The latest Enterprise Telephony Report by Infonetics Research has come out.

Found in this report, Matthias Machowinski projects that while even increasing 1% in the first quarter of 2007, TDM PBX phone system sales are expected to continue the overall decline (the small rise of 1% was the first in six months).

Machowski also doesn’t think that Microsoft’s Office Communications Server is going to fair better. He thinks it is not going to have the massive impact that some others say it will.

Some highlights from the report:

Overall enterprise telephony revenue is on track for another year of double-digit growth;

Hybrid PBX systems represent 63% of all PBX/KTS system line shipments worldwide in 1Q07, and will increase to 72% by 2010;

Avaya is the market share leader for worldwide IP PBX revenue in 1Q07, followed closely by Cisco and Siemens;

Cisco maintains a strong lead in IP deskphone and IP softphone sales, accounting for almost half the units shipped worldwide in 1Q07.

The enterprise telephony market was flat in North America in 1Q07, weak in Europe, and strong in Asia Pacific;

n 1Q07, worldwide total PBX/KTS system sales inched up 1% sequentially, and are up 8% from a year ago in 1Q06;

The overall market will total $11.9 billion in 2010;

One of the main thing that’s changed about prom night in recent years are professional photographers. Whereas it was common for professional photographs to be taken at a fancy restaurant or in front of the rented limos, today’s prom goers are taking their own pictures.

Teenager’s are using their camera phones to snap prom night pics. Just take a look at a search for “prom” at Flickr.com. You’ll find hundreds of thousands of prom night pics, like the one in this article, taken by the promsters themselves.

Makes one wonder how digital photography on the whole is impacting professional photographers.

The deadlines set by the FCC were explicit: by March 12th, 2007, VoIP providers in the U.S. had to file their plans for metting the wiretapping obligations laid out in CALEA(the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act).

It was made official that by March 14 these providers must be in full compliance or suffer the heavy fines. While several people assume this means that any VoIP call may be tapped, this is not the case. All that can be said with any certainty is that CALEA compliance is a work in progress, and having trouble off the ground at that.

Robert Poe of VoIP-News.com says,

Setting the deadline doesn’t mean punishment for non-compliance will be swift and certain. In theory the fine for not meeting CALEA requirements can be up to $10,000 a day. But the FCC has announced no procedure for determining who gets fined, or when or for how much. Even well-connected observers aren’t sure what’s going on.

Read more about the nuances of CALEA at VoIP-News.

Today the Boy Genius Report announced that the Apple iPhone to be released on June 29 may contain a VPN client. This has not been substantiated.

If you’re unsure just what the advantages of iPhone capability might be, take a look at Wikipedia’s definition, which is as good a place as any from which to start:

A virtual private network (VPN) is a private communications network often used by companies or organizations, to communicate confidentially over a public network. VPN traffic can be carried over a public networking infrastructure (e.g. the Internet) on top of standard protocols, or over a service provider’s private network with a defined Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the VPN customer and the VPN service provider. A VPN can send data (e.g., voice, data or video, or a combination of these media) across secured and encrypted private channels between two points.

Vonage recently signed a deal with DBL Distributing, a consumer electronics distributor, which will enable all Vonage devices to be sold at DBL’s greater than 32,000 retail distributors’ locations throughout the United States.

Beginning immediately, wholesaler DBL will market Vonage-ready VoIP items and accessories, along with retailer packages that include signage, sale displays and training materials, as reported by TWICE (This Week In Consumer Electronics).

As a leading distributor of consumer electronics among independent retailers, we’re always looking for services that add profit potential and increase foot traffic to a dealer’s business. We believe Vonage and VoIP-related products are two major components of consumer demand now and long-term,

said DBL’s chief merchandising officer, Henry Chiarelli, in a release announcing the deal.

Already DBL has included these Vonage products in their latest distributor’s catalog.

On Thursday, The Federal Communications Commission extended the disability access requirements of Sections 225 and 255 of the Communications Act.

This applies to traditional phone services, as well as to providers of interconnected VoIP services and to the manufacturers of all telephony related equipment.

Section 255 of the Communications Act has to do with requiring that manufacturers of “telecommunications equipment or customer premises equipment” and service providers of “telecommuications service” to ensure that all equipment involved or each service offered is usable by and accessible to those with disabilities, if readily achievable.

For more info, read the official FCC announcement.

Beginning today, South Korea has banned U.S.-based VoIP services to all of the U.S. soldiers currently stationed there.

What this means is that they will now have to use a South Korean provider, like Hanaro Telecom Inc, Korea Telecom Corp., or LG Dacom Corp. In addition, soldiers will have to secure a local number in South Korea to make VoIP calls.

Russell Shaw had this to say,

This has come about after a June 2006 statement by some of South Korea’s major Internet service providers that they would block phone calls over the Internet over connections from providers not registered under the Korean Telecommunications Business Act. But after U.S. Forces Korea Commander General Burwell Baxter Bell said the move would impact service members’ quality of life, the companies agreed to delay enforcing the act until June 1, 2007.Now, I am going to control my anger here.

If it weren’t for our dedicated yet underpaid forces in South Korea, Kim Jung-Il and those maniacs in North Korea likely would have overran the south years ago. If that had happened, there wouldn’t be telcos such as Korea Telecom Corp., Hanaro Telecom Inc. as well as LG Dacom Corp. And the fat cats that run these companies might be in exile, or worse.

In a new article published on xchange magazine’s xchange online by Kelly Teal, the dire situation of many VoIP companies.

For one thing, the expense of VoIP itself has set back companies that are trying to compete with the big telco voice companies out there. –particularly those offering multiple service packages.

In his article Kelly quotes two telecom industry analysts:

“I don’t see how far it can go — there is no future,” Stéphane Téral, principal analyst for Infonetics Research, says of the VoIP pure-play model. “They really need to come up with something new that has nothing to do anymore with who they were in the past.”

Sally Cohen, an analyst who covers consumer VoIP and broadband for Forrester Research, says consumers are not really interested in a pure-play solution. Despite the mountains of money Vonage has spent on advertising to evangelize VoIP services to the nation, Cohen’s recently released report, “VoIP Marketers: Price And Features Slowly Win Over Consumers,” finds 3 percent of online consumers in 2004 paid for pure-play VoIP and that’s only risen two percentage points since then. That slow growth illustrates Cohen’s opinion that Vonage is “marketing to a disinterested public.”

Though Kelly seems to think that Vonage understands the cons of pure play, quoting a Vonage spokesperson about the dual-mode phone to be released by the year’s end, many people feel that a new phone model isn’t going to do much when the problem is maketing to a disunterested public.

Though high interantional mobile rates have opened the market to alternative VoIP services like Rebtel and Jajah, there always seems to be some added inconvenience to using a new system.

That said, there are a couple new low-cost international calling services that come pretty close to repicating the traditional phone experience with more features.

TalkPlus and Eqo are two of these companies. While they take similar approaches, they each have significant differences. With both of these services you can set up a call via web interface. The service then makes local calls to you and the person you are calling. You pay for the local calls and the connecting international call. But at least you don’t have to receive a call to make a call.

Eqo uses low-cost international VoIP connections, while TalkPlus uses low-cost international voice routes.

Another difference if that Eqo focuses only on mobile customers, while TalkPlus Global can be used from traditional landline phones as well.

In an interview with Juan Carlos Perez, Google’s product manager Nathan Stoll hints at the possibility that news links from YouTube (owned by Google) are likely to be integrated with Google News.

When Perez asked Stoll if there are plans to add a video component to Google News, Stoll responded,

We don’t want to preannounce any features but our Google News philosophy is to give users access to all the perspectives on a news story. To the extent that a lot of those are in video and becoming available online, we’d certainly love to make those perspectives available and easily discoverable.

Read more about this latest move by Google in the Computerworld interview.