Reviews

Media Center Communicator

January 7, 2005

Captain Kirk - "Retrieve all my email. And oh yeah, beam me up Scotty!"

Most of us have seen at least one Star Trek episode. Then as you already know, Captain Kirk was able to talk into a communicator to have Scotty beam him up to the Enterprise. Star Trek the Next Generation had an advanced speech recognition system that let the Captain Picard simply press his communicator badge to ask the computer to do something.

Posted in Gadgets, Reviews

VoIP History

January 3, 2005

CTI Magazine cover

I often get asked "When did VoIP begin?" or "What is the history of VoIP?". Well, VoIP goes further back in time than most would expect - 9 years in fact. In fact, I did the first product review of a VoIP product back in 1996 within CTI Magazine (which later became Communication Solutions Magazine). CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) Magazine was at the forefront of news, articles, and reviews of anything to do with computers and telecom (or telephony if you prefer).

Posted in Reviews, VoIP

2005 VoIP Predictions

December 22, 2004

I've been thinking about making predictions for 2005 for some time now. I had a few ideas jotted down back in November but just never got around to compiling everything together and then sitting down and writing my VoIP predictions. Well, with only 9 more days until New Years Eve and then 2005, I guess I can procrastinate no longer.

Here are my Top 10 VoIP predictions and ponderings for 2005.

Posted in Reviews, VoIP

FTTH - Fiber and VoIP

December 16, 2004

FTTH Integrated Voice, Video and Data IP Gateway GW-282

I haven't seen any news about FTTH (Fiber To The Home) and VoIP solutions. If you think about it, most of the news about VoIP has been about VoIP over cable broadband or DSL broadband connections, not fiber. So I was pleasantly surprised when I came across Telco Systems, which has an Outdoor/Indoor IP Media Gateway for Voice, Video and Data services convergence and FTTH applications.

They claim that "the BATM/Telco Systems GW-282 series Integrated IP media gateway is the most efficient, flexible, and powerful device in its class." According to Telco Systems, it’s capable of supporting various combinations of 2, 4 and 8 analog voice lines (VoIP FXS ports), 8 or 16 10/100BaseTX Ethernet ports and optical Fast/ Gigabit Ethernet uplink.

Posted in Reviews, VoIP

Avaya and Verizon

December 7, 2004

Release to share regarding Avaya and Verizon. I actually recently tested and did a review of Avaya's IP Office for the November issue of Internet Telephony Magazine, which Verizon will now be reselling. Avaya IP Office is a very good product for the small office/home office.

here's the release:

Avaya (NYSE: AV) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) have agreed to collaborate in offering to small and medium sized businesses a suite of communications solutions that include systems, applications and services from both companies.

Posted in Avaya, Reviews, VoIP

Streaming Live TV

November 17, 2004

Streaming Live TV has been a dream of mine. I'd love to have access to streaming TV from anywhere - wouldn't you? Well, last week I redeemed 170,000 Sony points to get a Sony VAIO RA920G PC running Microsoft's Media Center Edition 2005 operating system. I was curious if I could figure out a way to "stream" my home PC's multimedia content, including My Videos (.AVI, .Divx, etc), as well as stream live TV to my PC at work by accessing the TV tuner capture card.

Posted in Reviews, VoIP

GoldMine 6.7

November 3, 2004

Gee, FrontRange just sent me a demo copy of GoldMine v6.5 a few weeks ago for a product review and already Goldmine v6.7 is out! I feel so outdated...

I spoke with FrontRange a week or so ago and they are really pushing their developers hard to crank out new features. More importantly, they told me they truly value customer feedback (such as feature requests) and try hard to add them into the next release.

Posted in Call Center and CRM, Reviews

Cisco ATA-186 firmware and other VoIP stuff

November 3, 2004

There is a popular thread in the VoIP Forums that discusses the need for users of the popular Cisco ATA-186 to be able to download H.323 or SIP firmware for the Cisco ATA-186. Coincidentally, I was Googling ATA 186 SIP Firmware and I came across a past Internet Telephony article of mine written in July 2003 titled "The Amazing Cisco ATA-186 And Top ITSPs Compared" where I discussed how to "hack" the Cisco ATA-186 so you can download SIP or H.323 firmware. Well, it wasn't a true hack in the sense of the word, but let's not split hairs. I thought I would share this article from 2003 since it still may be of benefit to readers of my blog.

Posted in Reviews, VoIP

Super Fast Samsung SATA Hard Drive

October 19, 2004

Spaceballs - "Ludicrous Speed!"

Wow, check out this news release! A super fast, ludicrous speed, whopping 3.0 GB/s Serial ATA hard drive for a desktop PC using SATA? Damn, I want one of those! Hey Samsung, can I have a review unit.

Posted in Reviews, Technology and Science

Popular Telephony and Global IP Sound

October 13, 2004

Popular Telephony and Global IP Sound have announced a partnernership to provide best-in-class voice quality on Peerio 444 serverless softphone. I've used Global IP Sound's GIPS codecs and they are very impressive. I gave Global IP Sound a glowing review in a TMC Labs writeup last year, which you can see here: Global IP Sound TMC Labs Review

We found that the Global IP Sound codec had some pretty interesting positive effects under high packet loss conditions, which we tested using the Shunra Cloud 4.0 network emulator tool which can inject latency and packet loss. I should note that we used an older/slower PocketPC with a softphone client containing the GIPS codec engine, so the latency numbers are much higher than a PC or hardphone would have.

Posted in Reviews, VoIP

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