A couple of weeks ago I penned a post about my search for a wideband capable soft phone. A short while later I was contacted by David Frankel of ZipDX. His company offers a standards compatible wideband conference service. It seems that he’s been down the path of wideband telephony a fair distance.
Well it has certainly been an unusual week around here. To start with migrating my domain to a new host took longer than I thought. The whole process took about a week. The thing is that it finally happened the very day that Hurricane Ike was to hit the Houston area. So…..I was a little busy…y’dig?
We had the house and office all boarded up and executed what the local authorities call “Shelter In Place.” That protocol, known as “SIP” to some outside the VoIP community was the recommended practice given our location.
A short while I go I wrote a lament about how the better IP phones with large LCD displays are woefully underused. Specifically, they provide XHTML browsers that allow the phone to interact with online data sources.
Poking around online I found a company in Colorado that develops apps to leverage these features. Further, they make available a public example that you can access for your Polycom phone.
To me Magic Jack is completely boring on its own. $20/yr for unlimited calling in the US is ok. In fact, that's cheap. But needing to use your PC to run their soft phone client from that USB device is…
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.
In September 2007 the folks at FWD put up a wiki in the hope of getting users to document how to configure various hardware & software SIP clients for use with the service. At the time I was provisioning a…