Internet Telephony Services Providers' Association

Last updated

The Internet Telephony Service Providers Association (ITSPA) is a British body representing providers of Internet Telephony services (VoIP).

Contents

History

Officially launched in December 2004, its existing founder members are Gradwell Dotcom Ltd, Magrathea Telecommunications Limited, Telappliant, Timico Ltd, Voicenet Solutions Ltd, Voipfone and XConnect [1] and corporate members such as BT and Gamma. ITSPA aims to promote competition and self-regulation in order to encourage the development of a flourishing and innovative VoIP industry.

Activities

As a trade association, membership is voluntary but the companies who choose to become members agree to abide by the ITSPA code of practice Archived 2012-10-13 at the Wayback Machine .

ITSPA's main activity is in making representations on behalf of the industry to Government bodies, such as the Home Office, the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (former DTI) and Ofcom.

Quality Mark

The enhanced version of the Quality Mark was introduced in 2016 [2]

Members of ITSPA can apply for the Quality Mark Archived 2012-10-13 at the Wayback Machine , which ensures that consumers are guaranteed that the certified organisation complies with the following points

  1. Adherence to the ITSPA Code of Practice and Best Practice Guidance documents
  2. Evidence that their platform design is resilient and that they deliver a reliable service, which will be measured by ITSPA as 99.99% availability between 8am & 8pm Monday-Friday, using the VoIP Spear monitoring platform.
  3. Transparent porting arrangements.
  4. Active fraud control measures.
  5. Evidence of access to the emergency services.
  6. Easy to find information on complaints & dispute resolution.
  7. Policies in place for Nuisance Calls & CLI Presentation.
  8. Evidence of Data Protection & Retention Compliance.
  9. Evidence of their Single Point of Contact showing that there is an easy way to contact the member with issues arising.

The first VoIP providers to gain the enhanced Quality Mark were: [3]

Regulation

Policies are agreed by the ITSPA Council (on advice from the Industry Developments Working Group), a body of up to ten people selected from and representing the various interests of the membership. The Council is served by a secretariat.

ITSPA Awards

Now into its 5th year, the 2013 ITSPA Awards were held on Wednesday 6 March 2013. There are now eight award categories which provide the opportunity for all companies involved in IP telephony (whether it be a service provider, wholesaler or vendor) to participate. [4]

2013 Award Winners

  1. Best Consumer VoIP - Localphone
  2. Best Business ITSP (Small Enterprise) - Voipfone
  3. Best Business ITSP (Medium Enterprise) - Telappliant
  4. Best Business ITSP (Corporate) - Ciptex
  5. Best VoIP CPE - Sangoma Technologies – NetBorder Lync Express
  6. Best VoIP Infrastructure - Metaswitch Networks – Perimeta 3.3
  7. Most Innovative VoIP Product - Voxhub – Voxtop Apps Platform
  8. ITSPA Members' Pick - Mark Spencer (computer engineer) for developing Asterisk (PBX)

Highly Commended

  1. Best Consumer VoIP: BT Group
  2. Best Business ITSP (Small Enterprise): VoiceHost
  3. Best Business ITSP (Medium Enterprise): Voxhub
  4. Best Business ITSP (Corporate): Timico
  5. Best VoIP CPE: Grandstream Networks – GXP2200 Enterprise Application Phone for Android™
  6. Best VoIP Infrastructure: Genband – GENBAND Web Application Manager (WAM)
  7. Most Innovative VoIP Product/Service: Alcatel-Lucent – OpenTouch Conversation

See also

Related Research Articles

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for voice calls for the delivery of voice communication sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet.

Vonage Holdings Corp. is an American cloud communications provider operating as a subsidiary of Ericsson. Headquartered in Holmdel Township, New Jersey, the organization was founded in 1998 as Min-X as a provider of residential telecommunications services based on voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). In 2001, the organization changed its name to Vonage.

The next-generation network (NGN) is a body of key architectural changes in telecommunication core and access networks. The general idea behind the NGN is that one network transports all information and services by encapsulating these into IP packets, similar to those used on the Internet. NGNs are commonly built around the Internet Protocol, and therefore the term all IP is also sometimes used to describe the transformation of formerly telephone-centric networks toward NGN.

An Internet telephony service provider (ITSP) offers digital telecommunications services based on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) that are provisioned via the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VocalTec</span> Israeli telecom equipment provider

VocalTec Communications Inc. is an Israeli telecom equipment provider. The company was founded in 1985 by Alon Cohen and Lior Haramaty, who patented the first Voice over IP audio transceiver. VocalTec has supplied major customers such as Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia, and many others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eftel</span> Telecommunications company in Australia

Eftel Limited was an internet service provider and telecommunications provider in Australia, with approximately 120,000 active accounts. It was established in 1999. Eftel offers a range of services including: DSL and dial-up Internet access, web hosting and telephony services - to the retail, corporate and wholesale telecommunications markets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeff Pulver</span> American Internet entrepreneur (born 1962)

Jeff Pulver is an American Internet entrepreneur and futurist known for his work as an innovator in the field of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Pulver's early work in VoIP with his company Free World Dialup led to a significant regulatory decision by the Federal Communications Commission in 2004 which classified VoIP as an internet application, rather than as a telephony service which would be subject to government tariffs and regulations, a decision which paved the way for the development of video and voice internet communications.

Voipfone is a UK (London) based Internet Telephone Service (VoIP) provided by iNet Telecoms Ltd, which was founded in 2004 by Lee Rose. The company develops standards based, VoIP telephony services using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). As of July 2014, the company has an annual turnover of over £4 million.

Ooma, Inc. is an American publicly traded telecommunications company based in the Silicon Valley, California area. Ooma offers communications services including Voice over IP (VoIP) calling for business, home and mobile users.

Founded in 2002, Grandstream Networks is a manufacturer of IP voice and video communications equipment, video surveillance, gateways and analog telephone adapters (ATAs), and Asterisk-based IP-PBX appliances. Grandstream supplies small and medium businesses and consumers with open-standard SIP-based products.

TouchWave, Inc., was a privately held Palo Alto, California IP-telephony network switch provider founded in 1997. TouchWave developed a product line called WebSwitch that was designed to replace traditional private telephone exchange systems in small-to-medium-sized companies. WebSwitch was part of a phone system that incorporates communication features provided by the Internet. The rapid success of TouchWave was memorialized with awards and an acquisition by Ericsson Communications for $46M two years after TouchWave was founded. Ericsson continued the TouchWave product line under the name WebCom, but its efforts have been viewed as less than successful.

Cloud communications are Internet-based voice and data communications where telecommunications applications, switching and storage are hosted by a third-party outside of the organization using them, and they are accessed over the public Internet. Cloud services is a broad term, referring primarily to data-center-hosted services that are run and accessed over an Internet infrastructure. Until recently, these services have been data-centric, but with the evolution of VoIP, voice has become part of the cloud phenomenon. Cloud telephony refers specifically to voice services and more specifically the replacement of conventional business telephone equipment, such as a private branch exchange (PBX), with third-party VoIP service.

SIP trunking is a voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology and streaming media service based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) by which Internet telephony service providers (ITSPs) deliver telephone services and unified communications to customers equipped with SIP-based private branch exchange (IP-PBX) and unified communications facilities. Most unified communications applications provide voice, video, and other streaming media applications such as desktop sharing, web conferencing, and shared whiteboard.

VaxTele SIP Server SDK is a complete development toolkit, which allows software vendors and Internet telephony service providers (ITSP) to develop SIP Server and (SIP) Session Initiation Protocol based VoIP systems for Microsoft Windows to install computer to computer voice chat, chat rooms, IVR systems, call center services, calling card services, dial/receive computer to PSTN and mobile phone calling services.

Federated VoIP is a form of packetized voice telephony that uses voice over IP between autonomous domains in the public Internet without the deployment of central virtual exchange points or switching centers for traffic routing. Federated VoIP uses decentralized addressing systems, such as ENUM, for location and identity information of participants and implements secure, trusted communications (TLS) for identify verification.

MyNetFone Australia Pty Ltd is part of the MNF Group, the company that owns and operates Australia's largest VoIP network, which is also the 3rd largest interconnected voice network in the country. MyNetFone provides broadband internet and cloud-based communication services to residential, business and government sectors.

Inter is a Venezuelan television broadcaster and telecommunications provider headquartered in Barquisimeto, Lara, Venezuela. Inter was founded in 1996 as InterCable. Its fiscal name is Corporacion Telemic C.A, and its main shareholder is the investment fund HM Capital Partners.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BT Business and Public Sector</span> Retail division of BT Group

BT Business and Public Sector was a division of United Kingdom telecommunications company BT Group that provided fixed-line, mobile, broadband and IT services to businesses and the public sector in the UK and Ireland. It bought many of its services from BT's other divisions: EE, BT Global Services, BT Wholesale and Openreach. It also sold other vendors' products and services such as the Avaya IP Office business telephone system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VoiceHost</span>

VoiceHost is a UK (Norwich) based Internet Telephone Service (VoIP) which was founded in 2006.

Ribbon Communications Inc. is a public company that makes software, IP and optical networking solutions for service providers, enterprises and critical infrastructure sectors. The company was formed in 2017, following the merger of Genband and Sonus Networks and is headquartered in Plano, Texas.

References

  1. ↑ "itspa.org.uk/members.shtml". Archived from the original on 2012-11-12. Retrieved 2012-10-29.
  2. ↑ Maradan, Romain (2016-04-12). "ITSPA Quality Mark". Gradwell. Archived from the original on 2016-10-12. Retrieved 2016-10-09.
  3. ↑ "Quality Mark - ITSPA". ITSPA. Archived from the original on 2016-11-16. Retrieved 2016-10-09.
  4. ↑ "The 2013 ITSPA Awards". ITSPA. Archived from the original on 16 October 2012. Retrieved 29 October 2012.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.