The times I spend in Concord, is to do business, or attend meetings, etc. I don’t tour my capital city. One day last month, my mother had to attend a meeting and I decided to go along with her. I walked on Main Street and realized how interesting the city was – despite living here for my entire live.
There are several “squares” (i.e. common spaces on private land) just off Main Street. Reminds me vaguely of Faunel Hall, especially if you see some of the store fronts on the alleyways.
I’ve come to realize in the my state that has a single area code, there probably is more and more Cisco IP Phones that are connected with a 603 number if it’s a business line. This isn’t even taken on any property in the State of New Hampshire government (which has gone in the tank for Cisco with our tax dollars at work), but a private business in the outskirts of the state complexes.
There is still a handful mum and pop shops that still have the typical Norstars, Partners, but they are becoming less and less as VOIP is moving into this said market. This will be the final nail to the traditional telephony coffin once that occurs. You’ll probably see more Lync or Polycoms than say Cisco enterprise phones, SPA is the consumer/mum-pop equivalent to the Polycoms or Grandstreams and I’ve seen SPAs more and more popping up too.
I’m the last guy to say “I hate Cisco” but often these phones can do much less than its “analog” counterpart and I’d go so far to say the sam with SIP softswitches or “cloud providers”. VOIP in general was not designed with the minds of telecom people, but more towards IT guys who are too lazy to care about the hundreds of features of phone systems, all they care about is make a call and have it go through, they don’t care about paging, multiple calls coming in or what. VOIP systems were designed in the minds of both a lazy consumer and a lazy technical professional, that created a great child called crappy service.
Of course any legacy telephony provider has done VOIP well. How did they do that? They just took their legacy offerings, put it on a server application and carry it over the IP network. The difference is the design and mentality. I am only critical of the VOIP providers/vendors that has not taken this approach. For gawd sake’s alive its not like many of these features are protected by patents ether at this point!