VUC

USB Speakerphones: An Observation

Over a period of years I’ve used quite a number of these portable USB attached speakerphone devices. A while ago I summarized my experienced with them, but as a couple of new models have recently emerged so I find that they have my attention yet again. These new devices, if I should be lucky enough to try them, will be the focus on some future posts. For the moment I have another observation to share based upon a recent experience.

Six USB Speakerphones

All of these portable speakerphones I find well suited to individual use. That is, they work well enough for an individual who sitting at their PC and doesn’t like to wear a headset. They’re also sufficiently portable to please a road warrior. One of the nice things about this kind of device is that they often support HDVoice when paired with a suitable soft phone.

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Reflecting Upon My First Astricon

Astricon2009This year marks the first time that I have attended Astricon. This is mildly paradoxical since Asterisk hasn’t been at the core of my IP telephony activities for a while. However, the opportunity to talk about HDVoice with a group of Asterisk users was just too good an opportunity to pass up.

My experience of Astricon was better than I had expected on a number of levels. Meeting up with  a number of the VUC regulars was probably the highlight of the event. Though we might speak every week or so to have a sit down and talk in one location remains a treat. Meatspace still trumps cyberspace in some ways.

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GIPS Comments On G.722

Not long ago Dr. Jan Linden, V.P. Of Engineering at GIPS, wrote a really good blog post called G.722 Revisited. In it he considers the trend toward the use of G.722 in the rollout of new wideband telephony projects.

Dr. Linden collected a nice stable of facts in making his points regarding the use of G.722. It’s simply old and less than optimal for use over IP networks. It’s not as bandwidth efficient as many of the new codecs, resulting is lower call quality for a given data-rate. He points to a 2007 study of ITU standard wideband codecs that is quite clear that G.722 is back-of-the-pack from a pure performance perspective.

The post is a great collection of information and he is absolutely correct in making all of his points. But I think that there may be more to it than the argument he lays out, strong though it may be.

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Aswath Rao On Why Trapezoidal VoIP Is Evil!

alt_vvx1500_2_1This week’s VUC call sure is timely for me! VoIP pioneer Aswath Rao will be walking us through the evil that is “trapezoidal VoIP.” His words, not mine.

Why is this extra timely for me? Well, I spent considerable time today dealing with the very trapezoid in question. My forthcoming review of the Polycom VVX-1500 Business Media Phone has gone to the publisher for a final polish. With the text in their hands my task turned to producing the supporting images, sound files, etc that they might want to run. This time around they want to run a recorded video clip example of the what you see on the VVX LCD screen. It’s a good idea, but as it happens, not so easily done.

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Codecs, Wideband & Stereo: A Conversation At AMOOCON

AMOOCON-200Back 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.

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