Phil Hochmuth

Canadian governments and other public sector agencies have identified VoIP as one of the most useful technologies to help them meet the high expectation for citizen service. VoIP may be hot, but all that heat can raise some issues. We resolve to answer some of the more pressing questions you might be facing.

Canadian governments and other public sector agencies have identified VoIP as one of the most useful technologies to help them meet the high expectation for citizen service. VoIP may be hot, but all that heat can raise some issues. We resolve to answer some of the more pressing questions you might be facing.

Foundry launched its largest Ethernet switch to date at Interop last month, a 32-slot, 5.1 terabit-per-second Ethernet switch aimed at high-end data centres and campus LAN backbones.

Startup Teak Technologies has debuted a 10G Ethernet switch for blade servers. The hook is a new traffic-management and congestion-detection technology built into the hardware, which, the company says, eliminates latency and makes standard 10G connections look slow.

Nortel has warned of several backdoors and other flaws in its VPN and secure routing products that could allow unauthorized remote access to an enterprise network.

Call Cisco a victim of its own success; as its dominance in corporate routing and switching grows, so goes the vigorous aftermarket for Cisco gear, a sub segment that

Last year, Cisco revamped its channel partner certification programs in an effort to get the VARs and integrators -- through which Cisco sells 80 percent of its products -- to become more competent in such advanced technologies as IP telephony and voice, wireless and security. The change required partners to specialize in certain technology areas, such as VOIP or WLANs, as opposed to Cisco integrators who just resold, installed and supported the vendor's whole product menu.

Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell is planning a global VoIP rollout with tens of thousands of IP phones that will ultimately run off of a mostly Microsoft-based server platform.