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OPUS

Started by Mike38, August 23, 2015, 09:38:01 AM

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Mike38

I have an Obi 110 and just saw an email about OPUS.  Quick question, what is it and does the 110 support it? 

It looks like all it does is make the audio sound better through a better compression ratio.  Sometimes my cable modem will get a t3 and drop a few packets.  Will OPUS help with the audio dropouts?


SteveInWA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format)

The OBi 110, and other hardware analog telephone adapters, support a variety of audio encoder/decoder algorithms (CODECs), to digitize speech, and then play it back in analog.  The original and most commonly-used CODEC for VoIP was G.711 (G.711u and G.711a variants).   These were designed to cover only the narrow-band audio range used by the old POTS telephone network for speech.  They were also "lossless" CODECs, like the old CD-audio format, meaning, they don't discard any bits during digtitization, to compress the data.  By contrast, Opus is a "lossy" CODEC that conserves bandwidth by selectively discarding bits.

Newer, wideband audio codecs are now entering the industry.  Some, like AMR-WB, require patent licensing, whereas the Opus codec is open-source.  The widespread rollout of LTE in the wireless phone industry is now providing enough bandwidth to support wideband telephone audio (often called "HD Voice"), mirroring the advances in fiber-optic-based broadband service. 

So:  manufacturers are now including wideband CODECs in their products.  The catch is, the entire path between the two endpoints needs to support it (both ends need to support the same CODEC, and there needs to be enough bandwidth available).  Today, you can't make a wideband audio call to or from a PSTN telephone number, for example, unless the entire path can handle it over VoIP.  Instead, you'd use a SIP VoIP service, or on two OBis, the OBiTALK network.

Bottom line:  no, your OBi 1xx device doesn't support it and likely never will, and, if you want to buy new hardware to support it, the equipment on the other end needs to support it, too (both your internet telephone service provider, and the other party's telephone hardware).

Extra credit:  Google Hangouts supports wideband audio codecs.   The "big four" wireless carriers are rolling out HD Voice, which uses wideband audio codecs.  For example, two Sprint customers using recent Sprint phones, with a good LTE connection, will be able to have HD Voice calls.  Today, much of this is not interoperable between carriers, but you can look forward to that in the future.