Digium has rolled out a seriously hot upgrade to Switchvox in Miami for ITEXPO. The new version includes integrated faxing, video calling support, and XMPP open source IM/chat/presence, along with a bunch of other goodies including introductory API support, IMAP integration for voicemail, a new Windows desktop client, IP phone autoconfig for snom and Polycom phones, and BRI support. "This release, is jam-packed with big things," said Digium's Tristan Degenhardt. "We can attribute to the fact we have more developers and we're working on the same stuff...fax is finally going in, finally, at long last. We have wonderful wonderful fax integration, video calling support with H.263 and H.263, and we also have chat built in. I would say those were the three things we were lacking, and now they are in." [+]

The global credit crunch is causing problems in the VoIP and Internet telephony community. It seems that funding, start-up money, and investors left some companies in a pinch. One such company is EQO. EQO was/is a VoIP/social networking play offering a free application that provides free IM, cheap calling and cheap texting to your mobile phone. The problem is EQO was like about a dozen other companies on the market with the same business plan triangle of free client/cheap calls/on mobile phones, including Jangl, Jajah and TalkPlus.

Also in this mix is Jaxtr. Some companies are dying a clow death, others are gone, and Jaxtr just released Jaxtr 2.0. See more about Jaxtr.

The secret to success is the marriage of cell phones, speed dial, and calls to anywhere in the world. With no high international [+]

Over the weekend, the one million registered users to Free World Dialup (FWD) were told that free is no longer free. After 12 years of free operations, users will be asked to pay $30 per year as of September 1, 2008. The announcement also named Daniel Beringer, as CEO of FWD.

In an email sent out on Friday by FWD founder and VoIP pundit Jeff Pulver, the $30 yearly fee is being justified as a “magic number” that is only “10%” of the cost of Vonage’s unlimited usage plan. However, Pulver has disavowed any connections with old style telephony and the PSTN, vowing not to chase per-minute arbitrage for lower-cost long distance calling as Skype, Jajah and others have done.

Nortel has bought Pingtel, a subsidiary of enterprise mobility firm Bluesocket. Nortel hopes the open source IP PBX software/appliance division will have better luck moving forward.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, 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 Billerica, Mass. facility. Pingtel and Nortel have been working together for a while on 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; as an independent entity, 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.