Graves On SOHO VoIP

Matt Riddell of VentureVoIP is always informative and a great read. This morning I see that he has posted an article listing 39 Free Soft Phones. What a great resource! He goes so far as to only list those that don’t require some sort of registration to download. Best of all he clearly indicates platform support for each program.

My two favorites, Counterpath’s X-Lite and PhonerLite, made the list. PhonerLite is notable for being one of the few with support for the G.722 wideband codec. (Am I not some sort of one-note instrument?)

During last weeks VUC call someone mentioned that there was a new service called UKDDI offering free DIDs in the UK.  They offer ten free numbers from locations all around the UK, where each can be mapped to a SIP URI.

It took a couple of minutes for the utility of this to really sink in. Given that I have a factory full of coworkers in the UK, and I’ll be traveling there this coming week there just has to be something useful that I can accomplish with such a resource.

Read the rest of this entry »

For about the past week I’ve been making a lot of use of the Polycom C100 in conjunction with a copy of Eyebeam provided by ZipDX. The C100 is a great little USB speakerphone device. It was one of the first devices from Polycom the supported wideband audio, providing that you have a similarly capable soft phone client.

I must admit that mine is the C100S model which is designed to work with the Skype client, although there are models that are not client specific. As a practical matter the only functions that are client specific involve the use of the five buttons on the device. The buttons support volume up, volume down, place a call, bring the soft phone client to the foreground and mic mute.

Read the rest of this entry »