The SIP school offers training and certification in SIP and other VoIP technologies. Use VUC discount code VUC10 for 10% off!

As the provider of the global standard in SIP training and certification, The SIP School has taught thousands of employees in the telecommunications industry how to better  support their clients, products, and services. Until recently, students training to become an SIP School  Certified Associate (SSCA®) were instructed in their first session to create a SIP address with any free service. Today, The SIP School announces another option by working with OnSIP as their SIP  service provider – leveraging the OnSIP API to provision each student with a SIP address on thesipschool.com domain.

This is the original press release.

We’ll be joined by Brough Turner to have a discussion on issues of broadband. Mr Turner has had a long history in telecom and network engineering. He’s currently at Netblazr Inc, a company which he founded, and which he describes as “a radically new form of wireless ISP.” You can find a more detailed bio on his blog.

Netblazr was one of the companies highlighted in StartupCamp4 Comms Edition at ITExpo West 2011. We will surely discuss Netblazr and what makes it special.

As the US federal governments “super-committee” just recently wound down the matter of spectrum use, licensing, auctions, etc has been more and more in the public eye. Brough recently posted a very interesting perspective on spectrum concerns called, “Valuing the white spaces above 3 GHz.”

All of this should make Friday’s VUC call very interesting indeed.

Allison is back with the latest news of her activities in the world of voice-over and voice prompts. If you’re not familiar with the name Allison Smith, I’ll tell you when I first heard it: on Free World Dialup circa 2003, yes, nearly 9 years ago!

If you’re lucky enough to be coming to Astricon this year, you’ll certainly have a chance to meet Allison, one of the nicest people I’ve met anywhere.

The death of WebOS hasn’t been greatly exaggerated, apparently. Some very interesting discussion comes out of this topic and some Google-Motorola trash talk as well. Batteries not included, but the usual endless conjecturing is.

Dan York brings some info from SpeechTEC. The mobile use of speech recognition is a specific focus we talk about. Also, the problem of the cloud and national data compliance, as in Europe, where data is not supposed to cross borders.

Lazboy and a few others give us a rundown about ClueCon.

Talk about Chrome Beta Audio without Flash or Java.

MRCP

We’re also using Google Plus to post threads you can comment on live. This leaves a nice permanent record.

Andy Abramson, Dan York, David Frankel, Jim O’Brien (Counterpath Director NCG Customer Engineering), Kelly Fitzsimmons, Karl Fife and more on day two of eComm 2011 in San Francisco.

With SMSified, you can build nearly any SMS application you can imagine. Auto respond to inbound messages, send interactive outbound notifications, drive sales with promotional offers, enable two-way customer self-service applications and much more. Chris Matthieu and Dan York join to chat about how SMSified works and what it can do for you.

Lots of great examples here on the SMSified Blog.

In hour #1 of a double-header this week we will be joined by Khris Kendrick, Senior Director of Business Development at Grandstream Networks. Many of you probably have experience with Grandstream’s well-established range of SIP hard phones and ATAs.

While Grandstream is long known as a market leader in affordable SIP end-points, they have stepped into new areas of business including video capable phones and IP surveillance cameras.

VUC regulars Michael Graves and Karl Fife have recently been using their latest video desk phone, the GXV3175. A very interesting desk phone with a 7″ touch-screen LCD display, the GXV3175 offers a diverse range of multi-media capabilities. Additionally, VUC sponsor OnSIP recently published a review of the GXV3175.

This is just one of the topics that will surely be discussed. Bring your breakfast, lunch or dinner & bring your questions.

By the way, Grandstream is running a contest to give away a GXV3140 phone and GXV3615 IP Cube Cam. Just drop by their Facebook page and like it to enter.

Some related links:

• Grandstream IP Multimedia Phone Channel on VoIP/Telecom Industry Leading publisher of Internet Telephony TMC
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/GrandstreamNet
• Facebook: facebook.com/GrandstreamNetworksInc
• Website: www.grandstream.com
• Onsip Review of GXV3175
• Onsip review GXP2100
• CRNs 11 Key Videoconference/UC Solutions

Chris Matthieu on Tropo.com, great added comments by Tim Panton. Michael Graves, just back from NAB with a few notes. Karl Fife on WebOS (just kidding!)

Bad Wifi at the trade show, new Siemens Gigaset handsets and more DECT comments. Profiles on mobile devices, sharing books on Kindle, Nook, Android, iOS, etc.

IRC Transcript and, here are the index labels we spoke of, generated by Audacity (and me). The first column is seconds in to the recording after removing silences.

106    News of the World phone hackers
875     Foreign SIM cards, USA phone booths
1273    Is toll-free still relevant?
1581    Skype v5, and new linux version
1641    Security: Telepacific outage
1745   Security: attacked? Who you gonna call?
2250   Epsilon email db breach
2381    Comodo breach, bad DSL, bad
2631    Linphone, new versions including OS X and Windows
2775   g711, not that bad!
2887  iPhone SIP apps
3346   Lync USB phone
3957   Visio TV checking file system?
4964  Anyone using Google Talk VUC gateway?
5109    Index or transcript of VUC sessions
5442   IRC transcript of VUC

This month, many exclusive news items have been obtained by the VUC and we will be sharing these scoops with you this Friday.
photo: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Lots more discussion, 2 hours of it on various topics, continuing the chat about various platforms. Tablets, more Android, more on lag and latency (just guessing here, I went to dinner).

Karl give us the skinny on his new Palm Pre 2 phone and runs through the features of WebOS. They do sound great, but is there a futre? Will developers get on board or is this another OS/2?

Thanks to @sollostech for bringing Bufferbloat to our attention!

Much more background is here: http://www.bufferbloat.net

What is Bufferbloat? From Jim Gettys’ explanation:

Bufferbloat is existence of excessively large (bloated) buffers into systems, particularly network communication systems.

Who is Jim Gettys? In his own words:

“As a quick synopsis, Bob Scheifler and I started the X Window System; I was the editor of the HTTP/1.1 proposed and draft standards, co-founder of handhelds.org and the revised X.org, and helped out on freedesktop.org.  I also worried a lot about the software for the OLPC XO-1. And a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I used to astronomy.”

More details on Jim Gettys and his many projects and challenges on Wikipedia. We’re very pleased to have Jim as a guest and I know we’re anxious to hear more about Bufferbloat!

Dave Täht, who will also be joining us, has been involved in Linux and VOIP since 1993 and wireless networking since 1996. In addition to early work on asterisk and the
sofia sip stack, he worked on several early embedded asterisk devices. In 2006 he “retired” to Nicaragua where he worked on the OLPC, IP04, and mesh potato, in addition to surfing a lot.

After observing the (sad) state of the wireless networks and the internet itself, there, he :assumed: that the core problem was wireless
spectrum and started developing the wisp6 5.8 ghz wireless mesh network.

He was in the middle of the first test deployment this past spring and got beaten by both the arrival of the Survivor TV show… and bufferbloat (not realized until December of this year) , which forced him to return to the US. Upon arrival… He slowly realized that the
problems he’d had in Central America were also appearing in the US.

It wasn’t until December that he got a handle on it with Jim Getty’s series of postings on bufferbloat.

He is now spending all his spare time working on beating bufferbloat.

Randal L. Schwartz, [@merlyn] a name to conjure with…

Some of us met Randal at Astricon 2009 and he’s been a part of VUC whenever he’s had the time. Randal’s an author, a narrator, a programmer and a fun guy to hang with. Somewhere in the call about lag, packet loss and latency, we took advantage of Randal’s visit to catch up with what he’s been up to. One of his recent activities was doing some narration work for StarShipSofa, an award-winning Sci-Fi (oh, sorry, “speculative fiction”?) podcast. Randal has written and co-written several books on Perl: Randal Schwartz’s Perls of Wisdom
, Learning Perl (4th Edition) Covers Perl 5.8, Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules.

Randal is also well-known as co-host on FLOSS Weekly the great open-source show, part of Leo Laporte’s TWIT Empire and for his long career in Karaoke.

iNum stands for international Number and is an initiative managed by Voxbone to develop an area code for IP Communications within the +883 global country code created by the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) started in 2008.  This will be an update to the earlier visit to the VUC made by iNum team members in January 2009.  Hugh Goldstein, Director of iNum Business Development will share current information and plans for 2011 and how VoIP users can leverage and support the iNum initiative in their own businesses and as individuals. Note that iNum supports voice, SMS and advanced multi-media services

Here’s Voxbone’s list of carriers who support iNum. (We notice that Orange Switzerland is not on the list, but we know that they can route iNum calls. They do this as surcharged numbers.)

VUC Holiday Special Edition

Today, our sponsor e4 Strategies is giving away two  HD-capable Gigaset DE380 IP R VoIP phones (shipment to North America only)

Polycom Productivity Suite licenses. We’ll be giving these away each week for the next few weeks. The suite adds the following features to your USB-equipped Polycom IP phone:

Corporate Directory Access
Local Call Recording
Visual Conference Management
Voice Quality Monitoring

From Voxeo Labs and Tropo

and boy, are my arms tired! But wait! It gets better!

Part 2 may be an acquired taste, but some people really like to listen to these, so here it is.

My advice? Be there. Join us every Friday at 12 Noon Eastern Times, standard or daylight, which ever is in force that day. There is a permatime link to know when the next session is in your very own time zone.

On the vuc.me web page during the live conference there is a link to the new experimental streaming URL and a widget that allows you to call VUC from a browser. We’re in IRC channel #vuc on Freenode.net.

If you’re reading this (and I know you are!) make a note to call sip:200901@login.zipdx.com or skype:vuc.me next week. Why? Because we don’t record the last 5 hours of the VUC. We might be talking about you.

VUC is an international group that meets every Friday at 12 Noon Eastern Time. We discuss technology and often VoIP, telephony, the Internet, web sites and hosting, networks and networking. VUC is @voipusers on Twitter. This week, no specific guest product or service made the discussion wide-ranging, with participants from Hong Kong, Algeria, France, Switzerland, Austria, Holland, Spain, Barbados and even the USA. A few of the subjects covered this week:

Cisco umi, is this worth following? Is the concept of video conference on your TV even something there’s an audience for? Do many people have the needed bandwidth for 720p or 1080p?

Counterpath launches a beta trial for there Bria Android app.

Who still have landlines? Why?

TV standards like PAL, NTSC, Secam…

David Duffet on the Ringer Rodeo at Astricon.

AG Projects’ Blink was bridging the ZipDX wideband conference bridge and Talkshoe for 3.5 hours without a single glitch.

Join us every Friday! If you have a product or service you think would be of interest, please reach out to us for a guest spot using the contact form or by grabbing @VoipUsers on Twitter. Join our mailing list or read it on the web as a Google group.

On September 16th, 201, an Internet outage that had wide-ranging effects of disruption happened and Karl Fife wants to know who to punish! Interesting thoughts and observations. John Todd educated us on DNS resolvers and such. Very good if geeky discussion, our warmup to an exceptional late night (for me) session with David Rowe.

We talk about several topics in part 2 including Skype, USB connections for VoIP, new devices like the Gigaset One, a cellphone gateway. Lots of talk about NAT with Asterisk and SIP. The usual chatter from friends around the table in our weekly “club”.

Among the participants Tim @steely_glint, Neil from IdeaSIP, Karl @karlfife, Michael @mjgraves and Graves on SoHo VoIP, David Frankel from ZipDX who furnish our great wideband conference facilities, Dave @DaveMichels from Pin Drop Soup, Pascal from Media5.

Welcome to a very old friend of mine, Bob from Future Video. The VUC encourages new people to be a part of our weekly talks. Please join us so you can chime in, ask questions and generally have a great time.

[audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-330735.mp3|titles=Part 2 March 5 2010]

Tim Panton reports in via satellite from Nuie where they were installing an open mobile phone system.
Voipathon plans world domination with a 24 hour live Internet conference.
Randal L. Schwartz chats with us about language choices, perl, python, FORTH, PHP, Squeak Smalltalk.
“Violent” arguments about port knocking and how to protect SSH by using less obvious ports, etc.

[audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-328189.mp3]

Karl Fife struts his Jabra stuff. The group talked about cordless headsets, wideband and performance of same.

From the thread of the same name on the asterisk-users mailing list, why is the Morse code channel still included in Asterisk, is Morse ever used? List to this riveting discussion to learn about the rivets that hold these things together.

On VUC session of Friday, July 10th we were able to give away one of the new A580IP phones from Gigaset. Congratulations to conference regular Karl Fife of “The Karl Experience” for winning the phone. We know he’ll put it to good use by calling in to the conference each week!

The contest consisted of finding the movie whose soundtrack featured the VoIP-appropriate song “Calling You”. Karl was first to type  “Bagdad Cafe” in our IRC channel #voip-users-conference on Freenode.net. The song is a beautiful, haunting piece of music and I would like to use an excerpt from time to time in our opening or closing theme.

Thanks again to Tony Stankus, Product Manager of Emerging Technologies Gigaset Communications USA, LLC for providing this phone as a prize and for being a great guest. I am counting on Tony to come back and tell us when the phone features evolve, which they do from time to time.

Early on, we spoke about the lack of a mute button on the S675IP, and lo and behold, they added one to firmware, which is easy to update. The phone shows a message when new firmware is ready, and asks if you want to update. See the original post for more articles on these phones.