Fusion Telecommunications International, Inc. announced last week that they have finalized the sale of their 49% equity interest in Estel Communications Pvt., Ltd., an Indian joint venture.

The reported profits of this deal are around $485,000. Fusion is planning to continue marketing their services in India under a different brand.

Matthew Rosen, President and Chief Executive Officer of Fusion had this to say,

Fusion has achieved a number of important milestones in the past few months, including significant capital infusions from private investors, a strategic partner and now, most recently, the sale of our subsidiary in India. This sale is an important part of our 2007 strategy to maximize efficiencies and expand our sales and marketing initiatives.

The May 16th edition of the New York Times had an article about looking beyond Vonage as to other VoIP service providers.

The NY Times article explains why VoIP is so cheap, not requiring installation of expemsive network equipment, and goes on to list some of the other advantages to using VoIP.

Beyond looking at some of the general benefits of using VoIP, the Times article quotes Henry Kaestner, CEO of Bandwidth.com as saying,

This is a real boon for the 5-to-10-person office.

Certainly the smaller office stands to benefit the most in terms of service versus cost. Smaller offices can save quite a bit over traditional long distance phone calls using VoIP, and at the same time benefit from high-end services such as call forwarding.

There are several applications that can help you shield your phone numbers, whether cell, land line or VoIP.

For call handling and call blocking, take a look at Jaxtr. This service gives you a Jaxtr URL. On someone’s Jaxtr URL you can enter you phone number and Jaxtr calls you and the other person for the cost of a local call.

Craigsnumber is a free service that generates a phone number where people can reach you. Before they can connect, however, users will need to leave a short message. Once you hear the message you can choose to connect with the caller or not.

For premium call blocking (maybe your VoIP number is already public) check out Privacy Corps. This $100 device can block up to 175 numbers or even entire area codes or area codes + prefixes.

Take a look at this hilarious Vonage spoof video from mepreport.com via YouTube. This video takes humorous look at the copyright infringement suit brought against Vonage by Verizon.

Okay, so you’ve probably heard that annoying Woo Hoo song more than one needs to in a lifetime, but this vid is worth checking out.

Not just another seemingly pro-Vonage commercial spoof. This one has a sense of humor about the rise and fall of the VoIP giant.

With its stellar history for ferreting out the hottest new technologies, it surely seems as though as eyes are on Cisco Systems and its most recent offering: telepresence.

VoIP-News.com caught up with David Hsieh, Cisco TelePresence System director of marketing, to talk about the company’s strategies for offering unified communications solutions.

Hsieh’s response as to what Voip-News asked about the company’s approach to reshaping communications, was to say that the new Telepresence System is built on a large amount of powerful technology and fits seamlessly into Cisco’s spectrum of offered communication solutions.

Hsieh goes on to say that he thinks experience is the other main advantage that Cisco has over other competing unified communications companies.

For more info see the VoIP News interview.

Of course your reasons for wanting to get through to a phone number by which you have been blocked are legit.

If someone blocks your VoIP callls by filtering out Skype and other VoIP packets, there are two primary options worth considering.

Routing calls through a VPN (virtual private network) means that all your VoIP packets are encrypted and unreadable.

Another option is to use services like those from Solegy. These encrypt VoIP packets and the accompanying information without using a VPN. Though services like these do not use a VPN, the packets are still unreadable by prying ears or eyes.

In Canada, a TV news item stated that for the first time, the number of cell phone users has outnumbered traditional fixed line users.

If I correctly recall, that has been the case in the U.S. since last Fall. I myself haven’t had a land line in over 6 years because I spend so much time away from home.

Like many of my friends, I have no intention of getting a land line unless I absolutely have to in order to answer an apartment complex intercom or something like that.

Microsoft is getting on track for becoming a dominant IP telephony provider. Their VoIP phone announcement on Tuesday represents a significant step toward Microsoft’s IP telephony goals.

15 IP telephones, by nine manufacturers, were unveiled and compatible with Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft’s software for providing IP PBX functions over a corporate network.

What this means is that companies using Microsoft’s phone solution will have options beyond headsets. A study, which Microsoft had commissioned, shows that its soft phones provide better quality than some desk phones of Cisco’s.

Although the study seems to indicate that Microsoft was counting on their headsets and soft clients run on PCs, the latest announcement has proven otherwise.

May 16th the new Skype for Mac 2.6 was released, chock full of new features:

One of the new features, exclusively for Mac users, is a call-transfer feature that is able to transfer an ongoing call to another Skype user on the original user’s contact list. This can be done by accessing the More > Call Transfer menu.

Many of the features available in this release have been available on other platforms in the past:

• A chat indicator that lets Skype users see when others are writing a message
• The ability to join public chats
• Skype Prime –which is a premium support resource that can be paid for with Skype credits.
• Automatic Updates allow Skype users access to new features and updates without having to visit the website.

For more information, visit the Skype for Mac 2.6 site.

Provider of Packet8 broadband VoIP services, 8×8, announced yesterday that they have been awarded another U.S. Patent for VoIP using a communication routing system that connects over a broadband data network.

Example portions of this invention include routing non-local calls through a broadband data network as well as utilizing a broadband data network to provide telephony services. This includes default and programmed call routing to a user’s voice mail, email or virtual extension.

This patent (No. 7,218,721) was issued from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on May 15th. One of the 16 claims reads:

A communication routing system having a plurality of local and remote
communication devices communicatively coupled through local and remote
PSTNs, respectively, the system comprising: a user-programmable
database associating each of a plurality of user identifiers with a
device identifier, each device identifier corresponding to one of the
communication devices; a call-routing switch arrangement coupled to one
of the PSTNs through a portal communication device having a portal
identifier and responsive to a received call designating a destination
user identifier, the call routing switch arrangement adapted to use the
user-programmable database to route the received call via the other of
the PSTNs to a destination communication device.