Support for the SIP protocol as well as presence and unified communication concepts weren't the only industry hot topics at last week's VoiceCon. The spotlight was also on wireless LANs (WLANs), contact centers, and voice over Wi-Fi.

Verizon Business expanded its hosted contact center service capabilities with support for Internet Protocol, enabling businesses to communicate using either traditional or IP telephony. The company's IP Web center and Verizon Voice over IP now run over the same network infrastructure and customer premises equipment, allowing Verizon Business to offer a range of IP telephony services, including IP Web center, hosted IP Centrex, IP Integrated Access, IP flexible T-1 and IP trunking, at a single location. Verizon Business also made flexible its payment plans, allowing customers to pay as they go for IP-enabled Web center services. Customers can now pay a monthly per-agent price plus call transport fees and associated IP phone equipment costs.

WLAN vendor, Trapeze Networks, upgraded its RingMaster lifecycle network management tool so that it simplifies deployment of voice and other wireless services. Voice, Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2), and a web portal for browser-based access can now be configured through a set of wizards that lead operations staff through the process with a series of mouse clicks. The configuration tool helps eliminate errors. The company also changed the structure of RingMaster to make it more user-friendly. RF planning, configuration, monitoring and reporting are now available on a tool bar so that creating a report on network utilization, for example, can be reached with a maximum of two mouse clicks. Scalability of RingMaster server has also been upgraded so it can now support up to 500 Mobility Exchange switches, 2,000 Mobility Point radios and 30,000 clients.

Also at VoiceCon, WiFiMobile introduced a Voice over Wi-Fi application that turns a mobile phone into an extension of a corporate IP-PBX. The WiFiMobilePBX will be available for mobile phones based on Nokia's S60 3rd Edition Platform for S60 3rd Edition smartphones via VAR500 resellers. In addition to having the ability to use mobile phones as an extension to the corporate PBX, WiFiMobilePBX features include transparent operation for dialing and contact list access, seamless mobility in the office using an existing WLAN, access to corporate contacts list regardless of location, an open, standards-based SIP solution that works with any SIP-compliant IP-PBX and offers server-based OMA-compliant Device Management. Nokia licenses the S60 Platform to leading cell phone vendors such as LG Electronics, Lenovo, Panasonic, Samsung, Sendo and Siemens which, together with Nokia, account for nearly two thirds of global cell phone sales