Originally published at www.smallnetbuilder.com on August 13, 2008
When I was asked several months ago about reviewing a pair of new Polycom desk phones, I simply could not believe my good fortune. It was a little like being asked if I’d like to have a Tesla roadster for a few weeks. But of course my good man! Where do I sign?
(this started as a quick comment on my Facebook page, but I’m moving it here so that people outside of FaceBook can join in)
With apologies to the McKenzie brothers. There appears to be an odd cross between two of my passions in the works. As I get more into the daily use of wideband telephony I wonder if there’s a potential to leverage some surround sound techniques to take conferencing to a new level?
It couldn’t be the puritanical kind of approach used in music recording. It would be more a matter of using surround panning to position participants in an synthetic soundfield. I wonder if this has been done to any degree elsewhere?
Early in 2008 when Netflix officially dropped support for HD-DVD I thought that I’d have to terminate our Netflix account. We were getting HD-DVDs routinely, but had no plans to migrate to Blu-Ray. Still don’t really. However, my wife had been enjoying downloads from Amazon’s Unboxed service, even if they were all SD and marginal image quality. It was a suitable substitute for Comcast Pay-Per-View which you simply can’t use on a TivoHD because of cable card issues.
Someone over at Broadband Reports VoIP Forum has posted on successfully using IAX2 via a soft phone on a laptop tethered to a Blackberry Bold. This doesn't seem like the most practical of approaches to mobile VoIP, but it's certainly…
Michael Seto
Vice President, Market & Business Development
Voice Communications
Polycom
Michael Seto is vice president of market and business development for Polycom’s voice communications division.
Jason Fischl, CTO of long time-VoIP leader Counterpath, contacted me by email to advise that they have released a new version of Eyebeam for Windows that is supposed to address the G.722 interoperability issue reported last fall. The release is available in their support forums. Licensed users can update their installations now. I’ve downloaded the release and will be trying it out over the next couple of days.