First HD Conference In Asterisk!

Today Russell Bryant and I had the first public HD conference using Asterisk! There had been other testing done by Malcolm Davenport and David Vossel (who is the developer working on this integration) internally, but this was the first public HD enabled conference using Asterisk (as far as I’m aware).

It worked really well! People were able to join in, and those who were calling in via G722 were able to hear each other in wideband, while the other people in the conference who were using narrowband codecs like GSM and ulaw didn’t hear any difference in the audio from the participants. It’s very cool that just because someone joins in a narrowband codec that it doesn’t bring the quality of the audio down for all participants. Very nice!

This is a feature that is slated to be in Asterisk 1.10, and it’s comforting to know just how well this works already. You can check out the team branch where David Vossel is working at http://svn.asterisk.org/svn/asterisk/team/dvossel/fixtheworld_phase2

Enjoy!

New headset thanks to e4voip.com!

Just got my new Plantronics headset from http://www.e4voip.com (or rather, the hardware store at http://www.8774e4voip.com/) and am extremely satisfied with the service. We had an issue with Purolator not wanting to deliver to the building and then not bothering to call me to let me know the address was incorrect. By the time I noticed and got the address corrected, they just decided to send back the package.

So after letting the guys at e4VoIP know what happened, they just drop shipped a headset via FedEx overnight and I had it by lunch the next day! Amazing service and great prices. I’m in Canada, so I know how much of a pain in the ass shipping across the border is, and usually there is a bunch of duty fees across the border, but this time around the headset didn’t cost me a thing.

I plan on getting a G.722 capable phone next because now that I have this headset attached to my Polycom, I’m kind of looking forward to high quality calls during the weekly VoIP Users Conference call! (http://www.vuc.me)