My main motivation for writing about wideband telephony is that I truly believe it is a game changer. I’ve experienced it myself and while it’s not always perfect it’s still much much better than a normal telephone call! The benefits and practical uses both in personal and business senses are plentiful but the ones that stand out immediately are that less concentration is required listening to the other party, and female voices sound much more richer and natural (at least, to me). I will write in further detail in future postings about the benefits and practical uses but first I want to start with an introduction to wideband and how the PSTN is dead, baby.

You’ve been using the ringy dingy for a long time, baby! Even before you started talking, it’s almost certain your ma or pa got you on the phone to ‘talk’ to a relative or friend. Since then, you’ve been using the same device – the telephone. They come in all sorts of colours and form factors, and some are even mobile or cordless, but they all essentially consist of a headset and a dialpad (or maybe even a rotary dialler when you were young!) and were your gateway to the world.

The problem you probably never really knew you had? It probably never actually crossed your mind how bad the person on the other end of the phone sounds. If you actually sit back and think about it, the comparison is astounding. Fifty years ago, scratchy LP vinyl recordings of music were commonplace. At the same time, the boffins at Bell Labs put together the rulebook which dictate how phones turn people’s voices into 1’s and 0’s to be sent across their new digital phone networks. These rules seemed like a good idea; marginally improve the sound quality of the carrier phone network that was the norm at the time and keep the last bit of the link between your house or business and the exchange analogue.

But that was 50 years or so ago. Using the same metaphor as above, LPs have gone the way of the dodo. So has the cassette, the portable walkman, CDs and minidisc! AM radio is only used by boring taxi drivers and sports nerds and FM radio is about to be replaced with “digital radio. Dare me to start on TV? That’s gone from a fuzzy black and white  image to glorious technicolor and up to digital TV with hi-definition plasmas. Betamax and VHS and DVDs have all succumbed to Bluray. Yet your phone still has the same scratchy, fuzzy sound it always has!!

Why you should throw your phone away: The reason why your phone sounds crappy over the phone is because of that 50 year old phone network, which I’m going to refer to as the PSTN (standing for Public Switched Telephone Network) from now on. This is the important bit: As you talk, your voicebox and mouth generate sounds as low as 30 and right up to 18,000 Hz. Although the lower frequencies are where most of the speech energy and voice richness is concentrated, much of the intelligibility of human speech occurs in the higher frequencies. When the Bell boffins originally designed the phone network, they determined that a listener did not need to hear all the frequencies that make up the human voice to determine the words being spoken, so determined that the phone network only needed to carry signals from 300Hz to 3400Hz. So, have you ever said ‘fifteen’ over the phone and had the person on the other end ask if you said ‘fifty’? It’s because those harmonics above 3.4Khz aren’t picked up and sent through the phone network.  It’s also why words like “fifth” and “sift” sound very similar to each other over the phone.

How does Wideband fix this? Well, here’s another name for the PSTN: Narrowband. The names come from the ‘band’ of sound that can get sent across the medium.  With the PSTN, it’s 300-3400Hz. With wideband, depending on the flavour, you’re looking at glorious technicolor – anything from 150Hz to 7100Hz right up to 14000Hz!!!

How VoIP is a real game-changer: The dawn of ubiquitous broadband internet access everywhere you go and the increased power of computers has given rise to “VoIP”. You might have heard of this and there are many different flavours of it. If you plug headphones into your computer, you can use a whole myriad of software to communicate for free or otherwise; either to people using normal telephones or their computers. A good example is Skype, which can call both. Many businesses these days have “IP Phones” or “VoIP Phones”, which are fantastic and offer many benefits over standard PBX systems. These IP Phones are really miniature computers themselves with dedicated headsets. Whatever the computer, it’s got the potential to bypass that pesky PSTN – which is what we need in order to free ourselves from this scratchy, squawky existance of the telephone we’ve grown up to love and hate.

More to come soon!

Back in the mid-nineties I had an Ericsson GH688. As with most Ericssons at the time there were two unique things that I really loved about it..

• The “heartbeat” LED at the top that flashed every few seconds
• The “tri-tone” ringtone that was really common at the time because it was the default ringtone on most Ericsson models.

Anyhows, I got bored with the iPhone “ad” ringtone (from the original iPhone ads that made its way into Garageband and then somebody converted it to an m4r file).  So I made my iPhone sound like the little guy to the right. You can too! Just download the file below, double click and load it into iTunes, then sync. Yay!

Ericsson Ringtone

(nb: you may have to shift/cmd click this file to save to disk)

So what’s so great about this vege soup anyway?? Well, it’s hearty and full of lots of nutritious stuff to help you keep healthy through winter. It’s cheap to make, easy to make, and fun too. Best of all it tastes pretty good (especially with fresh, buttered crusty bread) and you can throw all the leftovers in containers and put them in the fridge or freezer just fine!

OK, let’s get started. First hard and fast rule; there IS NO hard and fast rules!  This is kind of like ‘real’ Indian cooking – you can substitute, you can be adventurous! We make this soup different everytime.  No matter what it always seems to taste the same, and if there’s something you don’t like, that’s fine just don’t put it in the pot!

What you will need:

• Hardware: The biggest pot in your kitchen!  A ladle, chopping board, potato peeler, and a good, sharp knife. And a strainer.

And ingredients…go with a couple of everything you plan on throwing in. Aim to fill the big pot because it evaporates down a little. Dont worry if you need to add more of something later!

• These items are mandatory. No excuses. A couple of bacon bones.  You find bacon bones at the deli at Coles or Safeway. I think they only exist for the sole reason of making soup.  I also recommend some chicken or vegetable stock. Really doesn’t matter which. You will also need some soup mix. This is made out of stuff like barley, lentils and split peas. I actually have a stash of each of these items in the cupboard for some reason so whittle that away each time I make soup by throwing a really small handful from each of the 4-5 little containers into the pot. This stuff is great because it helps thicken the soup (less important if you have lots of well cooked starchy vegetables) and is really good for you too.

• Heres some vegetables you should try.  For the most part, chopping up or cubing is the order of the day. Don’t go for presentation points. In fact, Gordon Ramsey would have a hernia if he saw this stuff because it looks like watered down cat vomit. But tastes, oh so much better! Carrots, celery, potatoes, pumpkin, turnip, parsnip, leeks, onions.

• Other non-essentials you could try for fun: Small pasta elbows, spirals or shells instead of or as well as the soup mix. Maybe some herbs, particularly  parsely, maybe a little garlic. YMMV. Be careful with the herbs/spices. Go with salt and pepper, I say.

• Things to avoid: Things like silverbeet, spinach, capsicum, eggplants, zucchinis, mushrooms etc. Because youre going to be boiling the snot out of this soup you don’t want half the vegetation dissolving.

The method is pretty simple. Throw the bacon bones in the pot and cover with water. Heat on high until boiling and let it boil for a little while. Then add the soup mix, wait a little while longer, and start adding your veges. Hardest ones like turnip and carrot first. Bring the heat down a little bit and let it bubble away. Check on it regularly to stir and make sure there’s plenty of water. As it cooks, taste and add vegetable or chicken stock if required, and/or some salt and pepper.

It should be cooked if it’s been hanging around on the stove for about an hour or so and if you pick up a bacon bone and it starts to come apart in the tongs.  Do some taste tests to see if the veges are cooked and the soup mix barley is soft. Next collect up the bacon bones and put them on a plate to cool for a few minutes.

Grab a knife and fork and use these to pry every little speck of that OH GOD SO DELICIOUS bacon goodness from the bones.  Seperate out the fat and gristle too (if any).  Throw the bacon back in the soup and throw the bones out. Don’t mix this up.

Finally, after a few minutes, use a strainer (a big spoon, with lots of holes in it) to strain off any congealed rendered pig fat from the top of the soup. (YUM!)

If all goes well, it should look like this. Bon apetit!

So here’s how MY attempt came out. First and foremost I slightly modified the recipe.  I suggest you do not make the same mistake.

I used Splenda, partly, instead of the sugar the recipe called for.  This had no noticable effect other than making the cake less sweet. How strange. It should also lessen the girth on my already busting waistline.

I also used extra virgin olive oil instead of whatever filth you are supposed to use in chocolate cakes.  This unfortunately gave the cake a slightly nauseating mediterranean taste. At least my cholestrol won’t go up!

This is how far the cake expanded whilst cooking. Compare the head of this to the one in the original link. Simply pathetic.

This is the finished product.

The verdict? Even though it was slightly less sweet, noticably rubbery and looked like ass compared to the original, I would definitly make it again! This time with more sugar and some other sort of oil. 5 Minute Chocolate Cake FTW!

Good to see that Siemens have been listening to the community and implemented this useful function. The fact that an IP Phone is by its very nature connected to the Internet, and thus checks periodically for newer versions of itself, makes it a no-brainer to upgrade to the latest firmware and take advantage of new features, patches and fixes like this.  I literally had to press one button the other day on the handset to have the base station connect, download and install its firmware.

It’s a far sight from the days when you had to upload firmware binary images to a device over a RS232 link with X-Modem!

More and more appliances around the house are becoming internet connected in this fashion too – almost always because of at least one feature that requires internet connectivity.. But software updates are just as easy on the PS3, too.  What other appliances should be internet connected?  I wish my TV had wifi or an ethernet port so I could remotely program it.

At the enterprise level there are a number of offerings from the likes of Aastra, SNOM and Cisco, but for the typical SOHO/SMB environment this is overkill and $600 for a cordless phone is pretty out there. These phones are fantastic however when you put them in a campus environment with multiple bases that can handle call hand-off and all that magic.

I stumbled across the Siemens Gigaset C470IP a while ago; this is a great consumer-level phone that retails here in Aussie for well under $200.  In fact my friend AlexR at Maxo sells them at the moment for $149 + shipping.  Effectively for that price you get a cordless phone with great sound quality that has an ATA built in and a whole bunch of other features. For example, being able to read RSS newsfeeds on your phone and selecting from up to 6 VOIP providers to route your call; this is great for pennypinchers who want to route international calls to one provider, mobile to a second and local or national calls to a third provider.

You certainly can’t do that with a Uniden and most ATAs, plus you get better sound quality because the digital signal isn’t being converted back to analogue for the cordless phone.   And even better since the Siemens phones have an FXO port in built, if your intertubes are down or you dial Pizza Hut or 000 Emergency (and want Telstra to be able to route the call to the call center in the same city as you!), calls route to the PSTN rather than your more inexpensive VOIP provider.  Finally by having this connection to the PSTN in place, calls from your normal PSTN number arrive and ring the headset(s) just like they would if the cordless phone was plugged straight into the wall! This is of no value of course if you are on cable or a Naked DSL connection, but since Laura’s relatives all have our Telstra line here at home it was much easier to plug a cable in the wall than give everybody a  new number.  Maybe this will change when I finally upgrade to a Naked connection.

For a better review of the C470IP please check out this link where Arkenstone took the time to write a real essay.

I actually went with the “big brother” of the Gigaset C470IP, the S685IP recently when it was time to upgrade from a horrible, horrible cordless phone.  According to this page, the C- series are “value”, the S-series are “full featured” and the SL-series are “full featured and smaller sized”.  The main feature I wanted the 685IP for was actually its Wideband G.722 support, meaning it has hi-fi accoustics in the handset capable of recieving and sending better audio with this more advanced audio codec.   OK so it also looks nicer too.  It also has an integrated answering machine, which really only has the value that calls from the PSTN divert to voicemail on no answer.

Price wise the S685IP was $220 delivered in Australia from an online retailer in the UK. That and a weeks’ wait compared to $170 from Maxotel delivered overnight? I think it was definitly worth the extra $50