The award winners were announced on October 14th at a ceremony attended by over 600 people at the London Hilton, Park Lane. The event recognised excellence in resellers and their ability to provide solutions to customers, and the best products and highest levels of support provided by vendors to channel partners.

Now in their ninth year, the Comms National Awards are widely regarded as the ‘Oscars' for companies in the UK voice and data industry. With entry numbers at record levels this year, we were really pleased to win in this category against strong competition from some of the UK's leading vendors. I felt privileged to represent the team and accept the award for Citel from high profile comedian Stephen K Amos & Spitfire's Tom Fellowes.

Citel’s Portico TVA enables organisations to migrate to VoIP while continuing to use their existing phone handsets. This means they can get all the benefits of IP telephony, such as cheaper calls, while avoiding the cost or disruption of replacing their entire phone system.
See www.citel.com/News_Events/Press_Releases/Citel_CN_awards_extended_Oct_2010.pdf

We had several questions posed that were quite similar, one during the webinar and then a follow up question from someone else after the webinar so we thought we would combine the answer

Q1. Don't IP PBX systems support analog handsets? Many I've looked at do and I don't understand the difference between that and your product. 

Q2 I listened to a webcast today about the use of your system with analog phones. If we put in a new IPPBX from Avaya we have the option of buying analog cards with it. I'm confused on why we would need your solution when the IP Office has analog port options. Could you please explain?

A. The Analog TVA does indeed offer the functionality of an Analog ATA, available from various suppliers in gateway form, as well as in the form of analog line cards for IP PBXs, like IP Office or Asterisk.

If an Avaya IP Office user wants to connect simple analog phones, assuming the pricing works out, they would likely buy Avaya analog cards, making the overall system easier to manage. However if they want to connect Centrex phones, or legacy digital phones, then the TVA is the only show in town. Having said that we have had several customers tell us that as they were already migrating digital / Centrex phones using our TVA’s they wanted to keep everything consistent and standardized on the Portico™ TVA™. Also in another case, a customer stated that they found our Analog TVA worked out more cost effectively that the specific analog cards they were looking at.

Citel's Portico TVA has been named Peripheral Product of the Year at the 2010 Comms National Awards ceremony at the London Hilton on Park Lane in London, England on October 14, 2010. We are very proud of this award.

The Comms National Awards are regarded as the ‘Oscars' of the Voice & Data Channel in the UK and are  much coveted. Each year competition is fierce as the UK's leading vendors and voice & data solution providers seek to gain the accolades of their peer group and become winners at the Comms National Awards. We were pleased to be selected as a finalist and even more pleased when the award was announced this evening. The award is for providers of peripheral products that give customers more effective and efficient communications across the ICT spectrum and include headsets, GSM gateways, operator modules, faxes, conference units, UPS solutions, door entry systems, anti-nuisance devices etc. The support provided to resellers in selling these added value solutions is an important elements of the submission.

 

ON ON PARK LANE - THURSDAY OCTOBER 14th 2010

As promised, on an irregular basis we will be blogging with some more questions and answers from the Citel Portico TVA webinar from mid September.

Q. Is there a T.38-support on your Analog Port on the TVA, for using fax?

A. Not at the current time. The device was designed to work with voice not data.

Q. Did I miss this? I assume Citel's TVA provides power to both digital and analog handsets.

A. You are correct, the TVA provides line power to digital, analog and P-phone handsets connected

Stay tuned for more questions and answers.

I had the opportunity to be interviewed at the recent IT EXPO West 2010 held at the Los Angeles Convention Center October 4-6. We discussed the Portico TVA, our recent interview and our latest interoperability with NET and their SmartSIP platform that will enable Microsoft OCS users to continue to use their legacy handsets.  Go to www.tmcnet.com/tmc/videos/default.aspx?vid=3177 to watch the interview.

Another question posed during Citel's webinar on September 15, 2010

Q. Can the administrator control which users can access the User Portal?

A. Yes, Access to the user portal, and the username and password, need to be setup separately for each phone user. Phone users can configure feature buttons, display etc. They can access directory and call log. However,  line configurations and registrations can only be changed by the administrator.

As one of my colleagues reminded me, the E-1000U series units, the E-1000U-SNM, E-1000U-RNM, E-1000U-SLM and E-1000U-RLM  work in dedicated line mode, whereas their replacements, the E-1100A-SUC and the E-1100A-RUC do not: one of the main reasons we brought back the older units

The ever popular E-1000U series PBXgateway / EXTenders are now back in stock for the foreseeable future. Many customers have a number of remote workers who still need to connect in to their corporate PBX via POTS lines. Historically this was done by the use of the MCK 1000A series of products. These items connect to the PBX either on a one to one basis with a E-1000U-RNM (Nortel) or E-1000U-RLM (Avaya) at the remote locations connecting to the E-1000U-SNM (Nortel) or E-1000U-SLM (Avaya) at the switch site, or on a consolidated basis with the same remotes connecting via the line cards (E-1000U-CNM (Nortel) or E-1000U-CLM (Avaya) that can be connected 12 at a time using a 12 card rack.

Q. How does the Portico work with a hosted PBX provider? Is it just a matter of replacing TDM with SIP trunks?

A. The answer is yes. Though of course you can replace TDM/ISDN trunks with SIP trunks even if you have a premise based IP PBX.

Here's another answer to a question posed at the webinar (on September 15, 2010) that we didn't have time to answer on the day.

Q.
Using a serial-port for the Console set-up seems old-fashioned. Do you plan to have it replaced with a browser?

A.
I suppose it is a bit, but the console is only for initial setup, and we want to avoid inadvertant voltage changes to the phones via the web interface - as different makes of phone (Avaya, Nortel, Siemens etc) operate at quite different voltages.
Serial consoles are still not that unusual - IP Office has a serial port for some debugging for example. 

We do now intend to make a USB to serial adapter available with demonstration kits as an alternative to the standard serial cable - as laptops often don't have a serial port nowadays.

It's worth stressing that the console is only needed for initial out-of-the-box setup - after setting the PBX type to be emulated, and the initial IP settings (static or DHCP), configuration is then via the web interface. The console is then just for debugging purposes if needed, and can be accessed with Telnet as well as the serial port.