Graves on SOHO Technology

There can be no question that Counterpath is the leader in SIP soft phones. From the free offering in X-Lite to my favorite Eyebeam, and finally Bria they’ve long had a diverse offering and occupied a leadership position in the market.

In a move to strengthen the diversity of their range today Counterpath announced the launch of Bria 3.0 for Linux. This gives them a native release on Windows, Mac & Linux, which is a considerable achievement.

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My quest for a portable USB conference phone started just after Astricon this year. I’ve previously described the logic behind the search. When I found that Ipevo had a related product offering in this area I admit that I was hopeful.

Several of my UK-based associates have used Ipevo USB handsets in conjunction with Skype, some for several years. In fact, these have become a standard item in our packing for trade shows. Our booth has a Polycom Soundpoint IP430 and an Ipevo USB handset. The Polycom phone integrates with our US hosted IP-PBX (OnSIP) to provide calling to anyone and provides a handy, high-quality speakerphone. Alternatively, the Ipevo handsets supports free calling to those back at the home office that use Skype, including co-workers, friends & family.

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In mid-July I traveled to the UK, visiting my employer’s head office in Cambridge. Being away from my home office is in some ways a drag. I’m so accustomed to being in control of my local network, which is certainly not the case when I’m abroad. Suffice it to say that I can’t use anything VoIP related from within the office LAN at HQ, with the possible exception of Skype.

At the hotel where we typically stay near HQ there is wired internet access provided by Swisscom. It’s a decent service, reasonably fast and reliable. However, at 15 Pounds Sterling (around $22 USD!) per 24-hour period it’s also very dear. To get around some of this cost one of my co-workers loaned me a company issued Vodaphone 3G USB dongle. This was the first time that I’d used one of these little gadgets.

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GigaOm has a nice guest post by FWD’s Dan Berninger. Dan describes the benefits of wideband voice encoding, as well as the obstacles to its more widespread acceptance. He rightly points to internet connected devices as being the only way to reap the benefits of wideband voice.

I’m happy to say that in the past year members of VUC have started adopting wideband telephony. From the time when I first reviewed the Polycom IP550 & IP650 to now more and more people are wideband capable, having decided to invest in the hardware themselves. We will soon have access to the Siemens Gigaset range in the US, which include some wideband capable DECT devices. And finally, we have a fully interoperable soft phone in Counterpath’s Eyebeam v1.5 for Windows.

We are making progress toward wideband IP telephony.

A short while ago I was informed that Counterpath had issued a new release of their Eyebeam soft phone for Windows. This release, v1.5.19.4 Build 51814 available from their support forum, was supposed to address the interoperability issues I encountered last fall when passing G.722 calls between Eyebeam and a Polycom hard phone.

I downloaded the program and took it with me on a business trip the following week. Upon initial installation I found that the program overwrote the version that I had been issued by ZipDX. I suppose this makes sense as both were in the v1.5 branch. However, the license key that ZipDX had provided would not enable the new release. I contacted Counterpath and they very quickly provided me a license key to enable the new release.

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Jason Fischl, CTO of long time-VoIP leader Counterpath, contacted me by email to advise that they have released a new version of Eyebeam for Windows that is supposed to address the G.722 interoperability issue reported last fall. The release is available in their support forums. Licensed users can update their installations now. I’ve downloaded the release and will be trying it out over the next couple of days.

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This Friday’s edition of the weekly VoIP Users Conference call  is all about wideband audio (aka HD Voice) as mentioned in my review of the Polycom IP650 / 550 SIP phones back in August.

The guest for this call is David Frankel, CEO of ZipDX a commercial service that specializes in wideband conferencing. We expect an interesting call touching on many aspects of VoIP going beyond the traditional phone service, conference bridges, technical standards, device compatibility, etc.

The conference call will be held as usual on the Talkshoe service for people calling in from normal phones. Anyone with G.722 capable phones (Polycom, Snom, Cisco, Avaya, Mitel, Grandstream) or a G.722 capable soft phone (Eyebeam) will be able to connect to the ZipDX conference bridge and participate in glorious wideband audio.

The two conference bridges will be connected. People connected to ZipDX directly will be able to hear the startling difference that HDVoice makes. This is especially true in conference calls where line quality, accents and background noise all cause intelligibility issues. The downloadable recording of the conference will let everyone hear the difference for themselves.

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OK, so this isn’t exactly news. I’ve been using OnSIP with Polycom IP650 & 550 and a few months already. I hadn’t expected them to support wideband at all but was pleasantly surprised to find that their new conference bridge handles it just fine.

Further, if you’re using suitably capable Polycom or snom phones then calls placed through OnSIP will negotiate to G.722 and voila, much clearer calling. They had a blog post about it a short while ago.

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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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