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…
Back in September Aastra made a few announcements, starting with a new SIP/DECT cordless phone solution targeting the SMB market. Designated the MBU 400 this new system is starting to show up in vendors catalogs. I recently found it listed at .E4 Strategies where availability is given as “Early November.” Furthermore, the retail price is given as $299 for the base and one handset with additional handsets $189 each.
Being a curious sort I downloaded the brochure and the manuals and gave them a quick look. The system certainly appears to be built on a platform from Denmark’s RTX Telecom. This is not at all surprising as they are a leader in the DECT space and OEM for many popular brand names. Snom’s m3 is built on RTX technology as is the as yet unreleased Polycom IP200W.
Talk about perfect timing! Cory Andrews over at VoIP Supply just post a great list of 20 open source soft phones. Nice work Cory!
From this list I found that the French soft phone formerly called OpenWengo has mutated into QuteCom. Best of all, it’s G.722 capable. That makes it a viable candidate for use on this Friday’s VUC call on wideband VoIP.
What’s Happening This Friday?
The VoIP Users Conference weekly call on Friday, November 7, 2008 is all about wideband telephony. That is, using VoIP to deliver call quality vastly superior to the normal public telephone network (PSTN.) Our guest will be David Frankel, CEO of ZipDX, a commercial conferencing service that is specializing in wideband conference calling for businesses.
As usual anyone may join the call which gets underway at 12 noon EST on the Talkshoe conference service. That conference service can be reached by dial-in over the PSTN or by SIP URI. Details on how to connect to Talkshoe by various means can be found here.
For this one call only we will also be using the ZipDX wideband conference bridge. ZipDX and Talkshoe will be connected so that everyone will be on the call. Anyone connected to the ZipDX bridge using a suitable phone will be able to experience the call in G.722-based wideband quality.
Everyone else will experience the normal G.711 based narrowband conference quality that we all know and (despise) love.
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.
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.