An Interesting Week Ahead: New VOIP Hardware

The coming week promises to be very interesting. It’ll be the first full week spent in my office in a couple of months. Thank goodness. I’m tired of all the travel. Also, I have a bunch of new VOIP hardware either awaiting installation or on its way.

Polycom has been very gracious in providing a pair of their latest SIP hard phones, the IP650 and IP550 for evaluation. These are loaded with the most recent firmware (v3.0), including some optional productivity software that looks very interesting. I’m especially interested in trying the HD Voice capability based upon the G.722 codec. I suspect that the improved voice clarity might be addictive, especially for conference calls.

I also have one of their Spectralink 8002 Wifi SIP handsets on-hand. That’s been in-house for a couple of weeks, but I haven’t been around myself so I haven’t been able to use it much yet.

Finally, by weeks end I would hope that the Siemens S685 IP system would arrive. It’s HD Voice capable as well which will help in evaluating the Polycom phones.

I’m needing to make a purchasing decision about a handful of new SIP phones for work, so all this seems to come along at a good time. It should be fun.