Graves On SOHO Technology

Thilo Salmon, CEO of  SIPGate, was our guest on the VUC call on June 4th. Until then I had only passing awareness of the company, primarily as a result of speaking with some associates in the UK and Germany who have used the service for years. I signed up for an account just to give it a whirl. Further, I was more than a little intrigued when Mr Salmon said that the service has some support for wideband calling using G.722.

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Over at Nerd Vittles that Asterisk Guru Ward Mundy has posted a great how-to implementing ISN lookups with his popular PBX-In-A-Flash Asterisk distributions. It’s a great overview of ISN and ITADs, including Freenum.org.

ISNs are a novel approach to bridging the gulf between the worlds of legacy phones with traditional phone numbers, and the realm of SIP URIs. It’s a way of dialing something like a normal number and having it automatically be resolved to a SIP URI. This is easily implemented using Asterisk, especially when Nerd Uno shows you how.

All of this is an approach to transitioning from our current state into a time when SIP URIs are more commonplace. That would imply that more of what we think of as “phone calls” would transit a pure IP network. That fact is a major enabling mechanism for such improvements as wideband audio & improved call security, amongst many other things.

Last week I suggested Skype as an easy way to get started with wideband VoIP. Michael Robertson’s Gizmo5 is a great alternative to Skype.

Whereas Skype is a relatively closed network using proprietary protocols and codecs, Gizmo5 is based on SIP, a global open standard. A Gizmo5 account can be used from the Gizmo5 soft phone client or any SIP compliant device. That means that the myriad of SIP phones (hardware & software varieties) can be used with Gizmo5.

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Several people have asked about the physical size of the Gigaset DECT handsets compared to other gear. Then I remembered that Michael White of E4 posted a pic on TwitPic a while back. The pic originated in a Ustream feed.

These are (left-right): Polycom Kirk 5020 in a mug, snom m3, Gigaset S67H, Gigaset A58H.

Guess which ones support wideband?

Steven Perich recently posted an excellent article on his blog entitled, “How to make your phone calls sound better!” It’s a concise explanation of wideband telephony, described in very easy-to-understand terms for a non-technical audience. It’s well written, amusing and makes it’s points nicely.

He very accurately characterizes voice quality as “The problem you probably never really knew you had?” And further goes on to describe “…the potential to bypass that pesky PSTN” which is indeed a noble thought.

The image accompanying this post is motivated by the fact that I know that Steven uses a wideband capable Gigaset S685IP, just like the one that I bought last spring.

Sorell Slaymaker of Unified IT Systems he penned an interesting post over at CMPs No Jitter blog. The post starts out as follows:

After architecting a 50,000+ seat IP Telephony system and seeing it through rollout, this is what I would recommend to do different.

Wow! That’s huge. Got my attention right away! He goes on to give a list of brief but really meaningful points about various considerations in any significant telephony installation.

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