Friday, August 16th the VoIP Users Conference will feature Marc Abrams of Mocet with a discussion of their Communicator, a dock that turns an iPad into a full-featured SIP desk phone. There are many among us who have lamented the…
Monday afternoon an email arrived announcing E4 Technology’s new promotion of the Polycom VVX Series desk phones. As I am a huge fan of the VVX Series I thought this worth sharing.
You may recall that I long ago reviewed the VVX-1500. It remains the single best sounding desk phone that I have ever used!
However, I recently replaced the VVX-1500 that had occupied the corner of my desk with a VVX-600 model. The VVX-600 is much smaller and sounds almost as good as it’s larger kin. It’s Bluetooth capable, which is certainly handy. With the optional camera module installed the touchscreen VVX-600 is capable of HD video (720p).
Next week the IETF will be holding a conference in Berlin. Part of that conference is a Technical Plenary Session about the Opus audio codec scheduled for Monday, July 29th 5:40-7:40pm CET. The IETF usually streams much of their conferences…
Last week there was some exciting news on the AG Projects mailing list; Blink support for the Opus codec was being released for the Mac version of Blink. A similarly capable release of the Windows version was expected shortly. Earlier this week Adrian Georgescu, the A. G. of AG Projects, passed me a Blink for Windows release candidate for experimental use.
This beta release installed readily, right along side the production release. I quickly registered it with my account at SIP2SIP.INFO so that we could have a couple of brief test calls.
Since most telephony oriented audio hardware doesn’t do justice to full-bandwidth audio I connected my Blue Microphones Yeti USB Microphone
I’ve recently started to develop a grumpy streak with respect to the use of certain terminology with respect to telephony. Maybe telephony isn’t exactly the right word, let’s say that my unease arises from some odd terms surrounding audio quality in the context of communication. I think that some of the language needs to be more application sensitive.
A few years ago the world was a simpler place. The “Plain Old Telephone System” (aka POTS) was definitely a narrowband medium. Where “narrowband” implied digital sampling at 8 KHz and a useful audio channel of 300 Hz – 3,400 Hz.
Some people using more advanced systems enjoyed “wideband” audio. Wideband in that case was defined as a 16 KHz sampling yielding a useful audio channel of 50 Hz – 7 KHz. The TIA-920 standard, which I have referenced previously, spells this out. A variety of audio codecs can deliver this capability including; AMR-WB, EVRC-WB, G.722, G.722.1, CELT & Opus.
Earlier this week I saw a press release detailing a new model of Gigaset cordless DECT phone. This new model, known as the Gigaset C620A, isn’t even SIP capable so normally I wouldn’t give it the time of day. However, the release placed unusual emphasis on one particular feature…a blacklist function intended to reduce the impact of nuisance calls.
Nuisance calls have been on my mind lately, not so much because we get them…because we generally don’t suffer such a problem. They’ve been on my mind because ZipDX’s David Frankel has been railing against the outcome of the FTC/FCC sponsored Robocall Challenge intended to crowd source a solution to the problem of such calls.
David entered that contest but was not one of the winners. He made some inquires about the judging criteria and scores, but met with resistance. In fact, David’s experience following up on the scoring was pretty bad. So much so that he’s been pursuing the FTC and FCC for more details. His efforts in this pursuit made it into The Wall Street Journal on June 25th.
While the contest was over some time ago, there was a Senate hearing on the subject just last week.