.

  The post Harnessing the Power of Wholesale SIP Trunking: A Guide for Communication Service Providers appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

June 20, 2023

• Digium Making it Easy for SMBs Looking for Communications Solutions

  You may have noticed back in April; we announced our bundles. And I’ve gotten a few questions about what’s that all about and why we did it.

  First, let me address what it is all about. For some time in Sangoma, we have been trying to address the complexity a business has in buying multiple cloud communication solutions. From UCaaS to video meetings to collaboration to fax to internet access to SD-WAN to security, organizations have to sift through different vendors, contracts, user types and options, pricing structures, etc., when purchasing services. We’ve heard this from both partners and end-users. Yes, we understand it is not easy. And it’s confusing. And it takes time. It takes time.

  So at the heart of the Sangoma Suite is making it easy to buy and understand what you are getting. The Suite is centered around purchasing UCaaS and adding on top of other services you might need in an easy-to-understand manner. So I hope if you are evaluating us, this comes through.

  And why did we do it? In many ways, we are unique in that we offer all of what an SMB might need for communications – UCaaS (phone calls, collaboration, video meetings), add-on services such as fax and contact center, and also offer MSP type services such as internet access options, security, and SD-WAN. We are unique in providing all of these services. So our bundles take this into account – easy to understand what you are getting, with easy-to-understand pricing if you take the optional services.

  Please go here to learn more about how our bundles might help you.

  The post Making it Easy for SMBs Looking for Communications Solutions appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

June 09, 2023

• Digium Retail SIP Trunking vs. Wholesale SIP Trunking: Time to Take the Big Sip?

  We’re all familiar with SIP Trunking – it’s reliable, cost-effective, and a staple in the business communication landscape. But have you heard of its more advanced counterpart, Wholesale SIP trunking?

  Wholesale SIP trunking is like SIP trunking but on steroids. It promises greater savings, improved scalability, and an opportunity to resell services. It’s the next step in telecommunication evolution that could catapult your business efficiency to new heights.

  Now, you may be asking, “When should my business consider this switch?” Well, strap in, because we’re about to embark on a journey to answer that very question. Let’s explore when it’s time to hang up on regular SIP trunking and switch to wholesale SIP trunking. The future of your business communications might just be a ‘switch’ away!

  SIP Trunking: The Trusty Workhorse of Business Communication

  Before we explore the shiny new world of wholesale SIP trunking, let’s take a moment to appreciate our dependable staple – SIP trunking. Acting as the backbone of business communications, SIP trunking has been transmitting voice and other unified communications data across the internet with remarkable efficiency.

  Worldwide, SIP trunking accounts for almost 60% of all network traffic. And it’s not just because it’s popular; it’s because it delivers. Over 90% of SIP users report being satisfied with the audio quality​.

  But its pièce de résistance? The incredible cost savings. Businesses that have switched to VoIP via SIP trunking have seen the cost of their local calls drop by up to 40%, and international calls? They’ve saved up to a staggering 90%​. That’s the kind of economics any business can get behind.

  So, with its strong track record and undeniable financial benefits, SIP trunking has firmly established itself in the business communications landscape. But as we all know, even the trustiest workhorse can face competition from a more powerful contender. Enter wholesale SIP trunking. Let’s see what this new player brings to the table.

  The Turning Point: Recognizing When to Switch to Wholesale SIP Trunking

  In the dynamic landscape of business communication, knowing when to embrace change can be a decisive factor for growth and efficiency. Not every business may need to transition to Wholesale SIP trunking, but for some, it could be an essential step forward. So, how do you discern when it’s the right time for this strategic move? Here are several key indicators to consider:

  Business Expansion
  If your business is experiencing rapid growth, it may necessitate a communication solution that can adeptly keep pace. Just as an expanding team requires more resources, a burgeoning business might outgrow the capacities of regular SIP trunking. In such scenarios, Wholesale SIP trunking, with its inherent scalability, can cater to evolving needs more effectively.

  Demand for High Uptime
  Downtime can be detrimental to any business, causing disruptions that lead to loss of productivity and revenue. If your business operations demand high uptime, Wholesale SIP trunking could be a strategic choice. With the potential to achieve an uptime of up to 99.96% using cloud-based VoIP, it offers a robust solution for maintaining business continuity​.

  Cost Efficiency
  SIP trunking is already more cost-efficient than traditional telephone lines, but wholesale SIP trunking can take these savings even further. This is especially true for businesses with a high volume of calls, as the cost per call can decrease significantly with a wholesale model. Moreover, there’s no need to invest in high-priced equipment, and installation costs are minimal​​.

  Increasing Call Volume
  If your business is consistently handling a high volume of calls and you’ve noticed that your costs are rising with this demand, it might be time to look at wholesale SIP trunking. The scalability of this model can provide significant cost savings for businesses that have a large volume of calls, reducing the cost per call​​.

  Growing Your Business
  If your business is rapidly expanding and you’re adding new locations or employees. You can even add regional and international office numbers, allowing your customers to avoid long-distance charges​​.

  Deciding to switch to wholesale SIP trunking is a significant decision that requires careful evaluation. However, if your business aligns with one or more of the above scenarios, it may be time to transition from regular SIP trunking to its more advanced and versatile counterpart, wholesale SIP trunking. Recognizing the turning point can pave the way for greater business efficiency and growth.

  These signs can help you recognize when it’s time to switch from SIP trunking to wholesale SIP trunking. Remember, every business is unique, so it’s important to weigh the pros and cons based on your specific needs and circumstances.

  “Super-Sizing” SIP: Upgrading Your SIP Experience: The Wholesale Advantage

  So, you’re sold on SIP trunking but now you’re considering stepping up your game and diving into the wholesale pool. Good on you! But what’s in it for your business? Let’s unbox the benefits of moving from regular SIP trunking to wholesale SIP trunking:

  Scalability
  Wholesale SIP trunking offers unparalleled scalability. Whether your business is growing faster than a weed in spring or you experience seasonal spikes in call volumes, you can easily add or remove channels as needed with wholesale SIP trunking. You’re not stuck with a fixed number of channels that either leave you paying for capacity you don’t need or constantly bumping up against the limits of your lines​​.

  Reselling Opportunities
  With wholesale SIP trunking, you’re not just a consumer—you’re also a potential provider. If you’ve ever dreamt of becoming a telecom tycoon, here’s your chance! As a wholesale SIP trunking user, you can offer SIP services to your own clients, providing them with phone numbers and lines at competitive rates. Now, that’s what we call a win-win​​​.

  View this infographic to learn why you need to sell wholesale SIP trunking.

  Redundancy & Reliability
  Wholesale sip trunking providers often have redundant infrastructure, ensuring that your communication remains uninterrupted even in the face of network outages or disasters. It’s like having a backup generator for your voice services!

  So, if you’re looking to level up your SIP game, wholesale SIP trunking offers a host of benefits that regular SIP trunking just can’t match. Whether it’s the scalability, reselling opportunities, improved uptime, cost efficiency, or the ease of geographic mobility, wholesale SIP trunking is a force to be reckoned with in the business communications arena.

  Making the Transition to Wholesale SIP Trunking – Smooth Sailing Ahead!

  How do you make the transition without breaking a sweat? Here’s a simple roadmap:

  Find a Reliable Provider
  Do your research and choose a wholesale sip trunking provider with a stellar reputation and a track record of exceptional service. Look for features like 24/7 customer support, network redundancy, and a global footprint.

  Evaluate Your Needs
  Determine your call volume, international requirements, and growth projections. Communicate these details to your chosen provider so they can tailor a solution to meet your specific needs.

  Plan the Switch
  Coordinate with your provider to ensure a smooth transition. Create a deployment plan, test the new setup, and train your team on any new features or processes.

  The SIP Trunking Journey

  In the world of SIP trunking, it’s not just about making calls—it’s about making connections. And with wholesale SIP trunking, those connections could be clearer, more reliable, and more cost-effective than ever before.

  Remember, the goal isn’t to just follow the crowd—it’s about choosing the right path for your business. It’s about recognizing when your business is ready for a change, understanding the benefits, and making a well-informed decision.

  Whether you’re dealing with an increasing call volume, planning to expand your business, eyeing the potential of reselling SIP services, seeking improved uptime, or just looking for more cost efficiency, wholesale SIP trunking could be the next big leap for your business communications strategy.

  If you’re considering whether wholesale SIP trunking is right for your business, or if you just have more questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. We’re here to help guide you through the decision-making process and ensure that you find the best solution for your business.

  The post Retail SIP Trunking vs. Wholesale SIP Trunking: Time to Take the Big Sip? appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

June 06, 2023

• Digium More Reasons to Utilize SD-WAN

  Last month, Sangoma partnered with Frost and Sullivan to offer a leading-edge webinar regarding the state of SD-WAN.

  SD-WAN is growing quite well, primarily because of all the cloud applications requiring resources and the need for a business to ensure that it has sufficient internet access at an affordable price. But SD-WAN is relatively complex to operate, so 91% of all SD-WAN installations are either of the fully-managed or co-managed variety. If you are looking for a solution to help your business, Sangoma can help you.

  One new learning that makes sense but I hadn’t thought much about before is that all these new “smart” IoT applications will require even more bandwidth, smart scaling, and intelligent routing, making SD-WAN even more important. So if you haven’t deployed SD-WAN yet, at some point, soon you will want to for the continued health of your business.

  If you want to listen to a webinar replay, please go here.

  The post More Reasons to Utilize SD-WAN appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

May 31, 2023

• Enable Security May 2023: RTC conferences, advisories for Cisco, Mitel, sofia-sip
  Welcome to the May edition of the monthly VoIP and WebRTC security newsletter! In this edition, we cover: Kamailio World in Berlin and CommCon in the UK Open Source Telecom Software Survey 2023 Asterisk PBX and ASAN compilation SIP-based vulnerabilities in Shannon Baseband vulnerabilities many more RTCSec newsletter is a free periodic newsletter bringing you commentary and news around VoIP and WebRTC security. We cover both defensive and offensive security as they relate to Real-time Communications.
• Digium Leaving DIY Behind

  With a lot involved in deploying SD-WAN, leveraging a managed service provider (MSP) can help businesses keep their IT staff forward-thinking. There are many to choose from, and knowing the criteria to get the best fit is essential.

  Choosing an MSP Tailored to Business Size

  In searching for an MSP to align with, the size and focus are important so that businesses receive service based on their needs and style. For instance, if an SMB pairs up with an MSP designed for enterprise networking, MSP may not provide the personalized touch the business requires. They are simply too large. On the other hand, selecting a start-up MSP may not be mature with respect to its service offerings. However, they might be able to deliver SD-WAN, which may not meet overarching needs.

  Missing Complementary Services

  Once a business chooses an MSP for SD-WAN, they’ll want them to provide more than just services. For instance, businesses may want to add:

  • Voice services for collaboration for all their locations
  • Security services

  Businesses should want to partner with an MSP that can consolidate these services more holistically. They will want a partner that can help with their overall technology roadmap. For instance, integrating the network security of SD-WAN with endpoint security.

  Security at the MSP Level

  This relates to how the MSP is protecting themselves which effectively protects the customer. If their network is not reliable and secure, that will mean downtime and security issues for their customers. An easy way to investigate this is to know what type of certifications they have. A typical one to look for is SOCII (service operation center), where they have their processes not only well established but are independently tested by third-party auditors. These auditors will verify the following:

  • Network Security
  • Data Security
  • Process Security

  MSP WAN Diversity

  As they look for an MSP, businesses may find that many lack WAN service diversity and are not carrier agnostic. Businesses will want to ask questions such as:

  • Do they offer just one type of circuit?
  • Do they partner with just one carrier and offer just one service?
  • Do they have the relationships and product breadth to cover many different transport types over many different regions?

  That’s the benefit of picking an MSP that has those relationships to bring in a complete solution set and deliver it over one single bill instead of receiving bills from all the individual locations.

  The Sangoma Difference

  Let’s take a look at how Sangoma’s Managed SD-WAN service delivers this solution-set to customers and look at some key strengths.

  Dedicated Implementation Team
  When an SD-WAN solution is deployed, our dedicated implementation team begins to establish a relationship with the customer; they bring the customer through the entire implementation lifecycle, including post-implementation, monitoring, and support. This dedicated project management style approach is a crucial differentiator of Sangoma’s.

  Owned & Operated Robust Core Network Backbone
  Sangoma has pioneered the SD-WAN landscape with its own privately owned and operated PCI-Certified and HIPAA-compliant backbone. We have a diverse set of WAN transport options that brings all those transport options into a single network backbone that enables our clients to have the carrier and transport diversity that enables them to be successful.

  Managed, Maintained & Monitoring 24/7/365
  A major strength of Sangoma’s SD-WAN service is that customers can completely offload their IT resources from the burden of managing, monitoring, and maintaining the SD-WAN service. Sangoma’s dedicated network operations center (NOC) does all this for them remotely. If any issues arise, the NOC team is automatically notified and resolves the issue, even before it has any chance of reaching the customer’s network. Since Sangoma has a homegrown SD-WAN solution, customers have true experts on their side, assuring total satisfaction.

  Simplified Billing
  There is a lot of value in having customized invoices that simplify a customer’s back office approach to processing bills and allow the back office staff to be more strategic in their efforts.

  Sangoma’s Managed SD-WAN solution ensures customers securely connect any user, any device, anywhere, anytime, over any transport. It provides connectivity uptime for users in the most secure way.

  Summarizing SD-WAN Objectives

  In summarizing the need for SD-WAN, there are 3 main objectives:

  Uptime & Application Availability
  Users need to be able to reach their application whenever needed, so network uptime is vital. Included in uptime is also a security component. For instance, if there is a security attack that takes down the network, the user applications become unavailable. So, ensuring security incidents don’t occur is also key.

  Visibility & Management of WAN Workloads
  With the resiliency of an SD-WAN network, a failure could occur without users ever noticing and without impact. Still, visibility and management of those individual components are important to ensure the trouble has been identified and remediated in order to get back to primary services.

  Simplifying the Complexity of Telco Billing
  Consolidating all the individual bills from each carrier in their respective regions offers a nice white-glove approach and saves customers time and resources.

  So, is DIY the right approach to SD-WAN?

  SD-WAN technology is advantageous to incorporate into business networks. Still, it can worsen the complexities of network management for organizations that lack the IT resources to deploy and maintain an SD-WAN solution. They may look to MSPs to deliver managed SD-WAN to replace their traditional WAN architecture. MSPs can provide simplified SD-WAN operations by leveraging a multi-vendor strategy enabling them to augment their offering to provide agility and a differentiated service tailored to business requirements.

  Get in touch with one of our Managed SD-WAN specialists.

  The post Leaving DIY Behind appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

May 24, 2023

• Digium Build Your Own Communications Platform with APIdaze (CPaaS)

  No commercial off-the-shelf software meeting your needs? Tired of wasting time juggling multiple, disparate communications tools to get the job done?

  Tie together Voice, Video, and SMS, for example, and integrate customized solutions into your existing user interface or business processes with our pre-built APIs in our communications platform/SDK environment.

  APIdaze is our CPaaS platform for programmable telephony that clients have used to develop custom IVRs, create webhooks for WebRTC, and even develop AI Bot responders. Build your own call center, integrate SMS in your softphone client, automate call tracking applications, and more; the applications are nearly endless.

  APIdaze enables you to create the perfect communication solution platform, or augment your existing one, without the time and money building it all by yourself.

  Check out this customer testimonial for more details.

  APIdaze can integrate with your existing platform to enhance your development efforts. APIdaze is highly customizable and uses our pre-built communications API’s to enable your developers to add real-time voice, video, and messaging elements into VoIP, web, and mobile applications.

  Download our paper on the CPaaS Revolution to learn more about how APIdaze can streamline your communication platform development efforts.

  About Sangoma Wholesale Carrier Services

  Sangoma Wholesale Carrier Services, formerly known as VI, provides value-added resellers access to industry-best Sip Trunking products and carrier services, over our own nation-wide network at discounted rates to service aggregators. We offer wholesale Trunking as a Service (TaaS), provide telecom compliance and regulatory solutions, SPAM/Fraud protections, and reseller-focused features such as Hosted Billing. Sangoma Wholesale Carrier Services continues a legacy of innovations in product development, the expansion of our core networks and to advance technological capabilities, such as CPaaS, to help value-added resellers thrive as communications service providers.

  The post Build Your Own Communications Platform with APIdaze (CPaaS) appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

May 23, 2023

• Digium Cybersecurity Importance to SMBs

  Cybersecurity is essential for SMBs. This Business Tech Weekly article explains why in more detail, but some of the obvious ones include a relative lack of resources, inadequate training, and the desire to spend only what the business considers to be “needed.”

  But this is proving risky. According to the IBM Security, Cost of Data Breach 2022 Report, data breaches cost businesses a lot of money. “Reaching an all-time high, the cost of a data breach averaged $4.35M in 2022, and 83% of organizations studied have experienced more than one data breach.”

  As such, today, many companies are making this their number one IT priority – to ensure they do not contribute to the next report!

  But what to do about it? While the Business Tech Weekly article explains a few essential areas to cover (like training employees about phishing emails, instituting solid passwords, etc.), that still won’t cover everything.

  The IT department may have a big load they can’t handle. One good way to address that is to go to a Managed Service Provider who can offer these services. One you already go to for your UCaaS or Access—someone like Sangoma.

  The post Cybersecurity Importance to SMBs appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

May 17, 2023

• Digium The Pitfalls To Avoid In DIY SD-WAN

  In our last blog we started a conversation around the advantages of Managed SD-WAN vs DIY. In this post we are continuing that discussion by outlining some of the pitfalls to avoid when attempting a DIY SD-WAN.

  Overloading internal IT & Project Management Resources

  Depending on the size of the business, monopolizing IT staff resources for SD-WAN deployment may not be the best use of their time when they could be focusing on more strategic efforts. Enterprise businesses may be fine as they may have an entire floor dedicated to IT/ project management resources, but for an SMB, the IT resources are much thinner. So, keeping IT resources as strategic as possible is most important here.

  Inaccurate Budget & Timeline

  As already discussed, there are a lot of things that need to be discovered when it comes to the implementation and post-implementation of an SD-WAN solution. When it comes to budget, there is a need to expand the focus not just on dollars but take a look at the human capital and timeline to be able to complete a deployment.

  For small to medium-sized businesses, it’s beneficial to align with an experienced MSP who can deploy a dedicated team of certified and specialized network engineers that not only can set realistic expectations but can help them remain mindful of all the steps for an on-time delivery.

  Overlooking/Underestimating the Complexity of Networks

  The first question an executive team should ask themselves is, “Should we continue to manage our networks within?” It’s a meaningful and impactful question, especially if the business is starting to embrace hosted solutions, SaaS, or public cloud services, where the network’s complexity will change drastically.

  Thinking that SD-WAN & A Network Cure-all

  A major benefit of SD-WAN is that it can automatically detect link failures and seamlessly failover to a backup connection. So, if there is a failure in the primary link, a business will not notice any service disruption because it will continue to function over the failover connections. What this means is that the actual problem is never detected and resolved. For example, if the primary connection is a broadcast connection and the failover is over LTE, if the primary link fails, everything routes over to LTE and will continue to do so until the primary link failure is resolved. In this scenario, the business would be paying for increased charges since the connection remains on LTE. So SMBs may not have the capacity to maintain SD-WAN services efficiently.

  Key Executive Considerations

  • What are some of the key business outcomes expected from SD-WAN?
  • Does the business have in-house expertise that can select & purchase, project manage, install, and manage an SD-WAN solution?
  • Is managing SD-WAN in-house adding value to the business, or are there other ways?

  Can the business supply helpdesk staff with 24/7/365 monitoring & support?
  Many businesses run from 9-5 but want their networks to run smoothly around the clock without straining their staff.

  Can the public cloud be leveraged?
  Which deployment model will best support the use of SaaS and public cloud services? It’s essential to understand the different workloads and how that traffic will traverse the network for an end-user experience.

  Timeline for implementation & can we meet the desired dates?
  The best thing to do here is to define the desired completion dates, then work backward and develop milestones that need to be completed then be able to understand if those milestones can be completed by those desired dates.

  Business Outcomes

  There are 6 key outcomes for a business deploying SD-WAN:

  Hard Cost Savings
  SD-WAN vendors on the market typically promote the hard cost savings of their industry solution. SD-WAN saves substantial circuit costs for businesses relying on legacy circuits for their locations.

  When it comes to growth enablement, how can companies rapidly deploy for new locations or new applications? Ideally, they want to reduce provisioning time and turn up services for their end users in days, not weeks or months.

  Reduction of Risk & Meeting Compliance
  How can a company have advanced service features to identify and respond to security threats that may become prevalent in its environment?

  Business Continuity
  How can companies have continuity and be able to failover to secondary and tertiary connections services in the event that their primary provider suffers an outage?

  Efficiency & Productivity
  This relates to the end-user experience, and they want to know that when they turn on their applications-that, they will work. It’s about understanding how a network can be designed to prioritize and shape bandwidth to support those business-critical applications.

  Simplified Billing
  This is an impactful value but not necessarily known upfront. There is value here in handling multiple carriers and being able to consolidate billing. For example, for nationwide businesses and all their locations, what is realized is that their back office becomes inundated. The workload sometimes becomes out of control with individual bills from many different carriers, which may require an increase in the accounting departments to handle this. So, you can consolidate the circuits, hardware, and licenses into a simple bill with SD-WAN or a managed SD-WAN solution.

  So, while there are front-end needs for SD-WAN, things like simplified billing is a nice white-glove approach to SD-WAN to look out for.

  Stay tuned for our next and final blog post on DIY vs a Managed approach for SD-WAN.

  Get in touch with one of our Managed SD-WAN specialists.

  The post The Pitfalls To Avoid In DIY SD-WAN appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

May 11, 2023

• Digium What is an Omnichannel Contact Center & Why Should You Care?

  In today’s fast-paced business environment, customer expectations are higher than ever before. Customers demand seamless experiences across all channels, including voice, email, chat, social media, etc. To meet these expectations, contact centers must be able to provide an omnichannel experience.

  What is an omnichannel contact center?

  An omnichannel contact center is a customer service strategy that integrates all communication channels and allows customers to switch between channels while maintaining the context of their interactions. This approach enables businesses to provide a consistent and personalized experience across all channels, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
  Omnichannel means you can reach out and touch your audience wherever they are, which means you have more opportunities to get them interested in what you’ve got going on. You can do this by using channels like email, phone calls, text messaging, and even social media platforms.
  An omnichannel contact center is the next step in customer service for companies that want to provide a better customer experience but maintain efficiency and effectiveness.
  Here are some reasons why an omnichannel contact center is necessary:

  Customers expect it: As mentioned earlier, customers expect a seamless experience across all channels. They want to be able to contact a business through their preferred channel and have their inquiries resolved quickly and efficiently.

  Improved customer retention: Customers are more likely to stay loyal to a business that provides a seamless and personalized experience across all channels. An omnichannel contact center can help businesses retain customers by providing a consistent and efficient customer experience. Switching communication channels can improve hold/wait times, fostering a better customer experience.

  Better Reporting and insights: An omnichannel contact center can give businesses better insights into customer behavior and preferences. By tracking customer interactions across all channels, businesses can better understand their customer’s needs and preferences.

  In conclusion…

  Ultimately, an omnichannel contact center is all about providing a better customer experience. It’s not just about technology or how you deliver your services; it’s about understanding what customers want and how they want to interact with your brand. By combining all of these things into one seamless process, organizations can create a contact center that meets their customers where they are and, thus, create loyal customers who will continue to do business with them in the future.

  For additional information on Sangoma CX and omnichannel, click here.

  The post What is an Omnichannel Contact Center & Why Should You Care? appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

May 10, 2023

• Digium The Growing Benefits of 5G Wireless Internet for Businesses

  In today’s digital age, businesses rely heavily on fast and reliable internet connectivity to stay competitive and succeed. With the advent of 5G wireless internet, businesses can experience a new level of internet connectivity which is faster, more reliable, and more secure than ever before. Here are some of the growing benefits of 5G wireless internet for businesses:

  1. Lightning-Fast Internet Speeds

  One of the most significant benefits of 5G wireless internet is its lightning-fast internet speeds. With download speeds up to 100 times faster than 4G, businesses can enjoy seamless connectivity and faster data transfer rates. This means businesses can upload and download large files in seconds, host virtual meetings without lag, and stream high-quality video content without buffering.

  2. Seamless Connectivity

  Another benefit of 5G wireless internet is its seamless connectivity. Unlike traditional wired internet connections limited to certain areas, 5G wireless internet is accessible almost anywhere. This means businesses can stay connected on the go or in remote locations.

  3. Increased Productivity

  With faster internet speeds and seamless connectivity, businesses can experience increased productivity. Employees can complete tasks faster, communicate with each other seamlessly, and collaborate on projects more effectively. This can lead to increased efficiency and better performance.

  4. Better Security

  5G wireless internet is designed to be more secure than previous generations of wireless technology. With its enhanced security features, businesses can protect their data and communications from cyber threats more effectively. This can help businesses avoid costly data breaches and protect their sensitive information.

  5. Future-Proof Technology

  5G wireless internet is a future-proof technology supporting the latest applications and devices. As businesses embrace new technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), they will require faster and more reliable internet connectivity. 5G wireless internet is designed to meet these demands, making it a valuable investment for businesses looking to stay ahead of the curve.

  Sangoma has launched its 5G wireless Broadband internet service as part of its Managed Internet connectivity product suite. Our new wireless service leverages our relationships with the major US wireless carriers to deliver customers the best 5G plan based on their geographical location and from the provider of their choice! It consists of:

  • Download speeds up to 650 Mbps+
  • Data options from 50GB -> unlimited data
  • Static public IP address included!

  Since it’s part of Sangoma’s Managed Internet services, customers benefit from 24/7/365 maintenance and monitoring from our in-house NOC.

  If you want to take your business to the next level, consider upgrading to our 5G wireless internet today!

  Contact Sales

  Contact Sales

  The post The Growing Benefits of 5G Wireless Internet for Businesses appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

May 09, 2023

• Digium Reminder: Sangoma is Recognized in the Gartner UCaaS Magic Quadrant

  About 6 months ago, it was announced that Sangoma was positioned by Gartner, Inc. 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 just six companies to appear consecutively for the last eight years.

  So why am I writing about it again, now? This is on my mind since at last week’s Channel Partners conference, I was asked about this multiple times. Sangoma’s brand is getting out there more, to people who may not know us that well. This becomes part of the 60 second Sangoma story

  Read More About Sangoma's Magic Quadrant Award

  Read the Full Report

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

May 03, 2023

• Digium Why Managed SD-WAN is Better than a DIY Approach in a Digital Transforming World

  Why do businesses look for SD-WAN solutions? What kind of challenges are they experiencing? Why do businesses want to change how their business locations and end users connect?

  This is the first of 3 posts where we discuss the needs for SD-WAN within business networks, the different ways to implement and lastly the benefits of partnering with an MSP for a Managed approach to SD-WAN.

  Short and simple, the traffic across networks continues to increase, and so too are business networks. In fact, global network traffic size is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.7% from 2021 to 2028 and even higher for small-to-medium sized businesses of 10.3% during the respective period. Businesses purchase various software and applications and then realize that their network is limiting them from achieving their goals. It’s become very labor-intensive for them to log into many devices to manage their network.

  Current Trends & Challenges

  Today’s business environments are seeing a lot of challenges in the following ways:

  • Mobile devices on the corporate network, BYOD, and guest access are straining corporate LAN and WAN
  • IT staff struggling with how to manage security during growth
  • Poor end-user and application experience
  • High-cost interest services from multiple carriers

  As trends continue and companies undergo digital transformation, they are embracing more software-as-a-service (SaaS) and public cloud applications. In a prior time, they relied on applications and services running on servers in their office locations. Now they are moving to a business model where they rely on that being provided as a service, where those applications run on hardware located elsewhere. So businesses need to understand how to manage their networks in this new way, how to secure them, and be able to provide a reliable end-user experience so that end-users can achieve what’s needed. They also need to figure out how to connect all their locations, decide what type of internet services are needed at each, and what type of carriers they need to embrace in order to achieve a holistic environment. This all focuses on a company’s network, how it’s set up, and how it’s managed.

  This identifies software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) as a need within business networks. SD-WAN is a virtual WAN architecture that allows businesses to leverage any combination of transport services, such as broadband, MPLS, LTE, to securely connect users to applications. SD-WAN uses a centralized control function to steer traffic securely and intelligently across the WAN and directly to trusted SaaS providers. This increases application performance and delivers a high-quality user experience, which increases business productivity and agility and reduces IT costs. This is why we are seeing businesses of all sizes adopting SD-WAN at an exponential rate. For instance, an in-depth analysis of industry insights shows that the market is expected to have an estimated Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 31.2% between 2022 and 2030. Significant contributors to this growth are small to medium businesses (SMBs). Prior to SD-WAN availability, SMBs were limited to offering goods and services globally and having a distributed workforce across multiple locations because it needed to be more of an operating cost to bear. With SD-WAN and a highly competitive landscape, SMBs can leverage SD-WAN to reduce operating expenses while leveraging multiple links to low-cost local internet lines.

  Selections: Things to Consider

  Deploying an SD-WAN solution can be very complex and includes a combination of three key elements when selecting the right components:

  • Hardware Vendor – There is a hardware component to SD-WAN that connects the business’ local network to the internet. It’s essential to select the right solution provider based on business needs. For instance, is the hardware standalone, or can it be integrated into business activities, such as security? New vendors are popping up in the market, and being able to identify their ability to withstand and stay within the market to provide long-term support is something to consider.
  • Carrier Selections – This depends on where the business locations operate. Are all locations in one geographical area or spread out and across territories? So, they’ll need to identify if they need local, regional, or national coverage and then figure out which carriers they trust.
  • Connection Types – What kind of access is required at each location? Choices exist from direct internet access, broadband, LTE, and the combination of those for primary and failover connections.

  Finding the right partner to work with will help businesses achieve their goals here.

  Implementation: Things to Consider

  After having selected the right components, there’s a list of things to consider on the implementation front.

  • Hardware, Licensing & Maintenance Contracts – SD-WAN hardware selected for each site which includes licensing and maintenance contracts the business will need to own.
  • Circuit Procurement with Independent Lead Time – Whether all the circuits are available from a single carrier or come from multiple carriers. Are they different technology types? What type of bandwidth will be needed for each location? And knowing when each will become available by the vendor to know how to roll out the solution.

    It’s important to note that the contracts for the hardware licenses and the circuits may not align, so it’s important to keep that in mind for renewal purposes.

  • Hardware Configuration & Shipping for Deployments at Each Site – Depending on the size of the business and the number of locations, it can take months or over a year, or even more, to roll out the solution. So, it’s imperative to consider this timeline, along with hardware licensing and circuit contract dates.
  • Installation, Delivery & Activation – The actual deployments in the field of the SD-WAN devices, the scheduling and the turning up of the circuits, and the activation and testing.

  So, there are many things to look at during the implementation cycle.

  Post Implementation

  Once everything is all set up from an implementation standpoint, there are things to consider regarding maintenance. Businesses need to document everything and keep the information current in the event their support teams need to reach out to hardware manufacturers or carriers for help. Or if changes are required during the lifecycle of the service. This includes:

  • Circuit diagrams
  • Network diagrams
  • Hardware and license inventory for asset management
  • Configuration files for deployed hardware
  • IP address schema for each site
  • Contact numbers and internal helpdesk, carrier, and vendor helpdesks
  • All the due diligence in maintaining each site’s network and IP address schema
  • All the different contacts from carriers and hardware manufacturers that need to be kept all together in case support teams need to reach out to individuals

  Stay tuned for the next post where we continue this discussion and get into the pitfalls to avoid in DIY SD-WAN.

  Or get in touch with one of our Managed SD-WAN specialists.

  The post Why Managed SD-WAN is Better than a DIY Approach in a Digital Transforming World appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

April 28, 2023

• Enable Security April 2023: 3CX incident updates, WebRTC security and H264
  April brings with it conference announcements, updates to the 3CX incident and a very interesting paper about the most popular video codec. In this edition, we cover: New fuzzing of RTP codecs with SIPVicious PRO Details about our WebRTC security presentation for CommCon News about the 3CX compromise and much much more! RTCSec newsletter is a free periodic newsletter bringing you commentary and news around VoIP and WebRTC security. We cover both defensive and offensive security as they relate to Real-time Communications.

April 25, 2023

• Digium Application Aware Network

  More and more businesses are turning to the cloud to run parts of their business – from their phone system to their back office type systems to everything in between. And many of these services are managed services, offloading and optimizing IT resources.

  Many of these services run in different public networks, a hodge-podge of whatever the particular service uses, and run on any device. This puts stress on the networks as bottlenecks could occur. I’m sure we’ve all experienced this in our work-from-home experiences using video meetings – sometimes, the video is a bit “wonky” for brief periods. This can happen in business connections as well. As such, the networks businesses use to deliver workloads to their employees need to be responsive, or adaptive, to the applications running on them.

  This is one of the benefits of using SD-WAN. An SD-WAN solution has intelligence that can define traffic routes and priority based on the application need and, as such, can inherently find the best route for the traffic. There’s a lot more to it than a single sentence, though, as SD-WAN is complex.

  In fact, according to a 2021 Frost and Sullivan SD-WAN survey of North American-based network services decision-makers, 64% said they prefer a fully managed SD-WAN service, and 16% said they like a co-managed approach precisely because of the complexity of setting it up and running it. See what Sangoma has to offer with managed SD-WAN.

  The post Application Aware Network appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

April 11, 2023

• Digium 6 Benefits Of A Quality Contact Center

  If you are in the customer service business, and your business is growing, it is probably time to add an agent-based contact center to supplement calls queues, etc. that may be part of your basic UC / phone system. While some call center type features are making their way into the base phone system, these are more departmental type of call center features. Which are great if you have a small business, but as that business grows, it may be time to upgrade to an agent-based contact center. Why?

  1. Improved Customer Service: A contact center can help your business provide better customer service by allowing customers to reach your company easily through multiple channels such as phone, email, and chat.
  2. Increased Efficiency: With a contact center, you can streamline your customer service operations by managing all customer interactions in one place. This helps to reduce response times, minimize errors, and increase productivity.
  3. Scalability: A contact center can easily scale up or down to meet the changing needs of your business. This is particularly useful for seasonal businesses or those experiencing sudden growth.
  4. High-Value Reporting: Make better, informed business decisions with high-value reporting such as response times, average talk time and call volume.
  5. Data Collection and Analysis: Contact centers can help you collect and analyze customer data to gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs. This can be used to improve your products and services, as well as your customer service.
  6. Compliance: Contact centers can help you stay compliant with industry regulations and standards, particularly in industries such as healthcare, finance, and telecommunications.

  As your business grows, it may be time to augment your UC solution with an agent-based contact center. To find out more about Sangoma’s Contact Center solution, please go here.

  The post 6 Benefits Of A Quality Contact Center appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

April 05, 2023

• Digium The Top 5 Trends in SD-WAN

  There have been some important developments in SD-WAN technology over the last year. We need to continually assess changes in key technologies so we can make informed decisions and move our businesses forward. Let’s take a look at some of these developments so you can determine whether they might be important to your organization.

  SD-WAN, or software defined wide area networking, is now well over a decade old as a technology. The term SD-WAN was coined in 2014 by Cisco well after the technology’s introduction, so SD-WAN is now considered a mature service.

  What is SD-WAN?

  Here’s a quick overview for those unfamiliar with SD-WAN. Traditional site-to-site connectivity models relied upon closed private networks in the past. Typically, we saw MPLS or private lines connecting sites back to a centralized data center. Those data centers had the applications and security stack for the organization. Also, internet access was concentrated at that data center behind that security stack. This provided ease of management and concentration of security tools creating a strong security posture. These networks were expensive, but they guaranteed quality of service and security as well as reliability.

  Over the last decade, that model has changed though.

  • More applications were pushed to the cloud
  • Real-time applications, such as video and web conferencing required minimal latency and more bandwidth
  • Redundancy requirements forced public internet connections as failover at all sites, so security was pushed out to the branches and management became much more complex

  As a result, the datacenter became less important as a central computing hub, and distributed security made the centralized security platform less important as well. This gave rise to SD-WAN.

  How does SD-WAN work?
  SD-WAN allows users at each enabled location to access cloud applications directly over the public Internet, bypassing the need to route through a data center hub and enhancing performance. So, SD-WAN reduces costs and management effort while improving performance without sacrificing security.

  Here’s a brief outline of how SD-WAN works and is used:

  • SD-WAN is best used with redundant public internet connections, typically eliminating expensive private connections and allowing the organization to purchase whatever internet is available at that site
  • SD-WAN enhances quality of service over the public internet by determining the best route for individual sessions or packets
  • SD-WAN is frequently purchased with next generation firewalls and increasingly other cloud-based security services
  • Management is accomplished through a single portal ensuring consistency across all locations

  SD-WAN is Mature & Reliable
  SD-WAN is offered by the most reputable names in the networking industry and has completely replaced MPLS or private line for new network deployments. Most mature technologies enter into a state referred to as the plateau of productivity according to Gartner Hype Cycle, where SD-WAN is well entrenched in at this point. Typically seen in this phase of the technology lifecycle is a stagnation on product development. The industry focuses more on consolidation and adoption, rather than new capabilities. This is because the easy stuff has already been invented and so new capabilities come slower. However, the development within SD-WAN doesn’t seem to be slowing down. SD-WAN remains a dynamic and evolving technology as capabilities are pushed into the cloud rather than residing on a heavy appliance on site. To add, with the computing scale of the cloud, additional services are easy to add, and the industry continues to move forward.

  What’s new with SD-WAN?

  When evaluating an SD-WAN strategy there are some new trends to consider.

  Secure Remote Access
  One of the biggest developments in SD WAN is the coupling of secure remote access. The work-from-home strategy changed the focus of all IT professionals from secure location to securing the individual or the data itself. Some forward looking SD-WAN providers have already incorporated secure remote access before the pandemic, aligning their strategy with Gartner’s Secure Access Service edge (SASE). Other SD-WAN providers have since paired secure remote access capabilities with their SD-WAN platforms.

  In fact, small office locations for some customers are eliminating SD-WAN architecture and just using the secure remote access of their SD-WAN provider. What you lose here is application prioritization and seamless failover. That may be acceptable for a few users who might work from home if necessary, in an SD-WAN for home deployment. For a location with five or fewer people broadband connectivity is probably adequate for applications and redundancy is not absolutely critical, where you might have a wireless redundant option rather than a fixed circuit option for redundancy. What you gain is a lower cost structure.

  Co-Managed SD-WAN
  Early on, enterprises with considerable staff of network architects purchased SD-WAN devices and deployed and managed those devices themselves. This provided ultimate control similar to what they had in their prior WAN environment. Over time, however, organizations have realized that SD-WAN doesn’t require much care and oversight. The talents of the network architect are better used in strategy, policy and design rather than maintaining the appliances.

  One of the key benefits of managed SD-WAN is a co-managed environment between the managed services provider and clients’ IT teams. Co-management is now the most popular strategy where SD-WAN service providers maintain the device and its high-level configurations and the customers manage the application policy within the SD-WAN platform. This gives clients a sense of control that they need to run their network while delegating the non-value-added work to a vendor. Some clients are completely outsourcing the management of the WAN, and this option is frequently paired with a network carrier, creating a true network-as-a-service environment.

  Wireless Only SD-WAN
  While this option has existed for years now since wireless was integrated into SD-WAN, with the increased mobility of the workforce and supply chain issues affecting the delivery of wired services, wireless SD-WAN has caught on. Typically, with just a single wireless service SD-WAN prioritizes the application, so limited bandwidth is optimally utilized and eliminates non-business activity on the network, saving the aggregate bandwidth costs. Certainly, 5G makes this a very interesting exit strategy, but at least in the United States, it’s only really applicable for certain low utilization use cases because of the cost.

  SD Branch
  Software Defined branch office technology is an extension of the SD-WAN concept. The monitoring and management of branch LANs, access points, print resources and other branch peripherals reduces the need for on-site support and improves the service to the branch. The SD-WAN architecture is core to SD branch delivery.

  Security Tools
  Look for SD-WAN providers to continue to expand horizontally into other SASE categories, such as secure web gateway, data loss prevention, remote browser, etc. The industry is very fluid right now and SD-WAN is at the center of most security strategies. Going forward demand continues towards becoming the core interoffice connectivity technology. We’ll see automation and AI begin to make its way into the industry allowing the platforms to make adjustments in real time.

  So, SD-WAN is mature, but not idle. There is a lot of growth in the industry and it’s important for users to have a well thought out strategy before making an SD-WAN decision. If you’d like to know more how SD-WAN can help your business and how Sangoma’s Managed SD-WAN services work, click here.

  The post The Top 5 Trends in SD-WAN appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

March 31, 2023

• Enable Security March 2023: Trojan 3CX Client, CRA talk, OpenSIPS audit report and much more
  Welcome to the end of March, and this month’s edition of the RTCSec Newsletter. A lot has accumulated in March on the VoIP and IP Communication security front. In fact, this one is packed! In this edition, we cover: Our news, involving CI/CD automation of VoIP security testing with SIPVicious PRO More news from us, including the OpenSIPS security audit report and a chat about the Cyber Resilience Act 3CX Phone Client turned into a trojan Critical vulnerabilities affecting Samsung and Pixel phones via VoLTE and 5G Silent fix in Kamailio gets a CVE, vulnerable door phones and various other security reports RTCSec newsletter is a free periodic newsletter bringing you commentary and news around VoIP and WebRTC security.

March 28, 2023

• Digium Overall Managed Access Benefit Review

  Today, I’ll touch on the benefits of using a Managed Internet Access service according to the Eastern Management Group. Managed Internet Access is a service where a provider (such as Sangoma) obtains and proactively manages the uptime of internet facilities of each customer location.

  Major benefits include:
  

  • The provider (not you as the end-customers or partner) 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 you, the end-user company.
  • The provider manages, maintains, and monitors the services 24/7 to ensure everything’s running smoothly.
  • The customer receives one single unified bill from the managed service provider.
  • Using outsourced expertise avoids the costs of developing management and reporting capabilities.

  If you want to read the full report now, please go here.

  The post Overall Managed Access Benefit Review appeared first on Sangoma Technologies.

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 17, 2023

• Enable Security OpenSIPS Security Audit Report is fully disclosed and out there
  It’s almost a year since the OpenSIPS project published a minimized version of our security audit report from 2022. Now, the full version has been published, with all the information intact on how to reproduce the vulnerabilities and extra details in an 80+ page report. The OpenSIPS security audit report can be found here. What is the OpenSIPS security audit? OpenSIPS is a SIP server that often has a critical security function within an IP communications system.

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 07, 2023

• Enable Security SIPVicious PRO incremental update - and Gitlab CI/CD examples
  We just pushed out a new SIPVicious PRO update to our subscribing members! This version does not include any new major features. Instead, it fixes various bugs and brings missing but necessary features to various SIPVicious PRO tools. We have the following highlights in this update: Documentation now includes realistic Gitlab CI/CD examples The RTP fuzzer in the experimental version now supports SRTP Support for new SIP DoS flood request methods The RTP inject tool can now specify the RTP’s SSRC and payload ID The SIP password cracking tool now supports closing the connection upon each attempt The SIP ping utility supports INVITE For the boring details, including a list of bug fixes, do read the release notes for v6.

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.

• Enable Security WebRTC attacks, FOSDEM'23 and security fixes
  Welcome to the February 2023 edition of RTCSec newsletter. If you are reading this on your email client, you might notice slight formatting changes - the red color of the Communication Breakdown blog and the mascot on the side. Hope that this makes it more distinguishable. Do let me know if you have feedback, by replying to this email. In this edition, we cover: A chat with Arin Sime of WebRTC.

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.