Real Time Communications Bits

This week we received good news from google including phone calling support from gmail.   This feature is far from perfect and we expected it to improve a lot yet (specially in voice quality and integration with gmail site), but it is interesting to try to figure out how it works and how is it integrated with the rest of google communications suite . Gmail phone calls is a service to make outgoing voice calls from gmail website to international mobile and fixed telephone lines.  The charging and the caller id are integrated with google voice (GV) if available for that google account. From a technical perspective these are VoIP calls from the web client to the server infrastructure terminating the calls in the telephony network. Client technology The client is suppose to be the same application they use for the previous gtalk voice and video feature (in fact I hadn't to install anything new to start making calls).   That software is a native browser plugin scriptable from th

From my personal experience Skype is getting more and more presence as a non-official corporate tool providing advance communication capabilities.  According to the official reports 35 percent of Skype users utilize it for business purposes [1]. In my opinion the three more important features making Skype so attractive in those environments over other VoIP/Messaging tools are the following ones: Unblockable communications : Some corporate networks try to restrict employees traffic making impossible to use other VoIP tools.  Skype is able to overcome that limitation encapsulating all the traffic under HTTP/HTTPS connections while maintaing a good enough voice quality. Conferencing support : Skype was a pioneer offering voice conferencing support without additional equipment in the network.  That innovative solution allows free and easy to use conferencing support, being a feature commonly used in corporate environments to maintain the audio meetings with your colleagues. Easy to use