More recently, Cisco and others have started using XML interfaces in their phones, paving the way for third-party applications to be rendered on a variety of screen sizes and shapes. And, development platforms are gaining popularity; for instance, Design Studio, which is part of the Citrix Application Gateway, is useful in simplifying application development and enhancing an organization's phone investment. LiteScape Technologies makes a middleware platform for building applications on Avaya and Cisco phones. IPcelerate's IPsession suite provides as many as 30 capabilities for Cisco phones, including presence, call blocking, intercom and paging.
Presence is particularly vital in those instances when individuals must see the availably of others on the network. It's a common requirement across most environments, but has special importance in areas where shared PCs are not available, such as a nurse's station, emergency transport or security checkpoints. Anywhere staff may need to communicate over a large area, high-end phones are a valuable asset.
Tale of Two Codecs
While flashy features and bigger screens may capture attention, phones are all about voice, so it stands to reason that audio is a huge factor—much like paying for a Bang and Olufsen instead of buying a Panasonic, you expect quality on all levels.
Problem is, all IP phones are still striving for improvement in audio.
The standard codec for VoIP is G.711, also known as PCM (Pulse Code Modulation). It was developed when the PSTN was digitized in the 1970s. G.711 samples frequencies in speech from 300 Hz to 3,400 Hz, which was considered the range for normal human speech. As a result, subtleties in speech above or below that frequency range are lost during encoding. A simple example is telling the difference between an "f" and an "s." How many times have you been through the "F as in Frank, S as in Sam" drill when dictating individual letters over the phone?
Some dialects, languages and accents make heavier use of the higher and/or lower frequencies, and the inability to discern the nuances can make it difficult to communicate at times, especially in an increasingly global environment that links people with different backgrounds. We automatically compensate for these technical limitations by taking into account the context of the sounds in words and sentences, but this puts a strain on the listening process and can lead to miscommunications.
The answer to the problem is G.722, also known as wideband.
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