Graves On SOHO Technology

Some time ago the folks at Gigaset showed me their DE380-IP-R desk phone. It was about the time that they were just starting to ship their SIP/DECT products to the US. When they sent me some sample gear for evaluation a lone sample of this little desk phone came along for the ride.

I tried the DE380-IP-R for a short while but never really put it into service. I used it just long enough to confirm that it was truly wideband capable, supporting G.722.

The simple truth is that I found the phone to be just a little too quirky for my tastes. There are things about it that seem too Euro-centric in their design or implementation. Further, with a retail price of around $140 they were simply too odd when compared to the newly released Polycom Soundpoint IP335, which is also wideband capable.

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Just before the holidays the folks at Xiph.org put up a nice demonstration page with a lot of detail about their CELT codec. Word of this new offering was announced on the IETF CODEC mailing list.

The samples and explanations provided are first rate. They clearly illustrate the merit in ultra-low-latency for some applications, as well as exemplify how CELT currently fares against other common codecs at a variety of bit-rates and with various types of source material.

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Recently Pingdom published another in a series of reports documenting their findings about the reliability of various large blog hosts. It seems that in the months of October & November 2010 Google’s Blogger platform managed perfect (100%) uptime, while tumblr (96.81%) was the least reliable blog host.

As I am a WordPress user, and I started this blog at  WordPress.com, it’s interesting to note that WordPress.com was the second best host, with 99.99% blog uptime and no single outage lasting more than four minutes. That seems impressive to me.

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After a couple of weeks of rumors from elsewhere today our Gigaset S675IP system announced the availability of a new firmware release.

The companies US web site doesn’t yet have any details about this new release. It still shows the last release as being version 02223 from March 2010. The new release is version 02227.

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Cedar Point Communications manufacturers a range of switching platforms that commonly target CableCo’s, CellCo’s & traditional carriers. Multi-Chanel Mobile news recently ran a story highlighting how Cedar Point Pushes HDVoice Upgrade. This came to my attention when Doug Mohney tweeted something about HDVoice “upconversion” as an aspect of their Safari C3 switching platform. Doug went on to post something about this at HDVoice News.

An examination of some of the literature on the Safari C3 switching platform reveals support for circuit switched and packet networks, as well as G.722 in the codec realm. The Safari C3 really does seem to be build around the needs of the packet cable community.

In the broadest sense this is great as it points to yet another player in the telecom space making wideband telephony a factor in their marketing. That drives up visibility of wideband telephony, which can’t help but be “a good thing.”*

I’m especially interested in the idea of bandwidth extension. I’ll have more to follow on that subject shortly….

*tm Martha Stewart Omnimedia