Polycom Firmware Matrix
I'll be upgrading a small herd of IP phones over the holiday break, which had me looking for new Polycom firmware. There once was a time when Polycom directed all end-users to obtain firmware from a reseller. These days the…
Street Price On Polycom IP450 (updated)
Giving the online retailers a day to get their shops updated it seems like the new Polycom SoundPoint IP450 is going to start out selling for around $220. Given that the IP550 is listed in places for only a little…
Polycom’s New SoundPoint IP450
It looks like our friends at Polycom have released a new phone, the SoundPoint IP450. This new model offers three line appearances and a new high-resolution, backlit gray-scale LCD. It also offers both wideband voice and the availability of the…
VoIP Users Conference Nov 7: HD Conference. Are You Ready?
This Friday’s edition of the weekly VoIP Users Conference call is all about wideband audio (aka HD Voice) as mentioned in my review of the Polycom IP650 / 550 SIP phones back in August.
The guest for this call is David Frankel, CEO of ZipDX a commercial service that specializes in wideband conferencing. We expect an interesting call touching on many aspects of VoIP going beyond the traditional phone service, conference bridges, technical standards, device compatibility, etc.
The conference call will be held as usual on the Talkshoe service for people calling in from normal phones. Anyone with G.722 capable phones (Polycom, Snom, Cisco, Avaya, Mitel, Grandstream) or a G.722 capable soft phone (Eyebeam) will be able to connect to the ZipDX conference bridge and participate in glorious wideband audio.
The two conference bridges will be connected. People connected to ZipDX directly will be able to hear the startling difference that HDVoice makes. This is especially true in conference calls where line quality, accents and background noise all cause intelligibility issues. The downloadable recording of the conference will let everyone hear the difference for themselves.
Local Provisioning For IP Phones
A short while ago VUCs Randulo tweeted that he had recently updated the firmware on his Polycom phones. He said that he did this using a local provisioning server setup temporarily just for the task. If you’re using a hosted IP-PBX then you may not have a suitable server running 24/7/365.
If you don’t run a provisioning server all the time then booting the phones can take a lot longer. On boot-up the phones simply fail to contact the provisioning server and eventually boot using their existing internal settings. But this means waiting through a series of time-outs, which is the principle source of delay.
Web Apps For Polycom IP Phones
I've not had a chance to try these yet but this evening I stumbled across a couple of Tweets about new apps leveraging the LCD displays on better Polycom IP phones. One lets you load Flickr images to the phones…