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.
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….
3. Edit the default routing for your account
By default SIPGate will assign one number to ring multiple phones. We need to change this so that an incoming call rings one specific phone. Return to the main settings page. On the right side of the green strip select the Edit Routing option.
When this page appears you will see that the number is set to ring and entire group of phones.
Untick the setting for the group of phones and select the specific phone that wish to use for your wideband calling on this line.
Now save your settings.
Back on the main settings page you will now see a red banner warning you that some numbers only ring some phone. This is normal.
What you have just done is to create a setup where the SIPGate servers will not proxy the media during your calls. The media streams will go direct between your phone and the other parties.
While this is required to enable wideband calling it will have some other consequences. There will be some features of the service that you will not be able to use. These features rely upon their server having constant access to the call media.Without its proxy in place the service may not detect mid-call DTMF for example.
The fact that SIPGate accounts can pass wideband calls can be useful. Since each account is issued a DID, a normal PSTN number, they are purely numeric and so can be conveniently dialed from any phone. Yet since the calls between SIPGate accounts transit an IP network end-to-end you can take advantage of the outstanding voice quality offered by wideband capable phones. All in all, this is a very handy way of side-stepping the matter of dialing by SIP URI.
I can’t say that I’ve put a lot of minutes on my account thus far. Even so, I have found it to be very reliable, and welcome addition to my arsenal. Of course, calls passed to the PSTN are not wideband…but that’s to be expected.
And did I mention that calls between SIPGate accounts are free?
If you want to make a wideband test call from your SIPGate account send me a direct message on Twitter (@mjgraves).
