Release 4.1 of Aastra BluStar Increases Flexibility for Remote Workers

In its pursuit to enhance the video conferencing customer experience, Aastra (News - Alert) introduced Release 4.1 of the Aastra BluStar Application Server (BAS). Combined with Aastra BluStar endpoints, the BAS provides users an ecosystem of BluStar-enabled devices and clients, including the award-winning BluStar 8000i Desktop Media phone, BluStar for PC, BluStar for iPad and BluStar for iPhone (News - Alert).

The new integrated VPN capability provided in Aastra 4.1 allows users to set up a secure tunnel between the BAS and a remote BluStar 8000i phone, which addresses many challenges facing remote users in connecting to corporate networks – especially with feature-rich devices that utilize multiple video streams and connections to LDAP servers, and have to negotiate the challenges of NAT, firewalls and media routing.

Additionally, In release 4.1, the BAS has provided the Open Standards based SSL VPN capability that can be administered via the BAS Web user interface without end user configuration changes, such as dealing with certificates or forwarding ports on a third-party router, making remote deployments easy to manage.

"The mainstream adoption of video conferencing by remote workers has been hampered in the past by technology hurdles such as complexity of implementation, achieving acceptable quality, and deployment security," said Simon Beebe, vice president of Product Line Management at Aastra. "With this latest release of the BluStar Application Server, Aastra has eliminated these barriers to successful integration of remote workers into the new collaborative enterprise."

Release 4.1 also provides enhanced bandwidth management capabilities which address the potential bandwidth consumption issues with multi-way video conferencing.

The Bandwidth Manager (BWM) built into the BAS application has sophisticated features that can automatically control the per call bandwidth and what actions to take when limits are reached.

The BluStar 8000i and BAS 4.1 also support the ability to have asymmetrical connections, allowing the transmit rate to be different from the received rate. This capability is useful for remote users that typically have high downstream bandwidths and lower upstream bandwidths.

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