Small Business VoIP

In a move designed to bolster VoIP quality, an open source telephony platform reportedly is now supporting a Web-based development group’s low-delay audio codec.

 

Officials at FreeSWITCH say their platform supports Xiph.Org’s so-called “Constrained Energy Lapped Transform,” or “CELT” codec, a technology used for low-delay speech and audio communication.

 

According to Anthony Minessale II of FreeSWITCH, the implementation of the CELT codec allows any other device that can use CELT to send ultra-high-definition audio in a very small package.

 

“The bandwidth rate of 48kps in the FreeSWITCH implementation is actually less data per stream than the audio format that traditional telephones use,” Minessale said.

 

It’s also higher than CD quality, the company says – a feature that could bring even more businesses and consumers to VoIP communications.

 

As TMCnet has reported, some experts say that VoIP forms the basis for all Unified Communications (News - Alert), so that ensuring a high quality of Internet telephony is critical.

 

Though the market hype is around unified communications, it’s most important to get IP telephony right first, “before they would ever consider moving toward a unified messaging environment,” Joe Frost, vice president of marketing for Psytechnics told TMCnet in an interview.

 

FreeSWITCH’s announcement comes on the heels of other major news from the open source group, that it supports the Polycom Inc. Siren codec allowing VoIP at 32khz.

 

As TMCnet reported, Polycom (News - Alert), an Andover, Massachusetts-based leader in telepresence, video and voice communications, recently announced that two of its IP phones, both interoperable with SIP-based IP-PBX (News - Alert) and Softswitch platforms, now are being sold by Alteva, a Philadelphia-based provider of hosted VoIP solutions.

 

Tim Yankey, director of product marketing for Polycom’s desktop and conferencing solutions, told TMCnet during an interview that resellers want to ensure not only that their solutions are fully interoperable, but also that a select feature set is guaranteed to work on their phones and that if any problems arise, the phones will be supported.

 

“Polycom and its partners bring to market high-quality handsets that are feature-rich and fully interoperable with the leading hosted and premises-based SIP VoIP platforms,” Yankey said. “Resellers deploying these solutions can sell to their customers with confidence in the products and solution as a whole.”

 

For Minessale of FreeSWITCH, higher frequencies allow more detail in the audio making things such as music and voice sound more rich and true to its original sound.

 

“This offers a new frontier for telephony,” Minessale said. “The world has grown used to the low quality of the PSTN but many would happily exchange it for crystal clear call-quality to go with this new high-definition age.”