Graves On SOHO Technology

Today snom is introducing a small form-factor PBX for the small office and home office. Based upon their established ONE PBX software the ONE Mini offers a depth of features at an attractive price point.

You may not know this, but a snom 200 was the very first  SIP hard phone that I ever purchased. snom was an early leader in promoting SIP, also an early advocate of HDVoice.

The new ONE Mini PBX supports up to 20 extensions, providing a generous list of features derived from their snom ONE Yellow edition. Further, it’s delivered in a form factor that looks very much like the base from their m9 SIP/DECT cordless phone.

The device seems well-considered, featuring support for power-over-ethernet and no moving parts at all. This makes it especially well suited to applications where small size, low power consumption and high-reliability are concerns.

The ONE Mini sells for $599 from a range of vendors, including VUC sponsor e4 technologies.

Invoxia’s NVX 610 is a curious device. In some ways it defies description. Is it an iPhone/iPad dock? Is it a desk phone? Or is it a conference phone?

In truth, it’s all of these things. The question is, can it very good at all those functions? Or any of them?

These questions are what prompted me approach Invoxia for an evaluation unit. This review arises from the my experience with that device over the past eight months.

Let’s begin by considering a little bit about the company. Invoxia are a French company with strength in design and engineering. Amongst their team you will find considerable experience in telecom. In the past they have been involved in projects for BT and the French multi-national Thomson, including the SIP/DECT hardware that Comcast rolled out as part of its HomePoint offering.

Read the rest of this entry »

Now that Enterprise Connect 2012 has concluded Dave Michels poses a recurring question; The DeskPhone – Friend or Foe? Dave adds his observations of who makes the argument for the demise of the desk phone, noting quite correctly that each has their own horse in that race.

I find that the future of the desk phone should be considered in an application context. Soft phones are more appropriate in some roles than others. For example, in a call center soft phones are a compelling solution, saving money and adding flexibility in integration with call handling systems. Not that such integration is beyond the scope of hard phones, but it costs more in where hard phones are involved.

Every company will bring different sensibilities to such considerations. In the case of what I consider to be my beat, the home office, it may come down to personal preference. Myself I still generally prefer to use a desk phone, and being that I only need one or two, I don’t see any merit in buying cheap hardware.

Read the rest of this entry »

Preface: This is a wee bit off topic, but I haven’t ranted in a while, and you may find it worthwhile in the end.

For many months I’ve been toying with the idea of using streaming video as an alternative to some of the training and demonstration activities that haunt me in my working life. Historically, sending staff and gear to some distant location was the primary means of selling the gear, or post-sale, conducting end-user training.

In the past year one of our more experienced sales staff has found that demonstration given by remote means can be very effective. Initially this was merely his response to having limited access to my time, but it’s also become a way for him to get ad hoc demo’s accomplished on very short notice.

Read the rest of this entry »

A short while back I addressed the question of how DECT & CAT-iq may foster the broad deployment of HDVoice. At that time I described one possible scenario where carriers would deploy customer premises equipment (CPE) with an on-board cordless base station. Although a frontrunner, and the basis of Comcast’s (decidedly non-HD) HomePoint service, this is not the only approach afoot. There’s another possibility arising that involves conveying HDVoice over a plain old analog RJ-11 connection.

At first glance HDVoice and analog lines would certainly seem to be mutually exclusive. The common wisdom is that wideband telephony requires the use of an all-IP call path. This is in fact a generalization, and not absolutely true.

Firstly, it has long been possible to pass wideband audio, in the form of G.722 encoded media, over the PSTN by way of ISDN connections. Also known as BRI interfaces, an ISDN connection supports  up to two 64 kbps channels (bearer channels) and one D channel for the purposes of call setup & teardown signaling. High-quality voice using G.722 was one of the selling points of ISDN in the 1980s.

Read the rest of this entry »

You know that a technology is going mainstream when it starts to appear in places like Forbes. A recent story in the October issue called Get Ready For HiDef Phone Calls profiles the lack of progress in the quality of cellular calling of the last 40 years. It points to trendsetter Orange Moldova who are the first mobile carrier to rollout HDVoice before going on to describe the US reality.

There’s one very cute line than will doubtless be repeated often, “Eventually the U.S. will catch up to Moldova.”

Many thanks to friend David Frankel for pointing out this little gem.