Graves On SOHO VoIP

It’s been a while since I revisited this series on Make Use Of Wideband Voice Right Now! Over the past six months a number of things have changed. Google bought Gizmo5 and has for some time shut down new account sign-ups while they work out how to incorporate Gizmo5 into their voice applications.

With the demise of FWD as a SIP service earlier in 2009 Gizmo5 was probably the most high-profile, publicly available free SIP registrar. Their loss has to be felt as something of a setback to those who want to use HDVoice Right Now! Perhaps over time Google will make up for the current inconvenience.

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Over the past few months I’ve unconsciously made a curious transition. You see, last summer all of my requirements for mobility around the office were met by the Gigaset S675IP that I have installed. When I had to work near a server at my workbench I just grabbed the S67H handset and went over there. Often I used the Gigaset handset with a wired headset for calls lasting a long time.

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Over at Ars Technica Rudolf van der Berg has a nice story called, “ENUM: Dragging telephone numbers into the Internet Age.” The story includes a some nice background on the history of phone numbers and the possibilities presented by ENUM.

To get a little more into ENUM you need to go back in time just a bit. IT Conversations offers a podcast version of an Etel 2007 presentation by John Todd about ENUM. The slides from John’s presentation are also available.

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E4 Technologies has created a holiday contest for the VoIP Users Conference. The prize is one of the new Polycom SoundPoint IP335 HDVoice capable desk phones. To enter the contest you must leave a comment on the E4 Blog answering the question, “All I want for Christmas is…” On December 25th one winner will be randomly selected from all respondents.

Over a period of years I’ve used quite a number of these portable USB attached speakerphone devices. A while ago I summarized my experienced with them, but as a couple of new models have recently emerged so I find that they have my attention yet again. These new devices, if I should be lucky enough to try them, will be the focus on some future posts. For the moment I have another observation to share based upon a recent experience.

All of these portable speakerphones I find well suited to individual use. That is, they work well enough for an individual who sitting at their PC and doesn’t like to wear a headset. They’re also sufficiently portable to please a road warrior. One of the nice things about this kind of device is that they often support HDVoice when paired with a suitable soft phone.

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This year marks the first time that I have attended Astricon. This is mildly paradoxical since Asterisk hasn’t been at the core of my IP telephony activities for a while. However, the opportunity to talk about HDVoice with a group of Asterisk users was just too good an opportunity to pass up.

My experience of Astricon was better than I had expected on a number of levels. Meeting up with  a number of the VUC regulars was probably the highlight of the event. Though we might speak every week or so to have a sit down and talk in one location remains a treat. Meatspace still trumps cyberspace in some ways.

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There’s just way too much interesting gear out there for me to try all of it. That’s at least part of the reason why I was happy to read Ruben’s review of the Citel C-4100 IP phone. Back in May he won the phone in a contest on the VoIP Supply blog.

I hope that he makes good on his intention to use the phone to join a VUC call in G.722. At $99 it just might be a good low-end solution to providing a basic wideband capable desk phone. That is, if the handset truly delivers the call quality.

Beyond merely a wideband codec the physical device matters. It needs to be solidly build, with high-quality transducers. I guess we’ll see, or should I say hear, next week.

Not long ago Dr. Jan Linden, V.P. Of Engineering at GIPS, wrote a really good blog post called G.722 Revisited. In it he considers the trend toward the use of G.722 in the rollout of new wideband telephony projects.

Dr. Linden collected a nice stable of facts in making his points regarding the use of G.722. It’s simply old and less than optimal for use over IP networks. It’s not as bandwidth efficient as many of the new codecs, resulting is lower call quality for a given data-rate. He points to a 2007 study of ITU standard wideband codecs that is quite clear that G.722 is back-of-the-pack from a pure performance perspective.

The post is a great collection of information and he is absolutely correct in making all of his points. But I think that there may be more to it than the argument he lays out, strong though it may be.

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