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For more information and to confirm your attendance, please visit http://www.xconnect.net/venetian

Visit our recruitment pages to learn more about the fantastic opportunities currently available at XConnect – www.xconnect.net/recruitment

The International Business Awards are the only global, all-encompassing business awards program honoring great performances in business. Nicknamed the Stevie for the Greek word “crowned,” the awards will be presented at a gala dinner on Monday, Sept. 27, in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Istanbul, Turkey.

Honorees were selected from more than 1,700 entries from organizations and individuals in more than 40 countries.

With its crystal clear, superior sound quality, Orange’s introduction of HD Voice is set to herald a new era for mobile communications and a new standard for the telecoms industry. The service virtually eliminates the distance between callers so that it makes calls sound as if they’re in the same room.

The trial, which commences immediately, runs across the Orange UK mobile network between the locations of Bristol, Reading and Southampton, with those participating, having been selected to represent a range of demographic groups, including small businesses and early technology adopters, as well as more mainstream users. Levels of call quality and customer experience will be monitored, and upon successful feedback from the trial, Orange plans to roll out the service nationwide across before the end of the summer.

See what Orange have to say about the launch…..

Will Fabio Capello lead England to victory and take a step closer to bringing the World Cup back to England?

Join XConnect on Wednesday 23rd June to follow England’s progress at the World Cup as they take on Slovenia in their final group game in Port Elizabeth.

We are pleased to announce that a strong representation of the U.S. VoIP service providers offering high-definition (HD) voice service are participating in a trial of the world’s first IP-peering federation created for exchanging HD voice traffic.

Alteva, Broadvox, Ooma, Phone.com, SimpleSignal, Stage 2 Networks, Telesphere, TurboBridge and ZipDX are taking part in the trial designed to deliver HD Voice calls on a cross network basis

Operators joining the trial will participate in a peering community, called the HD Alliance, within XConnect’s Global Alliance, which combines carrier ENUM-registry and multimedia IP interconnection hub services.

Why?  Here’s the science -  a standard PSTN or “toll-quality” call uses G.711 codec, which samples audio at a range from 300 Hz to 3.4 kHz. Wideband codecs such as G.722 sample more than twice as much, this significantly improves the clarity and intelligibility of the call, providing an almost  “face-to-face” quality for the call.

Now, let’s consider the dependencies that are necessary for HD Voice to achieve mass market adoption:

1. Availability of HD Voice – The service provider or operator has to offer HD Voice as a service to its customers. Recently there have been a number of announcements by Orange, 3 , Ooma, phone.com, 8×8 of HD Voice services being available to their customers.

2. End points supporting HD – the end point, or telephone, has to support HD Voice codecs. A standard telephone will not be able to process the wideband codec and therefore will not support HD. This challenge has been been addressed by vendors such as Polycom who have been shipping phones with HD capability as a standard feature.

3. Scalable IP Interconnection between HD enabled networks – mass market adoption of HD will only occur when HD is enabled across multiple service provider networks. Like other multimedia services, HD Voice is dependent on the call path being all IP. HD enabled interconnection hubs like Global Alliance can enable scalable IP interconnection between multiple service provider networks globally. The interconnection hub can also facilitate transcoding enabling negotiation between the various wideband codecs, such as G.722, AMR-WB and SILK.

To help achieve greater adoption of HD Voice, XConnect are running a HD interconnection trial to allow service providers to test the interoperability of IP based hub interconnection for HD Voice calls. For more information visit the HD Trial page.

Also join us at our HD Interconnection Summit at Comptel Plus 2010 – where we will be discussing the challenges of next-generation interconnection.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Hello and welcome to the new XConnect website and blog. Here’s where you’ll find the latest news on everything about XConnect – from product/service updates, whitepapers, to interviews with members of the XConnect team

Plus you’ll see regular articles and insights from Eli Katz (CEO) and David Schwartz (CTO) on the latest developments in the next generation communications arena including, interconnection and peering, ENUM, VoIP, HD Services, IPX and much, much more. Along the way, we’ll try to make this blog a touch more interesting to read than your refrigerator’s user manual!

So bookmark this blog, email to a friend/colleague or add our RSS feed, and most of all, we’d love getting your feedback on XConnect and this blog — and what you want to see discussed (and showcased) in the future.

Until next time….