Recently in VoIP Category

As any readers of CityAm know, the FSA says all fixed line AND mobile calls have to be recorded.

If all Freddie Goodwin's mobile phone conversations are not available for inspection by the auditors, then HBoS's may be forced to hand its banking license back! In theory anyway.

The regulations became enforceable for all mobile communications in November.

As a result CIOs across the City are having kittens. Good.They get paid enough money, they should start earning it for a change.

Still you have to feel sorry for them because the explosion of iPhones, Blackberries and Androids has made this job a nightmare.

And let's not forget tablets. We all know how much fund managers and options traders love their tablets! Ahem.

Mobile operator Tru is hosting an event in The Square Mile on July 13th, that should help CIOs cope with this logistical nightmare.

It has teamed up with Obsidian Wireless, which specialises in mobile voice and data recording, to offer an app-less solution for the banks and the brokers for the City.

We'll be there. Mind you, if anyone's left it until July 13th to start thinking about their mobile recording, then they'll need a miracle. Let's hope Tru and Obsidian can provide it.

We must switch to IPv6 before the last rew addresses of IPv4 are swallowed up by rampant global consumerism, says Jeff Smith, Global Crossing's senior director for infrastructure services

When the internet was built they were on version 4 of the Internet Protocol (IPv4). So you would have thought it would be fairly advanced and forward thinking.

But IP4 was designed to cater for only four billion addresses. Bill Gates has got more Facebook friends than that! But 30 years ago, when IPv4 was first introduced, this seemed more than enough for a store of addresses.

When the Internet metaphorically caught fire, all those addresses were soon burned up. In the early 1990s the Internet Engineering Task Force (the industry standards body) identified the problem.

Recognition blem is only half the battle, of course. Taking action is another story.

With over 70 per cent of available addresses assigned to North America, regional distribution was very poor. The soaring populations and economies of India and China exacerbated the problem as they placed enormous demand for Internet access and IPv4 addresses.
Meanwhile, the western world wanted more Internet-dependent devices than ever, a trend that was accelerated when everyone began buying smart phones in 2005.  Add in 4G wireless rollouts and it's no wonder that the end of the road for IPv4 is in sight.

Which would be OK, but people haven't migrated to more practical alternatives, such as IP6. Why? Because they're happy with IP4, for now. Some say widespread shift to IPv6 won't happen until the cost of running on IPv4 starts rising.

(This all sounds like global warming, only for IP addresses - Ed).

Governments are taking heed and have started to encourage the transition to IP6. The developing nations are leading the charge. The Chinese, Japanese and Korean governments have also championed the rollout. The US government forced contractors to government agencies to be IPv6-ready by the summer of 2008. The EU is reviewing methods to encourage adoption.

But with IPv4 addresses near exhausted, a resolution by all countries to require the migration to IPv6 must be reached sooner, rather than later. Are they doing enough?

Are we going to run out of time?

Tomorrow Jeff Smith will discuss the possible strategies to avert disaster and identify the IP-changer deniers who refuse to accept there's a problem.

Here's Tina Green, who earns billions every year as the big name at retail giant Arcadia. That bloke next to her is her husband, Philip.

Philip Green was on TV recently, being interviewed about his multi billion pound retail empire. He was treated like a god by the interviewer, as if he was some retail guru.

But, if you check the company accounts, a different picture emerges.

The accounts seem to suggest his wife does all the work. She is paid a fortune - so much money that Lady Green has to live in tax exile in Monaco.

Her husband, for all his big talk, is paid a relative pittance. Which suggests to me that she might be the brains of this particular business.

Is it fair if he takes all the credit, while she does all the work!

Similarly, there are many under rated IT companies whose achievements need wider recognition.

Take Extreme Networks. Their WAN Optimisation service sounds a bit boring, but it saves companies a bucketload of money on bandwidth. When you consider that it can compress a Microsoft Powerpoint or  Excel file by 90 per cent, that represents a huge saving. It's still a bit broing though. But it makes the sexier apps, like VoIP and video, more viable. So maybe that's one way of selling it. Capture people's attention by talking about the fashionable apps, and sell them something less flashy in the meantime.

If only Extreme's software could compress Sir Philip Green!