OK, so this isn’t exactly news. I’ve been using OnSIP with Polycom IP650 & 550 and a few months already. I hadn’t expected them to support wideband at all but was pleasantly surprised to find that their new conference bridge handles it just fine.
Further, if you’re using suitably capable Polycom or snom phones then calls placed through OnSIP will negotiate to G.722 and voila, much clearer calling. They had a blog post about it a short while ago.
For the past few weeks I’ve been hunting for a soft phone with specific wideband voice capabilities. I’ve found a couple but there arises complications.
Wideband-capable hard phones usually support G.722, G.722.1 or G.722.2 (aka AMR-WB) codecs. There are other codecs out there that support wideband voice coding. Speex is the one most often cited. However, Speex support in hardware is extremely limited. So Speex implemented in a soft phone is not going to help me evaluate interoperability with hard phones.
After several months of using this pair around my office I've finally submitted a written review to www.smallnetbuilder.com. I have to thank Tim, the editor at SNB, for his patience. It took me a while because I really wanted to…