Robert Poe at VoIP News has a nice overview on wideband telephony entitled How To Benefit From HD Voice. It's a really good starting place for small businesses curious about the growing din surrounding wideband calling.
Originally published in December 2008 at Small Net Builder.
It has been nearly three years since I first published an article detailing my experience setting up an Asterisk server on an embedded PC platform. That turned out to be just the start of a wave of interest in the embedded system or “appliance” approach to Asterisk. Since then, a number of companies have offered ready-to-roll Asterisk appliances.
Many of these Asterisk “appliances” are really just pre-configured servers running a bundle of software built around Asterisk. To meet my definition of “appliance” the system should have no moving parts. That means diskless, fanless, silent and reliable.
Preconfigured servers are very capable but they often have much of the administrative overhead of an old-school Asterisk installation. They usually require someone with Asterisk or telecom experience to plan and implement a working system.
I have deferred upgrading my own Astlinux server a very long time. I knew it had to be done, but also knew that it would be essentially rebuilding the system from scratch. When Jazinga offered to let me evaluate their new Asterisk appliance, I saw the possibility of deploying something simpler, with less administrative overhead.
In their flagship MGA120 PBX appliance, Jazinga set out to build a device that could be installed in a typical small business, home or home office by someone with minimal IT skills. It combines common networking and IP telephony functions with software designed to make installation and administration truly easy.
For several years, certainly as long as I have been writing this blog, I have been hunting for a better cordless IP telephony solution for my home office. Cordless mobility is increasingly a critical feature for home office and small business users. While we have a satisfactory solution in place at the moment, there’s certainly room for improvement.
Siemens, a multi-national company headquartered in Germany, has a new subsidiary called Gigaset US specifically to market some of their range of consumer electronics in North America. This new company is headquartered in Dallas, Texas.
Telephony Online has today's release about Optimum Lightpath offering wideband business class voice service. Doug Mohney, aka Doug On IP Comm, has a bit about these events as well. His headline is "HD Communications – Cablevision fired the first business HD…
The CATiq blog as a press release from RTX Telecom about the release of a new DECT/CATiq 2.0 USB dongle. The release states that the device is basically a DECT/CATiq base station with a USB interface. That makes it an…
Over at VoIP Supply’s VoIP Insider Cory Andrews poses a good question, ” When Will HD Audio Come to Mobile Phones?” He frames it up in the context of having first hand experience with enterprise class wideband hardware like the new Polycom VVX-1500 Media Phone, but then recasts the question in the mobile space.
With 3G here and 4G coming, the bandwidth is certainly there to support HD calling on mobile devices. Seems all that is currently lacking is a traditional carrier or mobile VoIP provider and a handset manufacturer with a wireless device that supports G.722 or alternative wideband codecs. I wonder if there are existing mobile phone devices with a large deployed base that could be made “HD capable” via firmware update?
I’m certainly not an expert in all facets of the technology involved, but I have been investigating wideband for some time, and tapping many sources along the way. After a while all the little pieces of information start to form a more complete picture of what’s involved.