So now VoIP Girl has roped me into the Blog Tag game.

Here are my little-known facts:

I have a degree in Music. Sometimes I still play the piano, but mostly I sing these days. I belong to a choir dedicated to Gregorian Chant, Renaissance Polyphony and Latin liturgy.

I love shoes and the color red. And especially the two together.

I used to work in product marketing for an ERP software company where I was a maven of manufacturing. I volunteered to edit the customer magazine because it sounded like fun. After my son was born, I left the marketing job and just ran the magazine. After the company was inhaled by Computer Associates, I worked as a freelance copywriter. I was a wallflower at the dot-com ball. After the tech bust in 2001 I was forced to find honest work.

I write poetry that gets published in journals that go belly up immediately after — sometimes before — publishing my work. I also write personal essays. Some of them are on SiliconMom.

Andy Abramson once called me “Voxilla’s VoIP Princess.”

So I tag….Marcelo Rodriguez, Lonnie Lazar and Eric Chamberlain.

Oh, and Leanne: check out a la cards for your embellishments.

We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but it seems to me that the Voice over IP (VoIP) industry is in need of security training and improvements.

There’s been much noise over VoIP security lately, though not much of the what’s been voiced is new or innovative. Much of it just parrots old advice: segment the network traffic and install a VoIP firewall.

The fact that VoIP security discussions haven’t advanced much beyond what applies to ordinary networking is a sign that a lot of new education is needed.

Some think education alone is not enough. For example, Stephen Northcutt, Director of Training and Certification for the SANS Institute, thinks that the whole technology needs a major overhaul.

“If I had my way, I would have the creators of VoIP stop everything and redesign this with security in mind from the get-go.” Northcutt said in a recent interview.

IT professionals need to understand the nature of the VoIP traffic on their networks. VoIP is much more than just another real-time LAN application and securing it requires broader security methods.

Overver the coming weeks, Voxilla will take a close look at VoIP security with our upcoming three part series on VoIP confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

And, we’ve launched a Voxilla forum dedicated to VoIP Security issues in hopes of fostering positive discussions over these issues. Come and visit

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The Linksys SPA942 Device Configuration Wizard is the newest device addition to the Voxilla Device Configuraiton Wizard family.

This update extends the same configuration options that were available with the SPA841 and SPA941 configuration wizards to the SPA942.

PhoneGnome offers several ways to make free calls, including using non-PhoneGnome devices.

As an example, I don’t have a landline at home and can use PhoneGnome, a SPA942, and my cell phone. The solution is a good fit for longer calls, when holding a cell phone would be uncomfortable and use too many air-time minutes.

Configuring a non-PhoneGnome device was a manual process, until now. With the help of Dameon Welch-Abernathy, aka “PhoneBoy“, the Voxilla Device Configuration Wizards now include support for PhoneGnome.

Simply select PhoneGnome as the Service Provider when stepping through the wizard and supply the SoftGnome SIP credentials.

The SoftGnome SIP credentials are found in My PhoneGnome Features -> SoftGnome Remote Access -> Edit -> View SIP Credentials.

The Voxilla Device Configuration Wizard won’t convert the device into a full-featured PhoneGnome Box, but it will allow the device to make and receive calls using PhoneGnome as the service provider.

For the full set of PhoneGnome features, there is the PhoneGnome Box or PhoneGnome has an upgrade tool for the Linksys SPA3000 (soon to be End-of-Lifed by Linksys).

For small- and medium-sized businesses, going VoIP is no easy matter. The choices are complex and confusing.

Because of the perceived risks, most small and medium businesses are not ready to move completely to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) in one move. Instead small and medium businesses are looking for an incremental transition from the world of analog to VoIP.

TalkSwitch offers an upgradeable line of hybrid PBX systems to fit the need — starting with the TS-24-CA supporting two lines and four extensions and continuing to the TS-48-CVA supporting 16 lines and 32 local and 32 remote extensions.

The newly released version 4.0 of the PBX software now extends VoIP support beyond trunks to the extensions, allowing an organization to use both analog and SIP phones.

We tested the TS-48CVA with version 4.0 software, a TS-400 phone, a TS-600 phone, a Polycom SoundPoint IP 601 SIP phone, and an Aastra 390 analog phone.

Read the editor’s review or post your own.