OhVoice - Broadband Telephone and VoIP Solutions

The New York Times took a look at the current lineup of VoIP handsets on the market.

These new, familiar-looking VoIP phones are being cranked out to make VoIP services appealing to people who are less than tech whizzes, and to give manufacturers a chance to sell yet another handset for your home. “Anything that makes these services feel more like the phone services that people have 100 years of experience using is to their advantage,” said Joe Laszlo, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research.

There are essentially two types of VoIP consumer services: Skype, which has a proprietary technological standard, and most everything else, using a common version of a standard called SIP. While either can make calls over the Internet, Skype-certified phones won’t necessarily work on other services, like Vonage, and vice versa. You may have to read some fine print to find out, or just buy a phone certified for the service you choose.

Today I redesigned OhVoice to take the focus off of this blog and put it on the breadth of VoIP coverage online. The home page now aggregates RSS feeds from top VoIP bloggers. We’ll also soon be adding a page that aggregates the latest news releases from VoIP service providers. I felt this would prove to be a nice resource for anyone interested in the latest VoIP developments.

If you have any ideas for feeds I should include, please let me know.

Skype has released video calling for Mac users. The software can be downloaded here.

Sam Houston State University is dropping Cisco’s VoIP platform in favor of open-source Asterisk.

SHSU is in the process of moving its 6,000 students, faculty and staff off of Cisco CallManager IP PBXs and a legacy Nortel Meridian PBX over to Linux servers running Asterisk, which includes call processing, voicemail and PSTN gateway functionality. The driver for this project was cost, says Aaron Daniel, senior voice analyst at Sam Houston State University.

“We thought that it will be more cost effective in the long run to go with an open source solution, because of the massive amounts of licensing fees required to keep the Cisco CallManager network up and running,” says Daniel, who this week gave a presentation on his migration project at the VON show in Boston. In the Cisco model, each phone attached to the CallManager required a separate annual licensing fee to operate, Daniel says. In SHSU’s Asterisk/Cisco model, where it will keep its existing Cisco phones but attach them to Asterisk servers on the back end, the phone licensing costs are eliminated.

Sam Houston State University is dropping Cisco’s VoIP platform in favor of open-source Asterisk.

SHSU is in the process of moving its 6,000 students, faculty and staff off of Cisco CallManager IP PBXs and a legacy Nortel Meridian PBX over to Linux servers running Asterisk, which includes call processing, voicemail and PSTN gateway functionality. The driver for this project was cost, says Aaron Daniel, senior voice analyst at Sam Houston State University.

“We thought that it will be more cost effective in the long run to go with an open source solution, because of the massive amounts of licensing fees required to keep the Cisco CallManager network up and running,” says Daniel, who this week gave a presentation on his migration project at the VON show in Boston. In the Cisco model, each phone attached to the CallManager required a separate annual licensing fee to operate, Daniel says. In SHSU’s Asterisk/Cisco model, where it will keep its existing Cisco phones but attach them to Asterisk servers on the back end, the phone licensing costs are eliminated.

A number of companies plan to launch new products at VON this week.

One of the first hands-on reviews of the Mylo is now available at Laptop Magazine. They give it 3 1/2 out of 5 possible stars in their rating system. They were impressed by Mylo’s chic design, screen resolution, screen navigation, video playback and the quality of Skype calls. They were, however, concerned over the unit’s cramped keyboard, difficulty in displaying photo-heavy web pages and price.

We were blown away by the Skype experience on the mylo. Voices were clear and crisp with only a hint of occasional lag. The earphones’ integrated microphone makes it simple to call someone without purchasing additional accessories. You can’t plug your own headphones into the mylo directly, but Sony includes an adapter for this purpose. When you’re at home or in another quiet location, you’ll be glad to know that the built-in speakers deliver surprisingly good audio quality. Too bad these speakers don’t work when you’re using Skype.

Sony’s Mylo converence device should go on sale this Month. The handheld connects to 802.11b wireless networks and allows for web surfing, e-mail, instant messaging and Skype calls. Sony’s learning center now has video that shows the device in operation. When you get to the site, click on the “How To Guide” for some demonstrations of the Mylo in action.

Update: Engadget got its hands on a prototype model and posts many pictures of the device.

Skype for Windows 2.6 Beta is in public beta. New in the beta are:

• A new “Live” tab to get directly to Skypecasts.
• Plugins for making calls from within browsers
• Clickable links in mood messages
• Birthday notifications for your Skype friends

One of the nicest features on Hullo is the ability to transfer a call between phones. This allows you to establish a call on your home or office phone and then transfer it to your cell phone if you need to hit the road. Of course, you can use this feature to hand off a call to any phone.

The transfer when I tested it was seemless. I tested this by transferring from my home to my cell phone. While my cell phone was ringing the connection was maintained on my home phone. As soon as I answered my cell the call moved there. I’m not sure the party on the other end could even tell this was happening.

Because of the problems I’m having connecting at the office, it would be nice if Hullo could be run through the browser. The landline-to-landline calls I’m making don’t require the SIP application that’s installed on my PC. That would only be necessary for PC-to-PC or PC-to-landline calls. The landline-to-landline calls could easily be handled on Hullo’s servers.