Graves On SOHO VoIP

Networking visionary David Isen delivered the keynote address at the Broadband Properties Summit on April 28th. He’s just posted a transcript. It’s a good read, and a very insightful video clip. Highly recommended.

It started out an uneventful day, the third day in an entire week that I expected to spend in my home office. That’s something of a rarity in recent times. I was enjoying it, catching up on matters around here, and addressing tech support calls as they arose. I was on just such a call when, to my considerable surprise, the power went out.

The sudden loss of power is not enough to disrupt my phone call beyond my own expression of surprise. As I’ve documented elsewhere, I’ve taken steps to ensure that critical infrastructure around here is on a UPS. To paraphrase Frank Herbert, “The electrons must flow.” In fact, it occurred to me that this afternoon was an opportune time to ascertain just how sound my planning had been.

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Just a few days ago VoIP Supply announced a new desk phone that’s capable of both SIP and IAX2. Not much has been forthcoming in the way of IAX2 capable end-points, even though the protocol has wound its way through a lengthy standards process. Digium has dropped the little IAXy (aka S101i)  ATA device a while back. Last year Zeeek tried the Allnet 7960 which is IAX2 capable but lacking in some ways. So it seems that to date there just haven’t been any truly business class IAX2 phones to be had.

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Michael White over at E4Strategies has a great deal on Clear One Chat 50 USB speakerphone devices. When used with a suitable soft phone these little gadgets turn any PC into a decent speakerphone. They’re even wideband capable.

I’ve been working up an overview of the various USB speakerphones that I’ve used. The Chat 50 is one of the better ones in the group for desktop use.  Definitely recommended!

I have no connection  to E4 or Clear One, beyond being a happy customer.

A viable G.722 capable soft phone for the Mac is one of the key pieces missing in driving further adoption of wideband telephony. I single out the G.722 codec specifically as that is key to integration with existing hard phones and conference systems or services.

Earlier today Randulo did a little experiment and discovered that two of the Counterpath soft phone clients, Eyebeam & X-Lite, work on Apple systems. He ran them using Parallels & Windows XP on OSX.

This may not seem like big news, but it does help further wideband cause considerably. Sources close to Counterpath report that they remain very interested in an updated native Mac soft phone client, but it’s not currently one of their top priorities.

I’ve been traveling a lot lately so the phones around my home office have been idle. Even so, I was a little surprised to find that my snom m3 was not making or receiving calls this morning. Well, it was and it wasn’t. I could dial out and the call appeared to be placed, but I never heard any audio. Once clear of today’s VUC call with Dan Behringer, and lunch with my wife, I was able to investigate this further and get the matter resolved.

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Pixel Power, my employer these past ten years, uses Microsoft Dynamics CRM. We don’t love it, but we need it and we really do use it. It’s taken a long time to get it worked into our corporate culture. We started with v2.0 and have since migrated to v3.0, with a further step to v4.0 coming in the next couple of months.

The move to v4.0 is really a good thing for multiple reasons. I’m told that integration with Outlook is much improved, including the ability to access CRM while offline. Also, v4 supports the Camrivox Flexor CTI plugin allowing integration with our OnSIP hosted IP-PBX.

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So often our exposure to the utility of telepresence/video conferencing is by way of things like 24 or NCIS. These examples highlight big governmental or corporate situations with people are banging their fists on board tables and glaring at the other parties. This is so stereotypical and under serves the real application of such technology to bring people together. To help us communicate better.

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