Our friends at Gigaset are continuing to promote their wares to a broad audience, this time with a contest offering their DX800A desk phone. The DX800A
The Gigaset DX800A
It also supports the use of wideband audio over its built-in Bluetooth radio. I tried it using my Plantronics Voyager Pro UC while at CES last year.
Early in 2010 Polycom introduced an addition to their legendary Soundstation line of conference phones, the Soundstation IP5000. (pictured right) I was lucky enough to get one for review and found it very attractive for the small office and home office user.
While I was on the exhibit floor at ITExpo last month I saw what looked like a Soundstation IP5000 at the Netx booth. However, looking a little closer I found it wasn’t a Soundstation IP5000 at all…it was a new model called the Soundstation Duo.
Comments rss
Trackback
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.
Comments rss Trackback
Earlier this week someone posed me a question by way of twitter. They asked, “How Will Cat-iq Help HDVoice??” I responded briefly, also via Twitter, but upon reflection I think a longer answer may be in order.
Some time ago VoIP luminary Jeff Pulver started to beat the drum for HDVoice. As an initial part of that effort he organized a couple of HDVoice Summits where interested parties could meet and discuss the issues surrounding widespread adoption of HDVoice.
The first of these events was in May 2009 in New York City. I was fortunate to be able to attend. It was there that I started to track who was promoting the use of HDVoice, how, and sometimes why*.
Comments rss
After a couple of years testing the SMB/SOHO marketplace with the KX-TGP5x0 SIP/DECT series Panasonic has today launched a new range of desktop SIP phones. There are initially three models in this new range, from the entry level KX-UT113 to the top-of-the-range KX-UT136 (pictured). List prices run from $120 to $270.
Compatible with Asterisk & Broadsoft’s Broadworks they seem to have all the features that you might expect, including POE and support for G.722 based wideband audio.
The support for wideband audio is nice. If anything like the earlier SIP/DECT models it’s a little limited because the devices are fundamentally designed around dialing by PSTN numbers, with no facility for handling SIP URIs.
I’ve always like the feel of Panasonic hardware. They got off to a rough start with the KX-TGP5x0 SIP/DECT series, but with the experience of Asterisk & Broadsoft certification behind them I would expect that by now they are now better positioned to address the SOHO market.
Not too long ago the only phones truly capable of delivering an HDVoice experience were in the upper end of the pricing spectrum for common desktop SIP phones, typically well over $200 each. Early in 2010 the situation improved when Polycom released the Soundpoint IP335 priced at around $130.
Grandstream Network’s recently dropped the cost of entry another notch in releasing their new GXP1400 & GXP1405 models. According to their press release:
“The GXP1400/1405 delivers superior wideband HD audio quality, high performance full duplex speakerphone with advanced acoustic echo cancellation…”
With list pricing in the range of $59 and 65 USD they’re certainly on the affordable side of things.
For that price you might expect very little, but they seem to have a reasonable compliment of features, including;
I’ve not laid hands on these new models myself, but I can certainly see they may appeal to a more cost conscious uSMB or SOHO user.
While I have no doubt that you get what you pay for, I’m also keenly aware that everyone’s sense of what has value is a little different. If you were holding off exploring the benefits of HDVoice purely because of cost, perhaps the GXP140x models could get you started down that path in a most affordable manner?
Comments rss
Recent Comments