Authors Mark Lindsey
SMTS at ECG

Enterprise Connect 2019 focused on Small-room video systems and Cloud-hosted Contact Center platforms, with lots of other small bits in the orbit.

Cisco's support site now aggressively warns BroadWorks operators when patches are missing.

Seven basic facts about the laws, the logic, and the technical implementation of STIR/SHAKEN to fight robocalling.

New training specials from ECG lock in savings and give you the maximum flexibility for 2019.

To provide reliable SIP failover -- do it slowly.

MIAMI, FLORIDA - BroadSoft Connections 2018 - The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has now allowed ECG to publish information about the long-term relationship in which ECG, Inc. has been proudly supporting Federal law enforcement since 2007. This partnership is one of ECG's proudest contributions to reliable communications for critical, life-saving goals. The US DOJ approved release of the info...

Original Release Date: September 19, 2018. Updated 18:19 UTC Systems Affected SIP Service Providers and Enterprises Background & Description SIP based Enterprises and Service Providers (SIP Operators) that provide SIP UA configuration files (such as for Cisco, Polycom, Yealink, Mitel devices), but which do not authenticate those downloads effectively, are vulnerable to attack by...

Network Outages are going to happen. The marketing department talks about Zero Outages -- and that's a great goal to have. But as the pragmatic engineering and operations team, you can prepare for outages to prevent them and to remediate instantly. Skip the Pretend Redundancy Detect and Triage Faults PCAP: Packet capture Ready for Remote Testing Logging Enabled & Synchronized Prepare the h...

Capturing packets and not missing a lot of them can be hard. If you're monitoring TLS (including SIP over TLS), you need every single packet to be able to decode it. Many of us have a Linux server for doing our captures. There are some great tools like gulp and n2disk (among other great work on this subject from Luca Deri). But on a vanilla Linux machine, using whatever Ethernet interfaces you ...

"DNS is one of those things that gets overlooked… You make your voice servers super-redundant, but you take it for granted that DNS will always work." — Fonality The Domain Name System (DNS) conventionally helps devices convert domain names, like VoIPCarrier.com, to IP addresses, like 216.128.128.50. But in Voice and Unified Communication (UC) services, it serves an additional key role i...

Careful testing is crucial for stability before launching new SIP Access Device models The Product Definition must be baked into the Test Plan used to approve the device, & new software for it Customer Technical Support teams need extensive early access to devices  before they are deployed Space Probes are designed to be sent far away, beyond our reach. They run software, and send back d...

IP Fragmentation of SIP Messages is an enduring source of trouble. Fragmentation of SIP traffic is a problem on the rise. It appears when everything has been working fine, and seemingly without cause,  some SIP messages are lost in the network. The result is a frustrating scenario where some SIP messages are delivered fine, but others are not. To explain SIP fragmentation, let's start at the be...

  When we teach classes on VoIP networks, we discuss the variety of SIP standards that can be used by working systems. For example, identifying the calling party varies between platforms: One system uses P-Asserted-Identity to indicate the caller, and another uses From. Then there's the codec used for audio: One system uses G.722 and another uses G.722.2. One system expects national telephone n...

Robocalling, enabled by VoIP, causes real social harm Filtering based on Caller ID brings some temporary relief The telecom industry has real work ahead to protect Caller ID with STIR VoIP Drove down the cost of making phone calls. We love that about VoIP: free long distance! In the telecom industry now, the idea that calls within a country would cost a retail user more than local calls seems...

Committing time to answer questions is the crucial first step This is Part 3 in my Series on Supporting/Managing Engineers Configuring bridging, building bridges Unlike software, systems, network, and voice engineering, regulated engineering disciplines require licensing. According to the National Society of Professional Engineers, a college engineering graduate candidate can "begi...