Graves On SOHO Technology

TMC’s IT Expo West 2012 in Austin TX is October 2-5th this year. I had a quite a good time at IT Expo West 2011. I’m leaning towards attending again but as yet not committed.

TMC is offering a discounted all access registration for just $99, but only until the end of June. That’s end of day tomorrow. I guess that I’ll need to decide shortly.

The VUC call on Friday, June 29th will feature Doug Mohney of HDVoice News. With over 20 years of telecom experience Doug truly is a veteran in the realm of IP communications. Having appeared on VUC calls twice previously (Feb 4, 2011 & Aug 14, 2009) he’s also becoming a VUC repeat offender.

This weeks discussion will focus on the evolving state of HDVoice as described in HDVoice 2012: Proliferation. This is the latest version of his annual report on the state of HDVoice, published by TMC.

I’ve read through this years report. It’s a great summary of state of HDVoice deployment. It covers the issue from a variety of angles, presenting sound insights useful to  corporate telecom managers, service providers, manufacturers and start-ups in the ITSP space.

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Let me be blunt, at present I’m just on the periphery of the telecom space. I’m still a user, specifically a home office user. Not being directly involved in the telecom industry I don’t get the opportunity to take part if many of the major industry events. However, when TMC decided to hold IT Expo West 2011 in Austin, TX it proved just too good an opportunity to pass up.

Austin is essentially right in my back yard. “Just over yonder” in local terms. OK, it’s really a two-and-a-half hour drive, but that’s still close compared to its usual location in Los Angeles. When TMC offered a deeply discounted uber-early-bird registration back in February I took the plunge and bought a show pass.

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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.

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.

Picking up where I left off some time ago, there was one more question arising from the earlier thread in the VoIP Forum at Broadband Reports. PX Eliezer asks:

4) G.722 is royalty-free. That being the case, and if it is not a bandwidth hog, and if it sounds great, then why do so many Voip providers, and so many manufacturers, not support it? In other words, why has adoption been so slow?

There are many factors that have contrived to slow the progress in implementing HDVoice on a broad scale. So many in fact that just pondering them has delayed my response to your question. I didn’t want to drift around a range to topics and make the matter appear utterly insurmountable.

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