SureVoIP become Best Business ITSP (SME) Finalist in The ITSPA 2011 Awards thanks to FreeSWITCH!

Aberdeen-based internet telephony service provider SureVoIP has been shortlisted for a prestigious industry award.
The company is one of six finalists in the ‘Best Business ITSP (Internet Telephony Service Provider) for SMEs’ category of the 2011 ITSPA (Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association) Awards.
The winner of the accolade – presented to the company which the judging panel deems provides the best service for small and medium business users – will be announced at an awards ceremony in the iconic BT Tower in London, on Monday, March 7.
In order to make the shortlist, SureVoIP had to undergo a rigorous assessment process, which involved providing comprehensive details on its service offering, as well as a period of technical testing.
The testing element of the assessment stage entailed over 1000 calls being made via SureVoIP’s internet telephony lines over a 3 month period to measure a number of metrics including voice quality, delays and background noise.
VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) offers significant improvements to the flexibility, speed and cost of global communication through transmitting voice and multimedia communication through the Internet, as opposed to the fast-disappearing Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
Gavin Henry, Managing Director of SureVoIP – which became the first company in Scotland to achieve ITSPA Quality Mark accreditation in December 2010 – commented on the company making the shortlist:

“We are thrilled to be in the running for such a highly respected industry award.
“Being named as a finalist is a major, exciting achievement for SureVoIP, particularly considering the company has only been operating for a matter of months, having been launched in November 2010, but with all services being quality tested over the previous year before launch.
“Making the shortlist – which involved SureVoIP being assessed by top industry professionals – highlights the exceptional quality of service we already provide customers with and bodes well for the future success of the company”.
“We couldn't have done this without FreeSWITCH and the FreeSWITCH community”

SureVoIP, which is a division of IT and telecoms support specialist, the Suretec Group, was established to harness and utilise the vast technical expertise and experience with VoIP suppliers, which the group had acquired through its initial services relating to VoIP consultancy.
Established in Scotland in 2003, the Suretec Group specialises in open source IT support and consultancy, open source telecoms and training in open source software. SureVoIP is the fourth division within the group, which also includes Suretec Systems, Suretec Telecoms and Suretec Training.

SureVoIP, a UK ITSP based in Scotland and FreeSWITCH

SureVoIP is Scotland's First Dedicated Internet Telephony Service Provider.

Suretec recently got approval from Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator, to assign U.K. telephone numbers. Therefore, SureVoIP can assign phone numbers across the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. The company is also authorised to supply global numbers for over 60 countries.

This is unique in the Scottish market, because other companies act as "middle-men" between clients and service providers.

SureVoIP is partnering with British Telecom (BT) through a VoIP Interconnect to offer clients added benefits. SureVoIP has also partnered with Xconnect on their Global Alliance program, as well as two other U.K. VoIP carriers.

SureVoIP also provides 24/7 emergency telephone support.

Gavin Henry, managing director of SureVoIP, and founding member of the Suretec Group, said, "Our journey to securing the approval from Ofcom has been long and complex, involving the submission of detailed business plans, demonstrating an in-depth knowledge of the Communications Act 2003, various legal requirements, help from ITSPA (we've worked so hard that we will soon be getting the ITSPA Quality Mark), documentation and a significant investment in equipment throughout the U.K. With out FreeSWITCH and the FreeSWITCH community this would not have been possible."

"Our position as an Ofcom regulated service provider will make us a preferred supplier, as we are ideally placed to offer a holistic and competitive service to clients within the North-east of Scotland and beyond," Henry said. "The applications of VoIP technology are clear and we see it being of particular interest to the oil and gas, shipping, legal and financial industries as they need to make international, reliable and cost effective communications as a basic function."

"FreeSWITCH has been instrumental in passing interoperability testing with all carriers and especially BT. It's scales so well that our hardware usage is kept to the minimum needed to power our reliable and fault tolerant core platform. We also use FreeSWITCH and FusionPBX to power our hosted platforms, oh and let's not forget OpenSIPS and PostgreSQL."

"We're all about Open Source software and it's no secret that millions of customers and consumers worldwide benefit from projects like FreeSWITCH, even if they don't know it. The community behind FreeSWITCH is always so responsive. The IRC channel is brilliant, the mailing list is brilliant as is the commercial support available from the project team, which is also second to none. It's actually quite hard to fault the project at all", says Gavin Henry.

Established in Scotland in 2003, the Suretec Group specializes in open source IT support and consultancy, open source telecoms and training in open source software. SureVoIP is the fourth division within the group, which also includes Suretec Systems, Suretec Telecoms and Suretec Training.

Voicetronic Computer Telephony

Voicetronix builds a range of Computer Telephony hardware that connect to traditional fixed line and IP based services and equipment. We develop and support open source telephony application software and focus on the Linux operating system. Our products turn commodity PC/servers into advanced and open communication solutions, affording enterprise level functionality to Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs).
Typical telephony solutions supported include:

• Call Recording/Monitoring systems.
• Fixed line and IP based PBX phone systems.
• IVR and ACD systems.
• Computer Telephony Integration (CTI).
• Automated tools for measuring network & telephony equipment performance.

Our hardware and software products are tailored for:

• Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs),
• Value Added Resellers (VARs),
• System Integrators (SI) and
• Information & Communications Technology (ICT) consultants.

Asterisk Open Source PBX for Window

Asterisk creates a PBX in open source that rivals the features and functionality of traditional telephony switches. Asterisk is cost-effective, low-maintenance, and flexible enough to handle all voice and data networking.
With Asterisk software, Telephony hardware, and a common PC, anyone can replace an existing switch or complement a PBX by adding Voice Over IP, voicemail, conferencing, and many other capabilities. Asterisk integrates with analog phones and most standards-based IP telephone handsets and software.
Asterisk greatly reduces the cost of traditional telecommunication technology and operation, and moves voice over IP, VoIP, to the mainstream. Asterisk integrates a pre-existing analog telephone network with the benefits of IP technology, greatly reducing costs.

Asterisk Open Source PBX System

Asterisk, the world's most popular open source communications project, is free, open source software that converts an ordinary computer into a feature-rich voice communications server. Asterisk makes it simple to create and deploy a wide range of telephony applications and services, including IP PBXs, VoIP gateways, call center ACDs and IVR systems.
Asterisk is released as open source under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and it is available for download free of charge. Asterisk® is the leading open source telephony project and the Asterisk community has been ranked as a key factor in the growth of VoIP.

Asterisk is like an erector set or a box of Legos for people who want to create communications applications. That's why we refer to it as a "tool-kit" or "development platform". Asterisk includes all the building blocks needed to create a PBX system, an IVR system or virtually any other kind of communications solution. The "blocks" in the kit include:

• Drivers for various VoIP protocols.
• Drivers for PSTN interface cards and devices.
• Routing and call handling for incoming calls.
• Outbound call generation and routing.
• Media management functions (record, play, generate tone, etc.).
• Call detail recording for accounting and billing.
• Transcoding (conversion from one media format to another).
• Protocol conversion (conversion from one protocol to another).
• Database integration for accessing information on relational databases.
• Web services integration for accessing data using standard internet protocols.
• LDAP integration for accessing corporate directory systems.
• Single and mult-party call bridging.
• Call recording and monitoring functions.
• Integrated "Dialplan" scripting language for call processing.
• External call management in any programming or scripting language through Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI)
• Event notification and CTI integration via the Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI).
• Speech synthesis (aka "text-to-speech") in various languages and dialects using third party engines.
• Speech recognition in various languages using third party recognition engines.

This combination of components allows an integrator or developer to quickly create voice-enabled applications. The open nature of Asterisk means that there is no fixed limit on what it can be made to do. Asterisk integrators have built everything from very small IP PBX systems to massive carrier media servers.

Asterisk As A PBX

Asterisk can be configured as the core of an IP or hybrid PBX, switching calls, managing routes, enabling features, and connecting callers with the outside world over IP, analog (POTS), and digital (T1/E1) connections.
Asterisk runs on a wide variety of operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Sun Solaris and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX including many advanced features that are often associated with high end (and high cost) proprietary PBXs. Asterisk's architecture is designed for maximum flexibility and supports Voice over IP in many protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware.

Open Source Software Telephony PBX System

It is only natural to extend the benefits of open source to computer telephony, especially when the computer is running an open source operating system such as Linux and telephony while being a crucial business and social enabler is typically closed and still under the control of the supplier. Combining open source application software running on Linux based commodity PC/servers gives you total control at a very low cost base.
Open Source effectively increases user adoption by:

1. Reducing the cost of ownership and making it affordable.
2. Promoting community development & support.
3. Eliminating vendor lock-in thus providing control back to the you.
4. Inherently facilitating customisation and localisation activities, transcending geographical and cultural barriers.

Open source eliminates the barriers to knowledge, thus increasing competition amongst vendors and service providers, promoting innovation and eliminating the opportunity for monopolization. For developers, it enables them to avoid the duplication of effort, allowing them to concentrate on adding value by building on the foundation of others.

By using Open Source software, telephony systems can be built for the price of a telephony card, a PC and a little effort. This can give your company a tremendous cost advantage over traditional business models, that charge largely for their proprietary software. 

With open source software, at best you have a team of developers working with you to upgrade and fix bugs on your telephony system - all for free. This is why open source software potentially can be far more reliable and stable than comparable closed source systems. Open source software has a far lower cost of ownership for this reason. At worst, if there is a bug in open source software any competent developer can find and fix it, as they have the source available to them. In a closed source system, you are at the mercy of the software vendor.