Who hasn’t been on an important conference call and heard the infamous “buzz” sound on the speakerphone caused by cell phone interference. Nextel two-way “push to talk” phones are notorious for causing this “buzz” sound, as well as Blackberries. Still don't know what I'm talking about? Sure you do. Just play this MP3 file and you'll recognize this annoying buzz sound.
As I commented to Polycom, there are occasions when I'm watching FOX News or some other live TV program and I hear the "buzz" sound during the TV show that I know is coming from their end. How unprofessional and very annoying. You'd think professional news studios would have shielded microphones, or the news anchors would turn off their cellphone while on the air, but I digress.
I spoke with Jeff Rodman, CTO of Polycom’s Voice Communications Solutions division yesterday. He told me, “10 years the buzz interference wasn’t much of an issue, because not many people had cell phones. But now you can be sitting in a conference table and you can have 5, 10 people sitting around each with 2-3W transmitters in their pocket. The interesting thing is when you get a 2W transmitter within several inches of a phone the fields that the phone sees are as strong as if you had a major radio station 20 or 30 yards away. It’s really quite stunning how quickly the signal strength builds up. So it wasn’t much of an issue years ago, now as you know it’s quite common.”
“RF interference is nothing new, but our awareness of it is at an all-time high, as more and more business is conducted over virtual forms of communications such as voice and video conferencing, and as the popularity of smartphones increases. Now customers can bring their smartphones into the conference room and not cause any interference on the conference call.” He continued, “As the pioneer in voice conferencing, Polycom took the lead in developing solutions that stop the ‘buzz’ and offer the best quality audio available in the industry. Polycom’s industry-leading voice quality, coupled with the new RF shielding and isolation technologies, are now shipping worldwide, helping people be more productive throughout the global workplace.”
I asked Jeff some questions about their buzz-eliminating technology.
Q: What drove Polycom to develop a solution to the buzzing problem?
A: We’ve been going crazy in our own meetings saying ‘what’s that buzzing?’ ‘what’s causing that?’ and then realizing we could do something about to make the meetings better for ourselves but I know we’re not the only one’s suffering from this.
Q: (I commented how cell phones can even send audio out a laptop’s or PC’s speakers.)
A: What happens is there are a lot of things in electronics – it’s operating as a crystal set basically. It detects the modulating waveform and then turns it right back into audio. Essentially, it strips off the radio frequency and just leaves the audio that you hear. So it can happen just in the speaker amplifier -- walk into the amplifier through the speaker leads, be detected, amplified by the amplifier and then go out the PC speakers.
He added: “Telephones and speakerphones have the additional challenge in that they have microphones that typically are putting out a signal that is on the order of millivolts. So if you’ve got several volts per meter of RF field strength it’s not difficult for that to turn into a real signal that gets passed to the other end.”
Q: How do you solve this issue?
A: So one of the things that we spent a lot of time on is working with a couple of our vendors to redesign the microphone element from the ground up to make it highly resistant to this kind of stuff. That’s one of the pieces that goes into our overall solution to the problem.
Q: Can you explain in technical detail exactly how you eliminate the “buzz factor”?
A: It’s really a combination of things. It’s everything from the specific component design. There is an elevated level of shielding – actually metallic shields. There’s a lot of electronic isolation of signals in and out and to some extent within the unit. And then we do a lot of testing. Polycom is a founding member of C63 Study Group 9 of ANSI which is developing a formal industry specification for this. But in the meantime we’ve developed our own kind of superset of that, which is a combination of lab tests with directed microwave amplifiers and directional antennas, and that sort of thing. to really blast the product. As well as a variety of actually real world products that we put in unconventional settings just to be sure that there’s not any situation that we can find where our products are close to having this (buzz) problem.”
Q: Are you doing any sort of noise cancellation of the “buzz” through waveform or spectral analysis?
A: We explored that approach, but we found that we were better off taking a more strongly defensive approach at the beginning to make sure it doesn’t get turned into electricity. So that’s a combination of shielding, signal isolation, EMI filters along signal lines and some of this is even integrated into the microphone that we use, so the RF never gets a chance.
Q: So is this technology going to be rolled out into all of Polycom’s products?
A: We’re going to be rolling this into pretty much all of our upcoming products. All of our IP phone products, all of our circuit-switched products.
Q: Does this add a lot of cost?
A: It does add a little bit to our manufacturing but it doesn’t affect the customer.
On February 5th, Polycom will announced that its analog SoundStation and VoiceStation conference phones now incorporate their advanced radio frequency (RF) shielding technology. This new benefit, will be built into the latest versions of Polycom’s triangular conference phones offering buzz-free conferencing.
As of February 5th, all of Polycom’s analog conference phones will be shipping with this new RF shielding technology, with no changes in price or part numbers. This includes the SoundStation2, SoundStation2W, SoundStation VTX 1000, VoiceStation 300 and 500 product lines. I'm told their VoIP line of conference phones and desktop phones will also incorporate the technology. To learn more about Polycom’s SoundStation and VoiceStation conference phones utilizing RF shielding technology, check out www.nomorebuzz.com/news
android apple asterisk at&t blackberry cell phone cisco dell digium e911 facebook fcc google google talk gps im ip-pbx ipad iphone ipod itexpo ITEXPO lync microsoft mobile phone open source outage phone review sip skype sony unified communications verizon video video conferencing voip vonage wireless xbox 360
- Apple (280)
- Bittorrent (2)
- Call Center and CRM (48)
- Computer Hardware (183)
- Computer Software (71)
- Gadgets (650)
- Google (225)
- Home Entertainment (263)
- Internet (173)
- Linux (111)
- Microsoft (376)
- MovableType (48)
- News (187)
- Personal and Humor (118)
- Politics (9)
- Reviews (246)
- Security (2)
- Social Networking (42)
- Sports/Outdoor Technology (9)
- Tablets (32)
- Technology and Science (355)
- Unified Communications (471)
- VoIP (2285)
- Wireless (584)
- p2p (20)
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- January 2006
- December 2005
- November 2005
- October 2005
- September 2005
- August 2005
- July 2005
- June 2005
- May 2005
- April 2005
- March 2005
- February 2005
- January 2005
- December 2004
- November 2004
- October 2004
- September 2004
- August 2004
- July 2004
- June 2004
- May 2004
- April 2004
- March 2004
Featured Videos