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RingCentral manages your calls, saves money with VoIP

While GrandCentral may have been stealing headlines lately, there's another suffix-sharing phone call management service called RingCentral that can make small businesses look and function like larger ones with some pretty neat telephonic tomfoolery. The service has been around since early 2004, and today is introducing a slew of VoIP plans called DigitalLine that give users the option to use VoIP instead of, or on top of their existing landlines.

So what can you do with RingCentral? Small business owners will love it, since you can set up a ridiculously extensive set of rules to handle incoming calls, or reroute them on the fly with a virtual phone call manager called SoftPhone. The idea is to take a single or multiline setup and spread it out intelligently, while putting all the options online for you to manage and tweak while away from your office.

Like GrandCentral, you can set up calls to be routed to different phones or line extensions, there are also handy business-centric settings to tweak the response people get when they call at off-business hours. For fans of GrandCentral's multiphone ring system, RingCentral has also gone the extra step of letting you add three-digit passwords to an incoming phone call to keep unintended pickups from happening. This feature actually stemmed out of users wanting to keep their children from answering a business phone call when they had forgotten to turn off the home forwarding options off, or couldn't get to their own phone in time.

The new VoIP implementation is fairly straightforward. All incoming calls can be set to be received via VoIP, letting you receive and manage phone calls while away from your landline. You can also get various minute packages to use VoIP to make outgoing calls, including an all-you-can-eat plan of outgoing VoIP for around $25/month. In contrast to consumer VoIP services like Vonage, Skype, or Comcast's DigitalVoice, RingCentral isn't aiming at cheap outgoing long distance providers, as much as the multi-line business crowd who's looking for a way to handle several lines without the hardware or staffing.

For a shot of the call log interface, click the read more link below.

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Comcast capping bandwidth usage at about 90GB/month?

The battle for net neutrality might be in its infancy, and already we're seeing casualties. There have been murmurs that Comcast has been capping bandwidth usage on its all-you-can eat high-speed subscribers that have simply used more of their connection than Comcast is comfortable with, along with evidence the ISP has been monkeying with people's BitTorrent usage. Last week GameDaily BIZ got in touch with Charlie Douglas, a spokesperson for Comcast Corporation who confirmed that the company was indeed capping monthly downloads of its "excessive" users.

The actual ballpark figure Douglas gave GameDaily BIZ was "… Read more

Comcast may be acquiring BuddyTV.com

Citing ever-shadowy "sources," PaidContent reported Sunday that oft-maligned cable giant Comcast is in the process of acquiring television fandom site BuddyTV.com. No financial details were specified.

PaidContent blogger Joseph Weisenthal speculates that BuddyTV will be integrated in one way or another into Comcast's still-in-beta Fancast site, a Web video and community hub that it launched in August. Comcast, whose Comcast Interactive Media division has been attempting to craft an extensive Web 2.0-savvy social media strategy, also purchased movie ticket site Fandango in April.

BuddyTV representatives allegedly denied the allegation initially and then clammed up; we'… Read more

Comcast denies monkeying with BitTorrent traffic

Comcast on Tuesday denied rumors that the company is filtering BitTorrent traffic running over its network.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used to distribute large data files such as video. The protocol has been used widely throughout the Internet to distribute pirated movies. And sites that use the protocol have been targeted by the movie industry to stop the illegal distribution of copyrighted video.

Broadband providers have also not been big fans of BitTorrent because the use of the peer-to-peer protocol can clog networks with huge files. The blog TorrentFreak claims that several Internet Service Providers have been &… Read more

Report: Verizon Fios steals cable subscribers

Verizon's Fios TV service is stealing business from cable operators, according to a report published by OneTrak this week.

The report focused on 34 cities and towns in Massachusetts where Fios TV is offered. The report said that some incumbent cable operators could experience subscriber losses of 10 percent or more because of Fios competition. Traditional cable overbuilders, like RCN, will likely feel the brunt of the defections, the report said. (Overbuilders are companies that use or build on existing operators' networks to offer service.)

According to the report, Comcast lost about 2.6 percent of its subscribers, or … Read more

Making the case for CableCard

As with any first-generation product, CableCard has received its fair share of criticism. The cards are one-way devices, which means no pay-per-view or video on demand. The cards are also single-tuner devices, which means no recording one show while watching another unless you double up. There's no option for a DIY installation, and a visit from technician doesn't guarantee you'll be left with a signal.

I've been using Comcast's CableCard for a couple weeks now, however, and I've been pleasantly surprised. So much so, that I may turn in my cable box at the … Read more

CableCard with Comcast: So far, so good...

After repeated attempts to get CableCard up and running with Time Warner in Brooklyn failed to produce a signal, we decided to shift our CableCard operations to CNET's northern outpost in Concord, NH. We sent back Velocity Micro its CineMagix Grand Theater for some fine-tuning, and it then turned around and sent the system up here.

New Hampshire is Comcast territory. I called Comcast and scheduled an installation last week. The technician had done a handful of installations on CableCard-equipped TVs and DVRs, but this was the first time he had seen a CableCard-equipped PC. After complimenting me on … Read more

Intel's making friends with the cable industry

"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," apparently still has legs as a business strategy.

Intel has been trying for years to get PCs with its chips inside living rooms, trying to offset the slowing growth of the PC market by creating a new way to use PCs. That hasn't worked, as Media Center PCs and their Viiv successors have sold fairly well but few consumers are actually using them in place of their digital cable or satellite boxes at the center of their entertainment systems.

So Intel announced Monday that it will incorporate the OpenCableRead more

A cable modem hits hyper speed

Cable industry executives on Wednesday showed off a superfast cable-modem technology called "channel bonding," and wowed the crowd at The Cable Show convention in Las Vegas.

According to an Associated Press report on the demonstration, the CEO of communications technology specialist ARRIS Group, Robert Stanzione, downloaded a 30-second, 300-megabyte television commercial in a few seconds and watched it well before a standard modem worked through a download time of about 16 minutes.

Known as DOCSIS 3.0 among the engineers at Cable Television Laboratories, the cable industry's research arm, the technology can offer download speeds as quick … Read more

News Roundup: CBS, MySpace, Microsoft, AOL

Brightcove and CBS News parner up. CBS' News division has teamed up with Brightcove to play popular news content like CBS Evening News on Brightcove.com. This is one of the many sites and services CBS is partnering with as part of their " Interactive Audience Network," which is marketing speak for taking their shows off the television and putting them online. They've also been working with YouTube and AOL to expand online offerings of CBS programming. ( CNET News.com)

MySpace sexual preference bug causes stir. A small bug on MySpace that removed the option for users to … Read more