But, what about those people who have bought phones capable of higher audio bandwidth calls? How long are we artificially going to put up with the decades-old POTS 300 to 3.4K limitation? Yes, the OBi is an ATA, but why can't we allow for people plugging HQ/HD phones into them.?
http://www.etsi.org/WebSite/Technologies/DECT.aspx (looks like the spec is good for wideband via DECT, and my new DECT phone certainly has a "HD" option in the config - though I must dig out what it actually does...)
It's a bit like having a HD TV decoder but viewing it via SCART to the TV. Many consider it pointless, but as the owner of an old TV with only one HD input, I can still see a considerable increase in quality via SCART that many would tell me should not be there. The 300-3.4K is the
minimum a phone is supposed to handle, but it doesn't exclude phones doing better than that in reality. After all, the 300-3.4K was caused by the old analogue lines and analogue PBXs en-route, not really the phones on the ends. Why not make the WB CODECs an option in the OBi, at a higher priority than G.711, so that only when both ends are wideband capable will it be used. It's likely that such scenarios will only exist when someone has made sure they have a decent phone plugged in at both ends. You may say that not many callers can assume what the phone on the other end is, but many people are buying these for calling a shortlist of family/friends who may well also be using an ATA like the OBi, or a softphone which does indeed have a wideband CODEC (plus decent set of speakers/headset like a modern laptop). I have an old B&O analogue phone on which I can certainly discern a wideband call from a G.711 one.
Is there a processing overhead on the WB CODECs that would be a limiting factor (i.e. is the processing power of the OBi good enough to process SPEEX or SILK?). How much work is involved in just adding the codec as an option?
Thanks.
