A QUALITY OF SERVICE [QOS] tool developed to troubleshoot VoIP call quality has significant implications for some network users. A live demo at the IP08 show in London picked up on someone playing Blackjack in their lunch hour.

Known as Appflow, the tool has been developed for its customers by ISP and telecoms service provider 8el. The company's core business is weaning customers off their fixed (ISDN) lines onto its SIP based IP network.

The bane for any business relying on VoIP – rather the public phone network (PSTN) – for all its voice communications is call quality.

Businesses absolutely hate it when call quality drops off sharply because of network congestion. So 8el developed Appflow so that its customers could drill down and identify the root cause of the congestion.

Even as far down as an individual user and/or a particular app. Which is how the Blackjack player was caught.

With budgets getting increasingly tighter, 8el's md, Justin Hamilton-Martin, is counting on businesses turning to managed network providers like his company rather than spend on updating legacy switchboards.

So 8el can provide companies with 'virtual' switchboards where a telephone 'extension' can in reality be a mobile phone or a laptop computer.

Hamilton-Martin prefers to term this an IP Centrex offering. But the INQ would call it an NGN (next generation network) today rather than waiting for BT tomorrow.

8el is working with a specialist handset vendor which will mean that a dual mode – wi-fi and cellular - handset can work seamlessly as a virtual switchboard extension phone.

This will lead to an interesting battle. An 8el handset working as a virtual extension would have a 'fixed' line telephone number.

That would take revenue away from the mobile networks.
But they're probably blissfully unaware of the danger right now. Oops. µ