VoIP for the holidays

By Lesley McCreath

In October, Microsoft’s recently acquired VoIP application Skype announced that they had reached a peak of over 45 million concurrent users online, with an overall increase of 70 percent so far in 2012. Techcrunch.com suggested that this is due in large part to the fact that Skype is “now available on more platforms than ever before.” In addition to the Windows phone client, Skype reported 70 million Android downloads, and Comcast started offering Skype on its Xfinity-connected TV platform – all this in addition to the iPhone app that has been around since 2009.

In late November 2012 Skype reported that it is expanding the roll out of its Gift Cards franchise, making them available online in 44 countries, as well as preparing to move more aggressively into brick and mortar stores, including Target, OfficeMax and the Microsoft retail outlets. Users in the U.S. will also be able to purchase gift cards for the holidays via Facebook.

VoIP Goes Underground

Facebook gift cards are just one example of how quickly VoIP is expanding as a social enterprise, as well as a communications solution, but business and industry are looking to IP telephony to accomplish some heavier lifting. Norphonic is a Norway-based company with a serious mission, “delivering Heavy Duty VoIP telephones into some of the world’s most challenging areas, ensuring essential voice communications when it is most needed.” The Konkola Copper Mine (KCM) in Zambia has just selected Norphonic VoIP mining telephones for their underground operations. It’s hard to imagine a job where communication is more critical than the world of mining. The success and safety of any mining operation depends on effective two-way communications into and out of a subsurface mine.

VoIP mining telephones not only reduce cost, by converging voice and data networks, but those phones are the most essential system for mine site rescue efforts, to deal with injuries, fatalities and entrapment situations. Norphonic brings VoIP telephony to a wide range of emergency communications systems, where reliability and savings have to go hand in hand. Norphonic reports that their phones are now being deployed as emergency roadside telephones at bridges or alongside public highways and inside tunnels; as public emergency telephones, and in places where people feel vulnerable at night, like university campuses and underground car parking facilities. Also as public information telephones – in airports or transport terminals; inside elevators, and as general use public outdoor telephones - in common places such as train terminals, airports and car parks.

Government agencies, increasingly, are adopting IP-based communications. The White House made the switch to VoIP in 2007. They even went so far as to integrate the White House staff’s cell phones into the system, so when the President needs to reach his Chief of Staff, it’s VoIP that makes it happen.