VUC

VUC Call Dec 12: Asterisk Security

polycom_ip650_256Let me be amongst the first to say that I can be such a schmuck some days! Randulo asked me to guest host last Friday’s VUC call as he was unavailable. I agreed since I was going to be in my office that day. I thought ahead enough to have the correct Talkshoe web login to get the conference started.  But I called into the conference server using my usual SIP dialing process. I have it programmed into my hosted PBX, so it’s routine.

Logged in as me, and not the call host, this didn’t allow me to initiate the call recording on the Talkshoe conference bridge. Of course I didn’t know this until a few seconds before the call was to begin when I first tried to start the recording. No problem, says I, I’ll do it locally…which I did. I recorded the call using my Polycom SoundPoint IP650, which I used to actually participate on the call.

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Soft Phones: An Opportunity For Someone

<RANT> Let’s face it, the soft phone segment of VoIP space is stagnant. There’s been little change in literally years. I’ve spent the past six months looking for a Windows soft phone that was G.722 capable. In the course of my search I’ve tried a number of soft phones. The list is getting lengthy:

Corey Andrews over at VoIP Supply also blogged a great summary of Free SIP Soft Phones a while back.. There are a couple on this list that look promising. I’m about to try both MizuPhone and Mirial.

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Wideband Telephony: Seeing What You Hear

As expected the VUC call on Nov 7 about wideband VoIP proved very interesting. It was well attended with a dozen participants on the ZipDX wideband bridge and another twenty on the Talkshoe narrowband conference bridge. Our guest, David Frankel of ZipDX, did a good job of introducing wideband telephony, it’s advantages and some of the issues surrounding its implementation.

We recorded the call in several places so that we have both wideband and narrowband recordings available for comparison after the fact. History has shown that many people download the conference recordings, even many months after the original conference date. It’s evidence of “the long tail” phenomenon that we hear about so often.

However, some people are very visual so I thought I’d bolster the archive recordings by doing some simple visual analysis of the spectral energy distribution in each type of call. Happily, Cool Edit Pro (now Adobe Audition) makes it really simple to generate both waveform and spectral views of an audio clip.

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VoIP Users Conference Friday, Nov 7: Wideband Telephony

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.

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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.

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