OCS VoIP in a disaster zone

jkruse — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 06:56:22 GMT

Massive storms in Brisbane recently left many people homeless, and in fact it was declared a disaster zone.

One of the people who had their home destroyed in this storm was my mate Bill Lockett from Dimension Data. Our best wishes and thoughts are with him and his family during this time as they rebuild.

Bill’s house lost all power and landline communications, but fortunately Telstra’s NextG network was still online.

Bill was able to use a generator to power his laptop, and with a Polycom CX200 USB handset (which in fact he had to dry out as it was in an inch of water) and Office Communicator 2007 he was still fully able to use his work phone. No special hardware, software, or VPN required. Microsoft’s adaptive RTAudio codec ensured that call quality was excellent, despite the conditions.

Nice one Bill :)

Speech codec in OCS 2007

jkruse — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 22:54:00 GMT

One of the huge improvements we're making in Office Communications Server 2007 is in the area of speech quality and Quality of Experience in VoIP phonecalls.

We have a document available for download with an overview of our RTAudio advanced VoIP codec, which has the ability to dynamically adjust to network conditions such as latency, packet loss, jitter, etc; and because it is a variable-bitrate codec, calls will not drop out if the network is not "perfect". This is a huge change from traditional Enterprise VoIP technologies, which require end-to-end management of the network. Rather than adjusting the network to fit the call, we can adjust the call to fit the network.

So what does this mean? Think better voice quality with less bandwidth, and the ability for remote/mobile users to connect to OCS and make voice/video calls across the Internet and from mobile networks, wireless hotspots, etc.

Download the document from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=5d79b584-79c9-42a8-90c4-4ab3f03d19c4&displaylang=en

Johann's Unified Communications : rtaudio

OCS VoIP in a disaster zone

Speech codec in OCS 2007