Monthly Archives: June 2014
An Introduction to the Opus Codec
This is my third article on audio codecs. The first two covered the common codecs such as G.711 and G.729, along with the relative newcomers iLBC and Microsoft’s RTAudio. I felt that it was important for people to have a general understanding of the pros and cons of several different codecs. For further reading, please […]
#CollabChat Wrap-up Part Two
Last week I wrote about my “tweet chat” on collaboration. I promised a second part and since I always try and keep my promises, here you go. Please make sure you also read #CollabChat Wrap-up Part One. Allow me to continue on with the remaining questions and my thoughts regarding them. What if you could […]
#CollabChat Wrap-up Part One
On June 12th, I participated in a “Tweet Chat” about collaboration. It was a first for me and I honestly didn’t know what to expect. It turned out nicely, though, and I am happy that I was invited. I learned a lot from the other panelists and all the people that took time to tweet […]
An Introduction to Avaya Collaboration Environment 3.0
I began my career as a software developer long before there were fancy development tools such as Eclipse or Microsoft’s Visual Studio. If I wanted to get clever, I wrote my code in the UNIX visual editor vi, but more often than not, I used whatever text editor was available at the time. Of course, […]
Understanding SIP Responses
SIP is basically a call and response protocol. You send a message. You get a response. In some situations, you may even get several responses for a single message. Case in point is an INVITE transaction. A single INVITE request typically receives three responses and it’s not impossible for it to receive more. However, with […]
WebRTC For Beginners
I have been working in the field of communications for a long time and have witnessed many significant changes over the years. Some ideas, like IP telephony, have revolutionized the industry. Others, like Northern Telecom’s ill-fated ATM PBX, fell flat on their face. WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is one of those ideas that falls into […]
Live and Almost in Person
This Thursday I will be participating in a live “tweet chat” with eight well-known and highly respected experts in the field of unified communications. If you have been paying attention to this industry, you will recognize several of the names on the panel. Personally, I’ve used quotes from Zeus in quite a few of my presentations […]
Understanding SIP Headers
Whenever I get down and dirty with SIP, I can’t help but write about one or more of its various headers. In fact, in a recent article, Understanding SIP Registration, I must have mentioned at least six different headers. While I expect that most discussions involving headers are self-explanatory, there are some aspects that deserve […]
Why I Still Get Excited About Session Border Controllers
I remember my first DVD player. I couldn’t tell you the exact year I bought it, but it must have been sometime in the 1990s. However, I do remember that it cost me around $400 and it wasn’t even the most expensive one on the market. There were quite a few that went for more […]
A Necessary Guide to the Avaya traceSM Utility
Necessity is the mother of invention. Case in point is the Avaya utility, traceSM. As hard as I’ve tried, I have yet to find a halfway decent manual that explains how to use what is perhaps the most important Session Manager debugging tool. I would love to be proved inept in my efforts, but I’ve […]
Tao, Zen, and Tomorrow 