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.
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For about the past week I’ve been making a lot of use of the Polycom C100 in conjunction with a copy of Eyebeam provided by ZipDX. The C100 is a great little USB speakerphone device. It was one of the first devices from Polycom the supported wideband audio, providing that you have a similarly capable soft phone client.

I must admit that mine is the C100S model which is designed to work with the Skype client, although there are models that are not client specific. As a practical matter the only functions that are client specific involve the use of the five buttons on the device. The buttons support volume up, volume down, place a call, bring the soft phone client to the foreground and mic mute.

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For the past few weeks I’ve been hunting for a soft phone with specific wideband voice capabilities. I’ve found a couple but there arises complications.

Wideband-capable hard phones usually support G.722, G.722.1 or G.722.2 (aka AMR-WB) codecs. There are other codecs out there that support wideband voice coding. Speex is the one most often cited. However, Speex support in hardware is extremely limited. So Speex implemented in a soft phone is not going to help me evaluate interoperability with hard phones.

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