I'm chock full of excitement

I'm chock full of excitement

Boy, when I said thought VoIP would be exciting to write about, I really didn't realize just how exciting things would be! While there are many stories one might expect in this week's newsletter, there are many more that have my eyes popping out of my head: VoIP users being threatened with jail time in Antigua, cops in Bangladesh making arrests and confiscating rooms full of media gateways, and investors getting fleeced in Malaysia.

Then there's the article about the growing list of security risks that VoIP network managers need to worry about. And, finally, an article about a patch Cisco's offering to help prevent the dreaded consequences of something called heap-based overflow, oh my!

The dark underbelly of VoIP is offering up Hollywood-worthy intrigue even as the technology scurries to reach revenues of $44 billion by 2012. It seems to me that anyone getting into the VoIP game at this point ought to think about using their seed money to license the rights to all the drama going on and hire a stable of writers to write shows for a new cable channel. I can see it now: "The VoIP Channel--After Dark."

As far as business-as-usual type stories are concerned, I'm excited about those, too. Especially when I read about HelloSoft's VoIP for WiMAX systems on a chip. WiMAX can use all the help it can get to gain more traction and become all that it can be. I believe its ability to offer quality voice is critical in more ways than one.

While many of us have more than a few gadgets to choose from when we want to communicate with someone, there are many places in this world, such as rural China, using WiMAX to communicate within villages, from village-to-village and from their villages with the rest of the world--for the first time ever. I don't think I could overstate the importance of quality voice over WiMAX to those good people. I hope the news of VoIP for WiMAX SoC portends good things to come for all the end users on the WiMAX frontier. -Annie