Graves on SOHO Technology

If you make enough noise about looking for something eventually you’ll get some tips about where to find it. So it seems to be with my search for a wideband capable soft phone. Just in case you’re new around here, let me reiterate that by “wideband capable” I mean specifically G.722 capable allowing interoperability with my Polycom hard phones.

Not long ago I received tip about PhonerLite,  a freeware soft phone for Windows that is in fact G.722 capable. The availability of a working, G.722 capable release of Eyebeam has taken the pressure of somewhat so it took a little time to get around to trying PhonerLite. I finally gave it a try this past weekend.

At first glance it seems very promising. The GUI is straightforward and very clear. It actually has a reasonable list of features, including:

• Support multiple accounts (profiles) with one active at a time
• Supports STUN
• Supports SIP over UDP or TCP
• Supports echo cancellation
• Supports silence detection
• Codec support includes; G.711 A-Law, G.711 µ-Law, G.726 -16, -24, -32, -40, G.722  (Wideband), GSM, iLB, Speex and Speex-Wideband
• Supports TLS*
• Supports SRTP*

*There is no mechanism for exchanging certificates at present, making the TLS/SRTP support incomplete. But the author admits that it’s still a work in progress.

Here’s a screenshot of the user interface to give you some sense of it’s layout. I find it very usable.

I’ve made a few calls using PhonerLite to verify G.722 interoperability. I’m very happy to report that it works just fine with the various wideband phones that I have running! That includes a Polycom SoundPoint IP650, Eyebeam v1.5 and the Gigaset SIP/DECT range.

Beyond sensible wideband capability there are quite a number of things to like about this software. For example, the contact list is a simple text file that’s easily edited externally if you desire. Also, the fact that the user interface indicates the codec used for each call leg when a call is ongoing. The software also gives an on-the-fly statistics display showing jitter, packet loss, actual data rates and buffer levels.

While it’s only for Windows, and not open source, PhonerLite is still a very valuable addition to the arsenal of anyone using and promoting wideband telephony.