$7.99/month for Cloud Telephony. Interested?

Long-time hosted PBX provider 8×8 has some enticing news today. They’re offering a basic cloud-based phone system, Virtual Office Solo, for $7.99 month.

Solo is meant for tiny startups and entrepreneurs who just need a PSTN line to the outside world along with a few call handling tricks.

Their browser-based softphone lets subscribers click through three-way calling, call forwarding, Internet faxing, call recording, and visual voice mail. There’s also call waiting (with music-on-hold) for juggling multiple incoming callers.Continue reading

Cloud Telephony: High Availability with sipXecs

My world was shaken a little when Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud or EC2 collapsed two weeks ago, temporarily closing the doors on such sites as Quora, Reddit, FourSquare, and  others.

The trigger appears to have been a mysterious network event that occurred at Amazon’s “USA-EAST-1” availability zone, leading to delays in Amazon’s EBS and eventually bringing the show to a stop.

If you are not familiar with AWS—oh sorry, Amazon Web Services—and its terminology then most of the accounts in the news may have left you more, not less, anxious about the state of cloud computing.

Because I recently completed a DIY project (see reference below) in which I tested a very intriguing open-source SIP comm server called sipXecs (pronounced sipX, the ecs is silent) in Amazon’s EC2, my free-floating cloud concerns now settled on cloud telephony.Continue reading