Nortel Acquires Pingtel

Nortel has bought Pingtel from mobility firm Bluesocket. Nortel hopes the open source IP PBX division will have better luck moving forward.

Financial terms of the deal remain confidential but Nortel will acquire the key assets of Pingtel from Bluesocket, Pingtel’s existing OEM relationship with Nortel will be brought in house and Pingtel employees will be integrated into Nortel’s Massachusetts facility. Pingtel and Nortel have already been working together for a while on OEM SIP based enterprise solutions.

Pingtel’s sipX open source IP PBX software is highly regarded for its ability to scale to support up to 10,000 users and Pingtel landed Amazon.com as its largest publicly announced customer. The Amazon.com installation reportedly supports over 5,000 users in a high availability configuration.

We think this is an interesting move and we remember when Pingtel produced one of the earliest SIP phones called Xpressa which had a knob on the side to scroll through the phone book and later they moved away from hardware to focus on software and sipX development. In 2007, the company was purchased by Bluesocket. We like the way Nortel has made a move to an OpenSource system but has avoided the Asterisk race, it will be interesting to see how the Asterisk community reacts to such a big player in the Telecoms marketplace making a move into their area.

See the Nortel Press release here.

Does Skype Have a Backdoor ?

We all hear about government agencies that listen into phone calls and how VoIP has presented some interesting challenges for them. In the past we have heared Skype say theat their calls cannot be listened into because of their proprietery encryption methods, well we have now seen a story to the contrary.

The Austrian interior ministry have said that it is possible to listen into Skype conversations, implying that there maybe a back door built into the program.

We saw the story at Heise online and they had talked to a number of parties present at a recent meeting between ISP representatives and the Austrian regulator on lawful intercept of IP services who confirm the report. Skype has declined comment on if the software has a back door or if there is a specific key for decrypting data streams.

Rumors have been floating around for a while that Skype is selling a special listening device to interested governments. As Skype’s code and protocols are both proprietary and closed, security experts have long wondered what Skype is capable of and what risks may arise in deploying the software in an enterprise environment.

Austrian officials have demanded that ISP allow the interior ministry to install network bridges and Linux servers in their network centers to copy and filter data traffic.

See the origional story here.