Tag: astricon

Demonstrating Asterisk & HDVoice At Astricon 2009 This Week

astriconThis coming week I’ll be doing a short presentation at Astricon 2009 in Phoenix. For some reason the description of the session has never made it onto the event web site so I thought I’d describe it here in case anyone was interested.

The topic is “HDVoice & Asterisk: Hearing The Siren’s Song.” The session is essentially an overview of the very recent implementation of the Polycom Siren7 & Siren 14 codecs in Asterisk v1.6. The session is part of the “Tech Track” and the conference and happens Wednesday, October14th at 11:40am.

I’ll be sharing the stage with Tim Yankee, Director of Product Marketing, Voice Communications for Polycom. Tim will start the session, presenting on the state of HDVoice as envisioned by Polycom. When Tim passes the mic to me I’ll offer a demo of the Siren codecs.

We hope to make it both informative and entertaining. And, oh yes….there will be a test…of sorts!

Too Many Distractions Making Blogging Light

Yes, it’s true, I’ve been a little distracted. Recently a lot of my focus has been work related, as I’ve been on a project in Baltimore the past two weeks. During the time I’ve been staying at a Doubletree near Johns Hopkins University. It’s a quiet place with a good restaurant, including a nice wine list.

Sadly, cellular service in the area is spotty. I’ve had no T-Mobile coverage in my room. That leaves me relying upon VoIP over the hotel Wifi or my Sprint Mifi. Happily, those have been decent options.

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Inspirational Hardware: The FIT-PC Slim & FIT-PC2

My roots in VoIP are closely intertwined with embedded systems. I really like the idea of small, quiet, lower-power hardware that just runs…and runs…and runs. That’s what drove me to my 2006 article about Astlinux on Soekris hardware and was in part the genesis of this blog.

When I saw the original FIT-PC I thought that it could be an interesting platform for Asterisk. However, with its 400 MHz Geode CPU it wasn’t that much different than the Soekris platform that I was using, so there was little motivation to make the migration.

fit-PC Slim-500

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Fit-PC Slim (pictured above) is now available on sale on Amazon for a mere $159.

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This Weeks Blast From Astricon: Asterisk & Skype

Digium and Skype have partnered to provide a formal means of integrating the Skype and Asterisk worlds. It’s possibly very exciting although it’s early days yet, with a limited beta program just about to start.

It seems to me that this gives Skype a lot more exposure to business applications, especially in the SMB sector.

There’s a lot of coverage about this elsewhere online. Here’s some recommended reading.

Of course there has been a number of people demanding that Skype open their network to interoperability with the standards-based SIP world, key amongst them Voxeo’s Dan York and Gizmo5’s Michael Robertson. For their part Skype seemed reluctant, but maybe that was just gamesmanship.