Graves On SOHO Technology

It happens that today I am in the Miami Beach area. As I look overhead I half expect to see a flock of pigs flying past. At least that’s what comes to mind when I see TMC’s Tom Keating reporting that the new magicJack plus device from Vocaltec is HDVoice capable. Not only is the new interface device capable of being used without a computer, but its reportedly capable of G.722, SPEEX and some kind of proprietary G.711 based wideband.

From Tom’s review:

I spoke with magicJack Vocaltec CEO Dan Borislow about the new magicJack plus. One of the first questions I asked was about wideband codec support. Dan said, “One of the largest carriers, besides ourselves is Neutral Tandem and they have wideband codec availability and they transcode. Obviously, our own gateways have wideband available as well. So for the great majority of calls we can do wideband.” He explained that for magictalk-to-magicjack calls they are already wideband. I asked which wideband codec they use and he explained, “We developed a G.711 wideband codec of our own but we have the capability to do Speex or G.722 as well. But currently we use our own 711 wideband codec.”

Will wonders never cease? I guess that shows that HDVoice is getting some traction in a wide variety of circles…even amongst those who are leading the race to $ 0.00/minute.

Yesterday Dan York, in his role as Director Of Conversations at Voxeo, gave a webinar* on HDVoice. Dan’s presentation included a good basic introduction to wideband telephony. He cited the well known limitations of the legacy PSTN before moving on to highlight the wideband capabilities of Voxeo’s new  Prophesy and Prism product offerings.

This session was part of the companies Jam Session series that introduces new capabilities to developers. To put it simplistically, Voxeo is a tool-maker. The offerings of the tool-makers typically lead the services that we eventually see in the larger consumer space. That makes the tool-makers very important. That the tool-makers show both imagination and leadership is critically important.

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Late last week I took an hour to sit through a Voxeo webinar on the impact of IP v6 on SIP communications. It was the latest in their series of Developer Jam Session presentations.

Dan York presented a nice introduction to the issues surrounding IP v6 implementation with respect to real-time communication using SIP. If you’re new to IP v6, as I am, then the recording of that session is a recommended resource.

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Not yet making use of wideband voice? That’s outrageous! It’s so easy, and I’ve given you so many ways to give it a try. Here’s yet another way to try wideband voice…and it’s absolutely free.

Blink is a relative newcomer to the realm of soft phones. Offered by AG Projects Blink was initially released in December 2009 for the Mac platform. Since it’s based upon the Qt framework they were eventually able to offer Linux and Windows releases as well.

VUC founder & host Zeeek has on several occasions expounded on how well Blink behaves on his Mac. Further, Blink supports wideband audio via the G.722 and SPEEX codecs.

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During last weeks VUC call someone mentioned that there was a new service called UKDDI offering free DIDs in the UK.  They offer ten free numbers from locations all around the UK, where each can be mapped to a SIP URI.

It took a couple of minutes for the utility of this to really sink in. Given that I have a factory full of coworkers in the UK, and I’ll be traveling there this coming week there just has to be something useful that I can accomplish with such a resource.

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What with the gathering storm that is wideband telephony there’s a lot of rumbling about codecs going on at the moment. Such discussions usually include at least a couple of open source proponents wondering why Speex is not more widespread. It’s a very good question.

Speex most commonly shows up in soft phones. That’s nice, but soft phones have limited appeal. Most people prefer hardware of some kind. That’s where Speex implementations are few and far between. This is kind of the opposite of the situation that I found with G.722. In that case I found that hardware support was good and growing, but support for it in soft phones was lacking.

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