Barrett Lyon is an interesting guy. He's the CTO & Co-founder of BitGravity, a company specializing in streaming media solutions for the web. Long ago I stumbled upon his blog which was then a very simple site. What caught my…
Earlier this week Matt Brunk penned a post over at CMP’s No Jitter blog entitled “SIP Means Change.” It’s a short piece detailing the contrast between SIP phones, Asterisk servers and legacy proprietary equipment. In particular it dwells on the boot times of the various items. He highlights how anything that takes longer, even just a little longer, ultimately has a higher cost.
Matt points out that the older, proprietary digital phones were effectively instant-on devices compared to SIP phones. This is a little obtuse in that SIP isn’t really the culprit. It’s just a protocol. Cisco phones running SCCP would have similar boot times to SIP handsets. I presume that Nortel phones running UNISTIM would also have similar boot times.
This is just too handy to remain hidden away in a comment so I thought I’d make it a proper post on it’s own. Gigaset Communication‘s Tony Stankus responded to a question asked in a comment on my A580IP review. The question was, how to setup the A580IP for use with Gizmo5 and Google Voice?
Back in the spring of this year VUC founder Randy Resnick made the trek to Germany to attend AMOOCON, a conference for Asterisk Users. AMOOCON started out in 2007 known as AsteriskTAG which literally translated means “Asterisk Day.”
While at AMOOCON Randy made a point of recording some of the presentations. These recordings can be found on the VoIP Users Conference site. Various sessions were recorded by the conference organizers and are available on the AMOOCON site. There they also have quite a lot of video of the formal sessions.
Here’s a nice little tidbit for you. One of the more annoying tings about setting up a Gigaset cordless SIP/DECT phone is the sluggishness of the web interface. In the first draft of my A580 review I made specific mention of this, but it was dropped in a later revision. I curse those editors! A few people have since commented about this as well.
There’s been a long running thread about the Gigaset line over at Broadband Reports VoIP Tech Chat forum. “Jan1973” recently posted advising that browsers other than IE or Firefox don’t exhibit this problem at all. That suggests that the matter truly isn’t the Gigaset web server, but rather how the browsers are rendering the pages. “Jan1973” further suggests using k-meleon, which is free download from SourceForge.
Junction Network’s is more than a little unusual amongst hosted IP-PBX providers. They cater specifically to an SMB clientele with accounts typically ranging from 3 to 50 seats. One of the things that sets them apart from other providers is that they don’t force you into specific hardware. When you sign up with them you bring your own phones. (BYOP?)
It’s much more common that providers insist you buy their phones. If they can limit you to only using a certain family of phones it reduces their support requirements. The trouble is, it also limits the end-user flexibility. You might not be able to deploy the ideal sort of devices for your business.