Vonage Looks North Of The Border

The spread of Vonage's Voice over IP service just keeps increasing, as the company announced Monday the availability of its service in Canada, with local Canadian phone numbers. Even though the VoIP regulatory scene up north is as muddled as it is here in the U.S., Vonage is showing once again that innovation won't wait for bureaucrats.

Vonage's press release, which can be read here, doesn't mention the fact that Canadian regulators recently opined that VoIP should be regulated like a traditional switched phone service -- a proclamation that didn't earn much local praise.

An interesting side note, courtesy of Jeff Pulver's blog: The Canadian regulators' public hearings on VoIP will take place at the same time as the VON Canada show in Toronto, May 19-20. Maybe rent a few buses and take show attendees on a field trip to add to the do-not-regulate chorus? Just a thought, eh.

Foundry Adds To Switch Offerings

On the data-center front, Foundry Networks on Monday announced two new versions of the company's ServerIron switches, adding more port density and "up to a four-fold increase in connection performance," according to the press release, which can be seen here.Foundry, which is one of the market and thought leaders in the cluster load-balancing space, needs to keep innovating to stay ahead of startups like Redline Networks, whose lower-cost appliances are targeting the same area, that being the streamlining of application traffic over networks.