Making the move from SS7 to SIGTRAN

By Alan Percy, CMO @TelcoBridges

Over the last year, we’ve seen an increasing trend where service providers across North America are modernizing their networks, moving from TDM-based SS7 signaling to IP-based SIGTRAN.   We recently published a new solution brief titled “Migrating from SS7 to SIGTRAN”.   The brief explains some of the motivation for moving from SS7 to SIGTRAN, much of which is driven by the expense and difficulty in maintaining the long-distance DS1 circuits that interconnect the service providers with their interconnect peers.  Spoiler alert: SIGTRAN’s IP infrastructure is more cost effective and reliable. Continue reading Making the move from SS7 to SIGTRAN

NEWS: TelcoBridges Announces Media Gateway Interoperability Agreement with Metaswitch

TelcoBridges has for some time been providing media gateways to service providers that operate with the Metaswitch CFS softswitch.  Check out the recent case study with HKT  where Tmedia gateways were used with CFS in a large network transformation in Hong Kong.

We are thrilled to announce that Metaswitch and TelcoBridges have entered into an interoperability agreement, furthering the integration between Tmedia gateways and Metaswitch CFS.

There is much to share about the new relationship on a new Metaswitch landing page at: https://telcobridges.com/metaswitch

Everyone Likes to Complain About Robocalls

Are they willing to do anything about it?

By Alan Percy, CMO @TelcoBridges

Every time I’m in a social setting and I get asked about what I do for a career, the subject of illegal robocalls always dominates the discussion.   “What are you doing to stop them?”

I clearly remember a series of meetings with service providers a few years back, pitching them on solutions to the illegal robocall problem that could be solved with session border controller software.   They could not care less about the problem.   As much as consumers complained to the FCC about the problem, there was little that service providers could or would do about the problem.  They were getting paid to transit the calls and had little motivation to fix the problem.  It was someone else’s problem.

All that changed with the TRACED Act of 2019.

The TRACED act included a number of new tools and mandates:

Caller ID Authentication requiring the implementation of STIR/SHAKEN – this forced originating service providers to attach an Identity Token to the header of the call, with origination traceback information and an Attestation field that indicated whether the call could be trusted.

Call Blocking – prior to the TRACED act, service providers had to pass all traffic, essentially preventing them from screening call and preventing illegal robocalls from being delivered to consumers.  The Act allowed service providers to block suspicious traffic and indemnified them from prosecution for failing to delivering what they felt was a suspicious call.

Scam Call Protection – required the FCC to explore means to prevent One Ring Scams and protect hospitals from illegal calls.

Enforcement – the Act increased penalties, extended statute of limitations and other tools to help find and charge those generating and passing known illegal robocalls.

The first big milestone of the TRACED Act is almost upon us.  Service providers in the US are required to file their Robocall Mitigation Plans with the FCC by June 30th 2021.   The penalty for not filing a plan is having their traffic blocked by other providers after September 28th, 2021.

So all of a sudden, service providers are interested in dealing with illegal robocalls.

We discussed this in more details during a Cloud Communications Alliance webinar titled “Robocall Mitigation Compliance”, explaining the details of filing and impact of not filing a plan.

View the recording here:

Welcome Sandro Peri to the TelcoBridges Team!

Welcome Sandro Peri to TelcoBridgesWe are thrilled to share news of a new hire here at TelcoBridges, bringing on Sandro Peri as our new Sales Manager for EMEA.  Sandro comes to us with extensive experience in the telecommunications industry and technical sales, having held sales positions at a number of telecom equipment makers.    In addition to his technology sales experience, Sandro also brings a strong background in channel and partner management, helping reseller partners grow their business with hardware and software solutions.

“This is an exciting opportunity and am looking forward to being part of the TelcoBridges team”, said Sandro Peri

Based in Northern Italy, Sandro will be covering TelcoBridges sales responsibilities for the EMEA territory, with a few exceptions (most French-speaking countries will still be covered from Montreal).

Sandro has a unique family background, with half of Italian heritage, and the other half from America.   Sandro loves traveling, winter sports and cooking.

The TelcoBridges product portfolio Sandro will be representing includes:

  • ProSBC & FreeSBC – wildly popular virtualized Session Border Controller (SBC) software, protecting networks from attack while offering extensive SIP interoperability and routing features with outstanding session handling performance.  With over 14 million sessions now in production or trials, ProSBC and FreeSBC are deployed in over 100 countries.
  • Tmedia VoIP Media Gateways – the industry’s most reliable & stable media gateways, boasting over five nines (99.999%) availability, with scaling from a few E1s up to 16 OC3/STM1 in a single cluster.
  • Ttrans Transcoding Gateways – with hardware accelerated transcoding delivering stable, reliable and predictable transcoding of a wide range of voice codecs.
  • Tsig Signaling Gateways – the most reliable & stable Signaling/SIGTRAN Gateway in the world.
  • And other related products from TelcoBridges.

Join us in welcoming Sandro to the TelcoBridges team with a brief note to Sandro.peri@telcobridges.com !

Remote Working: Get rid of your VPN and use an SBC by Dan Jenkins

Thanks for the mention! Nimble Ape Founder/CEO and CommCon Organiser Dan Jenkins has written an article titled “Remote Working: Get rid of your VPN and use an SBC” arguing for the use of an SBC over a VPN for remote working. Says Dan,

Now, while I don’t disagree that VPNs have a place and that not everything can be available publicly on the internet in all the different industries these technologies are used; I do think it’s high time that businesses started to look at whether phone systems should be openly available to all those who need them in todays society of remote working wherever you are in the world. And it doesn’t have to cost the earth either.

The simplest solution here is what we call an SBC – a Session Border Controller; and we can either make our own SBC using Open Source software or buy one in from a commercial entity… Now, I don’t have much experience with commercial SBCs other than I know they exist from the major players as well as some players you might now have heard of like Telcobridges with their ProSBC product.

Read the full article here.

Marking a FreeSBC milestone and Introducing ProSBC

By Alan Percy, Product Marketing

This week, TelcoBridges’ staff and friends celebrated a big milestone for the company and some big news about a new offering that is on the way.

The milestone we celebrated was delivering our 10,000,000th session download of FreeSBC.  What started in October of 2017 to enter the crowded SBC software market and fill a market gap with a pay-as-you-grow business model, FreeSBC was intentionally positioned as a disruptive offering.    Continue reading Marking a FreeSBC milestone and Introducing ProSBC

Entering the Era of Cognitive Collaboration at Enterprise Connect 2019

by Alan Percy, TelcoBridges

For a show that started many years ago focused on PBXs and enterprise telephony, things sure have changed at Enterprise Connect.

Collaboration Developments – Probably the biggest take away from the annual enterprise communications event is the increasing penetration of cloud-based web collaboration and the introduction to AI-powered cognitive capabilities.   We’ve had auto-focus on cameras and automatic pan and crop for a few years, but the makers of web conferencing used the event to show some huge leaps forward:

Microsoft Teams Gets Smart – Lori Wright’s keynote demonstrated new AI capabilities in Microsoft Teams that drew audible gasps from the audience with a feature that allow conference participants to see through presenters and see whiteboard content that would otherwise be hidden.  Other features included using proximity to automatically detect meeting organizers entering rooms, background image replacement and real-time translating / transcribing of live events. All are important new capabilities that will be built-in to enterprise Office365 subscriptions and accelerate adoption from Skype for Business and other competitive platforms. Continue reading Entering the Era of Cognitive Collaboration at Enterprise Connect 2019