Michael Graves

This author has written 1380 articles

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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VoIP Users Conference Friday, Nov 7: Wideband Telephony

What’s Happening This Friday?

The VoIP Users Conference weekly call on Friday, November 7, 2008 is all about wideband telephony. That is, using VoIP to deliver call quality vastly superior to the normal public telephone network (PSTN.) Our guest will be David Frankel, CEO of ZipDX, a commercial conferencing service that is specializing in wideband conference calling for businesses.

As usual anyone may join the call which gets underway at 12 noon EST on the Talkshoe conference service. That conference service can be reached by dial-in over the PSTN or by SIP URI. Details on how to connect to Talkshoe by various means can be found here.

For this one call only we will also be using the ZipDX wideband conference bridge. ZipDX and Talkshoe will be connected so that everyone will be on the call. Anyone connected to the ZipDX bridge using a suitable phone will be able to experience the call in G.722-based wideband quality.

Everyone else will experience the normal G.711 based narrowband conference quality that we all know and (despise) love.

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