Michael Graves

This author has written 1376 articles

A Little More Graphic Appreciation For Boingo

Today I was tasked with making a trip to the Los Angeles area. So I found myself on the way to the airport at 8am, counting my blessings that I didn’t need to take the extremely early first flight out of Houston, but rather the more sensible 9:30am departure. I get to the airport an hour before the flight and breeze through the security process with 45 minutes to get to my gate.

Normally I’d go to the President’s Club lounge for coffee, a bagel and a last minute check of email. Unlike many other airlines Continental provides free wifi in their lounges. Of course, you pay annually for the lounge membership.

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Wideband Telephony: Seeing What You Hear

As expected the VUC call on Nov 7 about wideband VoIP proved very interesting. It was well attended with a dozen participants on the ZipDX wideband bridge and another twenty on the Talkshoe narrowband conference bridge. Our guest, David Frankel of ZipDX, did a good job of introducing wideband telephony, it’s advantages and some of the issues surrounding its implementation.

We recorded the call in several places so that we have both wideband and narrowband recordings available for comparison after the fact. History has shown that many people download the conference recordings, even many months after the original conference date. It’s evidence of “the long tail” phenomenon that we hear about so often.

However, some people are very visual so I thought I’d bolster the archive recordings by doing some simple visual analysis of the spectral energy distribution in each type of call. Happily, Cool Edit Pro (now Adobe Audition) makes it really simple to generate both waveform and spectral views of an audio clip.

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First Look From Afar*: Aastra MBU 400 SIP/DECT System

Back in September Aastra made a few announcements, starting with a new SIP/DECT cordless phone solution targeting the SMB market. Designated the MBU 400 this new system is starting to show up in vendors catalogs. I recently found it listed at .E4 Strategies where availability is given as “Early November.” Furthermore, the retail price is given as $299 for the base and one handset with additional handsets $189 each.

Being a curious sort I downloaded the brochure and the manuals and gave them a quick look. The system certainly appears to be built on a platform from Denmark’s RTX Telecom. This is not at all surprising as they are a leader in the DECT space and OEM for many popular brand names. Snom’s m3 is built on RTX technology as is the as yet unreleased Polycom IP200W.

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How To Add a Cellular Trunk to Your VoIP System: Part 1

Originally published May 9, 2008 at www.smallnetbuilder.com

Our Asterisk based home/office phone system provides tremendous flexibility in handling our phone calls. It gave us the opportunity to migrate away from using analog phone lines from a traditional carrier. We now send and receive all calls via IP over our DSL. Of course, the monthly cost of our calling is a lot less. However, it’s not a prefect system – yet.

From the outset, we have worked to make the system more robust. This we have done in many ways, including providing various redundancies in hardware and configuration. Most recently, we have added a cellular trunk to ensure calling capability should our DSL service fail. The process involved in arriving at this decision has proven interesting.

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Wifi Business: AT&T Buys Wayport

Andy Abramson has posted with respect to AT&T deciding to purchase Wayport and so expand their Wifi hotspot business. Although I still prefer to not do business with AT&T I have over the years spent a considerable sum with Wayport. Such is the life of one who inhabits hotels quite frequently.

Andy notes, and I’m very pleased to hear, that one of the beneficiaries of the deal will be Boingo. While I haven’t posted about this before I’ve been using Boingo for about a year. In fact I just upgraded my account to their Boingo Unlimited access.

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