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When a little free time opened up last week, I scanned my long-term task list to find “VoIP softphone for my iPad” was still unfinished business. By VoIP, I really mean SIP or Session Initiation Protocol, which is the open-source … Continue reading →

OnSIP, the virtual PBX service that we use, has a web page that allows you to test your VoIP connection. It simulates a voice conservation to OnSIP’s remotes, measuring packet loss and jitter or variation in transit times. My performance … Continue reading →

My curiosity got the better of me.  While I’m completely content to use turn-key cloud telephony–OnSIP, in my case—the lure of DIY telecom is sometimes too enticing to resist. This led me to SIPfoundry’s sipXecs, an open-source PBX that many … Continue reading →

As has been reported everywhere, last week Gizmo5 users learned that Google will soon be hanging up on this open-source softphone.  Acquired by Google in 2009, the SIP-based Gizmo5 service will do its last “INVITE” in early April. Now some … Continue reading →

OnSIP, the cloud-based PBX startup, has reviewed the native SIP capabilities of Gingerbread (Android 2.3). Within the fine print of Google’s Gingerbread announcement last month was a reference to Internet calling using an onboard SIP stack. So the crew at … Continue reading →

One of my very modest goals in finding an inexpensive, usable Android tablet is replacing my cell phone with an open source SIP client. I spend enough of my time near WiFi hotspots that an Android gadget could do double-duty … Continue reading →

Junction Networks is a hosted PBX app provider that lets startups and small businesses pull a VoIP phone systems out of thin air or, more accurately, out of the cloud.  The company was founded in 2004, and open standards were … Continue reading →

In my evolving unified communications projects, I've been searching for a way to switch between voice and text. My current two Tropo apps (the headline reader and the Gov 2.0 bill browser) are voice-centric, but at times I would like to eliminate the text-to-speech part and just send the text. This should be possible with SIP, which underlies the unified communications platforms I've been accessing with my X-Lite softphone. So called "multi-modal" communications, in which device capabilities (plain cell phone, smartphone with keyboard, smartphone with video,etc.) and presence ( in meeting, on the road, in the quiet car) are acknowledged in routing and rendering decisions, is one of the important advances of this session technology. Continue reading →

I have been writing lately about my experiences setting up several unified communications applications, most recently one involving an open government project with hosted service provider Tropo. The projects were cell-phone centric, and assumed I would be issuing commands into … Continue reading →