Michael Graves

This author has written 1380 articles

Reflecting Upon My First Astricon

Astricon2009This year marks the first time that I have attended Astricon. This is mildly paradoxical since Asterisk hasn’t been at the core of my IP telephony activities for a while. However, the opportunity to talk about HDVoice with a group of Asterisk users was just too good an opportunity to pass up.

My experience of Astricon was better than I had expected on a number of levels. Meeting up with  a number of the VUC regulars was probably the highlight of the event. Though we might speak every week or so to have a sit down and talk in one location remains a treat. Meatspace still trumps cyberspace in some ways.

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Asterisk & HDVoice: Hearing The Siren’s Song Part 2

Asterisk & HDVoiceIn part 1 I gave you an introduction to Polycom’s Siren7 & 14 codecs, as well as a brief overview of their implementation in Asterisk v1.6. Now  it makes some sense to try and understand their advantages in use. This is really a more generalized exploration of narrowband (G.711 ala PSTN) vs wideband (G.722/G.722.1) vs Super-Wideband (G.722.1C)

I set about creating a series of audio recordings to illustrate the difference between the three codecs. If Asterisk had been capable of handling all three codecs then recording samples encoded in each fashion would have been relatively simple. The trouble is that in the period leading up to Astricon I didn’t yet have a version of Asterisk capable of handling Siren streams beyond pass through.

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Asterisk & HDVoice: Hearing The Siren’s Song Part 1

Asterisk & HDVoicePreface: This post is a rework of the HDVoice session I presented in cooperation with Polycom at Astricon 2009. The Powerpoint slides in support of that session as well as a videotape recording of the session are anticipated in a few weeks on the Astricon web site.

In considering this subject I developed more demo material than was possible to use in the 40 minute session at Astricon. This post begins a series that is a kind of superset of the Astricon session, intended to go into more depth with a larger variety of HDVoice examples.

The introduction to the session was given by Tim Yankee, Director of Product Marketing, Voice Communications at Polycom. Tim’s intro gave an overview of the state of HDVoice in the industry.  Hopefully his slide set will be included in the presentation materials to be put online at Astricon.net

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Gigaset Phones & OnSIP

siemens-a580ip-160In the month or two since I posted my review of the Gigaset A580IP SIP/DECT phones I’ve been contacted a number of times by people struggling with configuring the phone for their chosen ITSP. In most cases it’s a simple matter of the people not being familiar with some of the terminology common to SIP service providers, and being able to map the terms use by their ITSP to the menus on the Gigaset web admin portal.

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