Graves On SOHO VoIP

Digium’s Tristan Barnum, Director of Product Marketing for Switchvox, has a nice piece over at IT Business Edge called , “Five Things You Didn’t Know About VoIP” I especially like item #5 on her list, “SIP Trunks don’t exist. There’s no such thing.” It’s so very true, yet it flies in the face of the growing hubbub about SIP trunking in recent years.

Paul Otellini of Intel made a keynote address at this past Mobile World Congress. One of the things he highlighted was OpenPeak’s OpenTablet 7, which is based on an Intel Moorestown CPU. Here’s a clip from that presentation.

It’s interesting to see how the tablet is the basis of the product and the handset merely an aspect of the dock that provides its context as a business class desk phone. The combination is what OpenPeak has called the ProFrame 7. It’s been a product for quite some time but not available in North America.

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If an idea worked once it’ll certainly work again. While I’ve been eagerly awaiting news from Cloud Telecomputing about their Android based business desk phone it appears that MSI had a similar idea. Engadget’s coverage of the CeBit show in Germany includes a photo gallery and video walk-through of MSI’s MS-9A31.

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Let me get this right out into the open…it seems to me simply insane for a small company buy a PBX. Buying a PBX takes precious capital for something that is often not a strategic asset in the life of the business. It’s at best “a necessary evil.”

We’re a small business, around sixty staff in total. Most of them live out their days in our corporate HQ in Cambridge, UK. But the “we” that I’m describing here is actually the dozen of us who earn our keep in the North American operation.

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Journalist. Reporter. Columnist. Writer. Blogger. These are all very different things, yet there’s a lot of commonality to their activities and presentation. Most often, to have some semblance of credibility one must consider both sides of an argument or treatise in addressing a topic. This is done in the name of being “fair and balanced.”

The problem is that being fair and balanced can also lead to a kind of blandness in the writing. We might still convey some useful insight, but without expressing what is truly opinion it’s often difficult conveying a passion for the topic.

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Nobody’s perfect, but isn’t it great when a good service keeps getting better? I’ll admit that I completely missed it when way back on January 6th Junction Networks’ issued a press release about the availability of HDVoice in their OnSIP hosted pbx service. I must’ve just overlooked the announcement. Of course OnSIP does HDVoice….I’ve been using them with G.722 capable phones for almost two years.

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If you’ve been reading here for a bit you’ll know that I like my Plantronics .Audio 615m headset. I heartily recommend the Plantronics .Audio lineup for people who need a headset for use with a soft phone.

Since back when this review was published I’ve heard a couple of times that people have had issues with the Plantronics .Audio line not working correctly on Mac systems. Most recently this comment was posted to the review:

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What with the Mobile World Congress 2010 happening in Barcelona this week there’s some interesting stuff being announced. One that caught my attention today is the formal announcement of OpenPeak’s OpenTablet 7.

I’ve been following OpenPeak for some time, and was very interested in the Verizon HUB, which was also their hardware. However, Verizon Wireless managed to wrestle a possibly great product offering into failure with onerous contractual terms and their typical heavy handed insistence upon absolute control.

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