Graves on SOHO Technology

Beyond merely satisfying my curiosity I have a legitimate need for a handful of soft phone licenses. In my day job we have a small group of staff that travel a lot. Some have recently found that soft phones, typically Skype, or X-Lite can be handy and cost-effective of staying in touch with the office or home while on-the-road.

A few of these UK based staffers have even purchased Siemens S685IP SIP/DECT phones for their homes. They use these to connect to our US hosted IP-PBX infrastructure in those cases when then they are providing after hours support to North American customers. The S685IP is nice because it supports wideband audio via G.722. In providing these people soft phones I’d like to leverage G.722 so that their IP calling experience is truly better than using their cell phones as well as cheaper. So I continue to seek out G.722 capable soft phones.
A few weeks ago I made an inquiry with European company Eye P Media with respect to their Eye P Communicator Windows Edition soft phone. It’s reported to be capable of G.722 wideband audio so I downloaded the trial version from their web site to give it a try while I awaited their reply.

The software installed nicely and started up fine, but I could not get it to register with any SIP server at my disposal. I tried my local Asterisk, FWD, OnSIP and Gizmo5. In frustration, I posted a question on the Asterisk users mailing list to see if anyone in that realm had any experience with this software. Literally no-one responded. I suppose it’s possible that someone might have actually used it but branded or skinned for some specific company.

When Eye P Media finally responded to my email they simply said that they only sell to OEMs in quantities greater than a thousand licenses.

Oh, well. The search continues….