At long last the Gigaset C610A IP is available in the US. Gigaset recently issued a press release highlighting this very fact. Much of the detail of the press release was already known from the product announcement back at CES.…
It’s nice to see people “thinking outside the box” as exemplified by David Frankel’s recent presentation to the FCC. Please recall that David is the CEO of ZipDX, a leading voice in the battle for HDVoice and a sponsor of the VoIP Users Conference.
Doug Mohney’s HD Voice News has a good overview of David’s petition. David’s idea was that the merger hearings present an opportunity to point out how the ILECs have utterly failed to advance the issue of call quality. What Doug doesn’t mention is the mechanism of David’s presentation on May 27th.
I’ve been a customer of GotoMeeting for many years. I’ve used the service largely as a means to gain remote access to customers systems for the purpose of remote maintenance and diagnostics. I was driven to its use by the ABC group of stations, whose corporate network is seriously locked down. Since then my employer has become an avid user of their GotoAssist product, which is actually better suited to our activities.
We have also used GotoMeeting for its more traditional purpose of making online presentations. Since our staff are distributed around the US and UK it’s been a handy platform for giving presentations. At $50/mo the cost/benefit balance of the service is very good. It lets use do more while travelling less, which is a win/win combination.
Early in our use of GotoMeeting we tried to use the voice conferencing facet of the service. However, at that time we found it wanting. Call quality was extremely variable, never very good. Thus we adopted the habit of using GotoMeeting for the presentation/desktop sharing, but a separate conference bridge to handle voice calls.
Doug Mohney, Editor of HD Voice News is quite plain in saying that he Hates The Term “HD Audio!” In this case his comment stems from the fact that VTech, a Canadian manufacturer of consumer cordless telephones, has started to use the term “HD Audio” describe some of their latest hardware.
The company describes the “HD Audio” feature as follows:
“The frequency band has been extended allowing for the signal to be reproduced and tuned for a fuller and clearer sound.”
In addition, they seem to have implemented a kind of tone control with several preset contours.
“The equalizer feature on the handset enables you to change the audio quality of the handset to best suit your hearing. While on a call or intercom call, or listening to a message or announcement, press EQ to select the equalizer setting Treble 1, Treble 2, Bass or Natural (the default setting) for the handset. The current setting is displayed on the handset briefly.”
Since these are DECT 6.0 devices it’s possible that the cordless aspects of the system use G.722 encoded audio to provide higher quality sound for calls between handsets. However, since the device offers only the analog PSTN interface to the world it’s going to be limited to narrowband G.711 for all calls to the PSTN. The intercom function may be improved, but it’ll have limited impact upon most of the things that people do with a telephone.
Several people have been in touch regarding my recent review of the Plantronics Voyager Pro UC Bluetooth headset. It seems that they would like to purchase the device but want to be certain that they are selecting the appropriate model. After all, why pay for the wideband capable model if you only application will be with a cell phone? Conversely, if you really want wideband capability you’d better get the Plantronics Voyager Pro UC V2
Late last week I took an hour to sit through a Voxeo webinar on the impact of IP v6 on SIP communications. It was the latest in their series of Developer Jam Session presentations.
Dan York presented a nice introduction to the issues surrounding IP v6 implementation with respect to real-time communication using SIP. If you’re new to IP v6, as I am, then the recording of that session is a recommended resource.