VoIPtel Blog

It’s gone, disappeared, vanished! I was working like crazy to get ready for CeBIT, was able to spend a few days together with the guys from Atcom and Azuralis. And than full speed back to Norway, cruising the autobahn in 130-170 km/h. In a Nissan Micra. Never thought those little boxes with miniwheels could reach that kind of speed, but my GPS tells me that it wasn’t a (bad) dream.

This year we were a little late trying to get a place to stay during the Messe and ended up in Hamburg, one hour and twenty minutes drive from Hannover. It wasn’t until we arrived at CeBIT and met up with Job from our DC in Holland that he told us he had been able to find accommodations almost within walking distance from the fair. So next year I think I’ll leave the preparations to Job, it’s going to save me a lot of time and money.

The size of CeBIT is huge, I am under the impression that it covers almost the same area as the entire Bergen centrum, my hometown. So if you are planning to visit the fair, be smart and do your homework. It is simply impossible to cover everything. I won’t go into a lengthy description of the exhibit itself, it is thoroughly covered in various media. For me it is the small incidents that is interesting, incidents like bumping into the OEM manufacturer of the SNOM M3, or being offered to become the representative of a company that have stolen most of their PBX promo material directly from our web site! But more on that later. I found the meeting with my contact in Planet Corporation much more interesting, we are both interested in an even closer relationship in order to improve the support to our customers. For quite some time I have tried to locate a distributor of Grandstream IP phones in the Scandinavian countries to no avail, I believe that their products are both inexpensive as well as well designed and of relatively good quality. I was lucky enough to find their booth and ended up discussing the possibility of becoming their Scandinavian Partner! That discussion is not completely finished yet but I will post an update as soon as I have something to share.

I spent most of my time together with Peter, Edwin and Gottenphone from Atcom discussing the future of our products. Most of it is still to early to reveal, but some very interesting concepts and designs are currently under development in the PBX area. They are currently doing the final testing on two new corporate IP phones, one of them with a detachable extension console. And we have got a new Dual analog module for the IP02 and IP08 with one FXO and one FXS port. But for us the greatest news are the contract that was finally signed today, a contract where we will be responsible for the firmware installed on all IPxx PBX’s by default. And a brand new IPxx PRO series of PBX’s complete with VoIPtel SE and SEq firmware will be released in the near future. For those of you who want better security, the new AT-530P+ OpenVPN phone is currently being tested together with an IPxx with VoIPtel SEq firmware. More info will follow soon ;o)

We are preparing some very promising projects with our close friends at Azuralis as well, the same guys who convinced us that it was a good idea to integrate VoIP over VPN in our firmware. This time we are looking at the quality of the line from your provider, quite important if your business depends on VoIP trunks.

And last but certainly not least, a large firmware upgrade will be available next week for both VoIPtel CE and SE. Several new features as well as bug fixes are included so make sure you upgrade your PBX. The upgrade can be performed through the GUI.