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Business internet mobile connectivity voip

Orange HD voice – when will the whole world go HD?

Mobile operator Orange has hit the headlines today with the launch of its HD voice service. Trials for this service, which uses the Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband codec (AMR-WB – otherwise known as  G722.2), began in June this year in the south of England.

The service is initially only for Orange HD handset to Orange HD handset.  This is quite easy to do as “on-net” HD calls using the same codec don’t require transcoding and also do not therefore enter into the black art world of interoperability. 

HD voice has been the subject of discussion amongst the VoIP community in the UK this year.  A fair few vendors

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Business voip

#VoIP SNOM #SIP and the Football #WorldCup

When I first started looking at SNOM phones, perhaps 9 years ago, they were not very impressive. The handset was easy to knock off its cradle and the voice was tinny.

The phone firmware was impressive and the fact that SNOM was a very early runner in the SIP market is to their great credit.  SNOM is an entrepreneurial business.

The fact that SNOM is still around is also hugely to their credit and their handsets have come on in dramatic leaps and bounds. The quality of the plastics has improved and their expertise in software still comes clearly to the fore.

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Business voip

SNOM out of the box plug and play

SNOM is a German manufacturer of SIP  telephony handsets and iPBXs. They were an early entrant into the SIP phone market. SNOM software was always good but in the early days their plastic let them down.

I met with the Sales team from SNOM today to take a look at their phones. I am looking at new ranges for the Small and Medium sized Business market.

What I saw was very impressive. The phone was plugged into the Power over Ethernet socket in one of our meeting rooms. I connected to it’s IP address using my laptop, plugged in my SIP credentials and I was making calls.  OK it took me two goes to get the format of the credentials right so that the phone would register but the onboard logs showed me where I had been going wrong and a simple tweak made it work.

I then set up my voicemail alert (the light that comes up on the phone when I have a voicemail) and a busy lamp field for one of the engineers. It took seconds. In those seconds I basically provisioned something that a SMB would regard as a useful telephone key system.

Gone are the days when setting up a phone would have been a complicated affair. Actually our customers don’t need to set up their IP phones – they come preconfigured.    My point is that this was a totally strange phone to that I got working in no time whatsoever without it being preconfigured.  This is a long way from where it was in the early days of the technology and of SNOM.

This is a serious case study of the power of open standards, in this case SIP.  Well done to SNOM.