Graves On SOHO VoIP

Steve Song of The Shuttleworth Foundation was our guest on a recent VUC call. He also gave a presentation at TEDx in Johannesburg. Here’s a recording of that presentation.

Steve Song – The Village Telco – TEDx Newtown from Steve Song on Vimeo.

This presentation by Michael Calabrese at Ecomm EU is very, very interesting.

Paul O’Flaherty released this curious little vidcast that makes a good point.

For months I’ve been waiting for a new cell phone. There seems to be a dearth of suitable candidates available. So I’m going to try running a reader poll. I had been very interested in the Nokia N97 which has been shipping for about six weeks. Yet few people I know are using the device, and I don’t necessarily trust everything that I read about it online. If you have one I’d like to know your thoughts on it.

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Feel free to leave a comment or suggest an alternative.

Over at VoIP Supply’s VoIP Insider Cory Andrews poses a good question, ” When Will HD Audio Come to Mobile Phones?” He frames it up in the context of having first hand experience with enterprise class wideband hardware like the new Polycom VVX-1500 Media Phone, but then recasts the question in the mobile space.

With 3G here and 4G coming, the bandwidth is certainly there to support HD calling on mobile devices. Seems all that is currently lacking is a traditional carrier or mobile VoIP provider and a handset manufacturer with a wireless device that supports G.722 or alternative wideband codecs. I wonder if there are existing mobile phone devices with a large deployed base that could be made “HD capable” via firmware update?

I’m certainly not  an expert in all facets of the technology involved, but I have been investigating wideband for some time, and tapping many sources along the way. After a while all the little pieces of information start to form a more complete picture of what’s involved.

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Some time ago in a informal VUC post-call session Karl Fife brought up Magic Jack as a topic of discussion. He felt at the time that they were very possibly doomed to failure by their business model. I doubt that this is the case, and laid forth the logic of my belief. Well, earlier a recent thread over at BroadbandReports.com hinted at support for my theory.

It helps to start out understanding Magic Jack and their business model. Simply put, you pay $40 in the first year to establish an account and get the Magic Jack device. Thereafter you can make calls over your broadband by plugging a traditional phone into the MJ dongle, and the dongle into your PC.

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This past week I had the pleasure of attending The HD Communication Summit hosted by Jeff Pulver in New York City. The summit was a one day event intended to rally a number of players in the telecom world around moving beyond the PSTN with the rollout of wideband telephony services.

The event was the first of its kind, and drew a group of over 100 attendees most of whom were telecom industry insiders. For me it was exciting and enlightening to be in the presence of such a group of knowledgeable people.

The day was marked by a number of presentations from various parties and a handful of panels. There’s simply too much to convey in a single post so I’ll start with some of my more general impressions of the issues discussed.

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Over at Telephony Online Danny Briere has a good piece of opinion about the Verizon Wireless HUB. The opinions expressed are a close match to my initial impression of both the device and the associated service. It just smells of classic Verizon-style over-control, with a side order of under-delivery of capabilities.

Frankly, I like what OpenPeak has done with the hardware. Less is known about the software, but it looks like it has tremendous potential. It could truly be an “iPhone for Home.”

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