Making Use of Wideband Voice Right Now!: SIPGate

Thilo Salmon, CEO of  SIPGate, was our guest on the VUC call on June 4th. Until then I had only passing awareness of the company, primarily as a result of speaking with some associates in the UK and Germany who have used the service for years. I signed up for an account just to give it a whirl. Further, I was more than a little intrigued when Mr Salmon said that the service has some support for wideband calling using G.722.

Even while the VUC call was ongoing I went about setting a Gigaset A580IP to register with my new SIPGate account. However it took several tries and some assistance to confirm the assertion that wideband calling is possible between SIPGate accounts.

Earlier this week, with some advice from Tony Stankus at Gigaset Communications, I was able to confirm this capability. Tony called my SIPGate number, which rang a Gigaset S78H handset…whereupon we had a successful wideband call.

So, what was the magic you ask?

There are three parts:

1. Make certain that your phone both supports and prefers a wideband codec

Most phones have a priority scheme for negotiating codec selection. Make certain that your wideband codec of choice is top of the list.

2. Login to your SIPGate account

What? You don’t have one you say? Well, go here and get one. They’re free after all.

Now, as I was saying, login to your new SIPGate account. In the upper right corner of the page select Settings.

Then look to the bottom center of the next page and select Advanced Settings.

On the resulting page you will see a list of settings for each of your phones, enable Compatibility Mode for each of your wideband capable phones.

Now on to the question of routing….