siren14 – Graves On SOHO Technology

Too Many Distractions Making Blogging Light

October 3, 2009
Michael Graves
VoIP

Yes, it’s true, I’ve been a little distracted. Recently a lot of my focus has been work related, as I’ve been on a project in Baltimore the past two weeks. During the time I’ve been staying at a Doubletree near Johns Hopkins University. It’s a quiet place with a good restaurant, including a nice wine list.

Sadly, cellular service in the area is spotty. I’ve had no T-Mobile coverage in my room. That leaves me relying upon VoIP over the hotel Wifi or my Sprint Mifi. Happily, those have been decent options.

Michael Stanford On Wideband At TMC

March 11, 2009
Michael Graves
VoIP

Michael Stanford of Wirevolution has an article called Better Sounding Calls in the March issue of Internet Telephony that was today published on TMCs HDVoice Community site. While very general it's nevertheless a nice article. He cites Speex developer Jean-Marc…

Codec Wars vs Serving The Common Good

March 8, 2009
Michael Graves
VoIP

There has been for many years a subtle conflict ongoing in telecom space. Various vendors have created digital encoding techniques (codecs) that target common network issues. Since various network realities exist so too do various approaches to the problems faced. So a range of codecs exist in the marketplace. Typically a high-quality solution comes with an associated cost, reflecting the very fact that the solution has merit.

The poster-child for this is the G.729a codec. Over time this patented codec has become the industry standard low-bitrate codec for voice applications. Who can argue. It works well. It squeezes reasonable voice quality down to under 30 kbps and it’s compute overhead is acceptable on available hardware.