wideband

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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Junction Networks OnSIP Also Supports HD Voice

OK, so this isn’t exactly news. I’ve been using OnSIP with Polycom IP650 & 550 and a few months already. I hadn’t expected them to support wideband at all but was pleasantly surprised to find that their new conference bridge handles it just fine.

Further, if you’re using suitably capable Polycom or snom phones then calls placed through OnSIP will negotiate to G.722 and voila, much clearer calling. They had a blog post about it a short while ago.

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Wideband Calling With EyeBeam & The Polycom C100

For about the past week I’ve been making a lot of use of the Polycom C100 in conjunction with a copy of Eyebeam provided by ZipDX. The C100 is a great little USB speakerphone device. It was one of the first devices from Polycom the supported wideband audio, providing that you have a similarly capable soft phone client.

I must admit that mine is the C100S model which is designed to work with the Skype client, although there are models that are not client specific. As a practical matter the only functions that are client specific involve the use of the five buttons on the device. The buttons support volume up, volume down, place a call, bring the soft phone client to the foreground and mic mute.

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Wideband Voice And Free World Dialup

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.

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Looking For A Wideband Capable Soft Phone

Over the coming weeks and months I hope to explore wideband voice in greater depth. My recent purchase of a couple of Polycom IP650s and the Siemens S685IP provide me with some hardware end-points. I may also buy a snom phone as well, with the optional Klarvoice handset.

However, some of what I wish to undertake would be well served by a soft phone. As yet I have been unable to find a software that supports the G.722 wideband codec.

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