There are great Video Tutorials about VOIP!

Just visit http://www.thinkbright.net/voip_blog/voip-tutorials/

SiteStar is a cooling cabinet that can increase battery life by three times, and reduce the electricity consumed for cooling batteries at a base station site by up to 95%. The life of a battery is inversely proportional to the temperature under which it operates, and is reduced by 50% with a mere 10°C increase above the optimal temperature of 20°C. Service providers therefore have to undertake significant capital and operating expenditure to ensure that the batteries remain cool, or to replace them at regular intervals.It is ideal for countries with extreme climatic conditions and particularly for emerging markets where power supply can be scarce making battery back-up essential.

“SiteStar can replace expensive shelters and power hungry air conditioners which are often needed only for battery cooling,” said Prashant Agnihotri, Head of GSM/EDGE Product Management, Radio Access, Nokia Siemens Networks. “It eliminates the need for expensive indoor sites, while reducing the OPEX of an outdoor site thereby helping an operator not only reduce the cost of roll out and operation, but also its CO2 footprint.”

SiteStar’s unique design provides better resistance against external thermal radiation. This allows it to maintain a constant optimal temperature in very hot or cold climates, and increase battery life by three times in operating temperatures of 35°C, compared to a fan based cabinet. SiteStar also reduces electricity consumption for cooling batteries by up to 95% when compared to traditional air conditioned cabinets as it typically consumes only 40W. It thus helps operators reduce ongoing expenditure in battery replacements, site visits, electricity and diesel costs.

SiteStar’s operating range is from -40°C up to +50°C and it can therefore bring similar advantages in very cold climates too.

Security vendor, Cellcrypt has announced an application which enables encrypted voice calls from smartphones to conventional office landline phones. The Cellcrypt PBX Gateway integrates with commercial office PBX systems and allows users to complete encrypted voice calls from existing landlines to mobile smartphones that are running Cellcrypt Mobile software.

The PBX Gateway also enables encrypted voice calls between landline locations that have PBX Gateway installed; for instance between offices in different locations.

Cellcrypt technology is currently undergoing certification to the FIPS 140-2 standard approved by the US National Institute of Standard (NIST).

“Organisations spend significant amounts of effort and budget securing their data but until now have not had a viable solution for voice data,” said Simon Bransfield-Garth, CEO at Cellcrypt. “While traditional secure voice solutions have provided poor call quality and fail across most international boundaries, Cellcrypt offers unparalleled voice quality, government-specification security and global coverage never before experienced, all using standard smartphone and PBX technology.”

Source: Cellular News

More than 2,500 private branch exchanges (PBX)  companies were hacked by three people in the Philippines. These three people stole pass codes they sold to call center operators in Italy.    

Italian officials allege the sale of the pass codes helped finance terrorist activities, IDG News Service reported. On Friday, Italian officials arrested at least five people in raids on 10 call centers.

 The three indicted in the U.S. are charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, unauthorized access to computers and other charges, according to U.S. attorney Ralph J. Marra, Jr. 

“The hackers we’ve charged enabled their conspirators in Italy and elsewhere to steal large amounts of telecommunications capacity, which could then be used to further or finance just about any sort of nefarious activity here or overseas,” Marra said.

Pakistani nationals in Italy used the stolen codes to offer cheap calls to their clients on the PBXs of commercial companies in the United States, Australia and Europe.

Some of the profits from the scam were used to finance the activities of Islamist extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Italian officials said, according to the IDG News report.

Marra said the hackers dialed into the PBXs and used a process known as a brute force attack to hit vulnerable points of the PBX systems.

Source: IDG News Service

The Asterisk Development Team announced the third beta of Asterisk 1.6.2.0. Asterisk-1.6.2.0-beta3 is available for immediate download at
http://downloads.digium.com/pub/asterisk/

This is an incremental release of the 1.6.2.0 branch as the previous beta was released just over a month ago, and many issues have been resolved since then.  Included in this release are the following issues reported by the community:
 * Update spiral support in trunk and 1.6.x branches to match what is in 1.4.
 * Fix RFC2833 issues with DTMF getting duplicated and with duration wrapping over.
 * Fix a bug where the codecs of the called party leg were not properly sent
   back to the call leg when reinvited .
 * Fix broken attended transfers.
 * Add flags to chanspy audiohook so that audio stays in sync.
 * Resolve issues with choppy sound when using res_timing_pthread.
Additionally, an update to chan_iax2 related to issue AST-2009-001 is included in this beta release. For more information, see:
http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/security/AST-2009-001.html
For a full list of changes in this beta, please see the ChangeLog:
http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk/tags/1.6.2.0-beta3/ChangeLog
You can get more information about the new features and various changes in
Asterisk 1.6.2.0 at:
http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk/tags/1.6.2.0-beta3/CHANGES
And if you’re upgrading from previous versions of Asterisk see this file:
http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk/tags/1.6.2.0-beta3/UPGRADE.txt
Issues discovered in testing of this beta can be reported at
http://issues.asterisk.org

July 8, 2009 — The leader supplier of test, monitoring, and analysis equipment for TDM, Wireless, IP and VoIP networks – GL Communications – announced today the release of enhanced PacketCheck™. CEO of the company – Mr. Vijay Kulkarni –  said it is a PC based Ethernet / IP BERT and Throughput test tool that is very easy to use. It also supports RTD (round trip delay), Loopback at all levels, including Ethernet frames and IP/UDP packets, and a simple to use GUI interface.

Mr. Kulkarni, further added, “PacketCheck™ allows monitoring of end to end performance such as total packets, packet loss, out of sequence packets, errorred packets, correct pattern frames, pattern sync status, and protocol statistics (Total IP packets, UDP Packets, IP/UDP Checksum errors etc ). It can operate on any of the three layers – Layer 2 (Data Link), Layer 3 (Network), and Layer 4 (Transport) of the OSI reference model”.

Important Enhancements Introduced:

Loopback Mode:
PacketCheck™ can now operate in Loopback mode in addition to its simultaneous Tx/Rx modes. PacketCheck™ can perform loopback at the Ethernet, IP and UDP levels. This powerful feature can prove extremely useful in diagnosing problems.

Calculation of Round Trip Delay (RTD):
PacketCheck™ now calculates the average Round Trip Delay. Round Trip Delay is the total time taken for a packet to travel to the remote end and back to the point of origin. Round Trip Delay can be calculated using 2 PacketCheck™ applications – one at the local end running in Tx_Rx (Transmit and Receive) mode and another at the remote end, running in Lopback mode. Round Trip Delay is reported in microseconds.

Command Line Interface:
PacketCheck™ can be operated through command line in addition to the simple to use GUI.

Other features include:

• Test Ethernet traffic of up to 500Mbps bandwidth
• Generates full duplex IP, UDP, or Ethernet frame traffic to transmit and/or receive traffic on any of the three layers (Data Link / Network / Transport) with on-demand bandwidth
• Bit-error-rate testing (BERT) on layer 2, layer 3, and layer 4 with detailed runtime statistics for both Tx and Rx
• Customizable 2 byte test patterns

Customizable protocol headers like MAC Source/Destination address, Length/Type field, IP Source/destination address, and UDP Source/Destination Port
For comprehensive information on the application, please visit PacketCheck™ web page.