Re: [orca-list] Accessible VOIP systems

[Janina Sajka <janina rednote net>]

Michael Whapples writes:
> A slight aside, is SIP audio quality dependent on the SIP provider?  

Not exactly. It's dependent on the codec you employ. My current high
quality favorite codec is CELT.

I would suggest carefully delineating protocols, codecs, clients,
servers, and gateways, and service providers. If you're going to
maintain a page, I would suggest carefully defining these so that you
can then name which are provided by any particular "system," as you used
the term previously. Else, you might confuse things by lumping Skype and
SIP together. Yes, there's an intersection of the two in that they are
both communication protocols, but SIP provides no clients on the one
hand, whereas Skype is also a client which supports SIP in addition to
its own proprietary communications protocol on the other hand.

There's an important web site you should know if you mean to become a
Vo/IP mayven:

http://voipinfo.org

Let me add that I have used only Vo/IP solutions for my telephony needs
for the past three or more years. The only exception to this is my cell
phone. There's plenty accessibility to be had if you're willing to work
with ASCII or XML config files and CLI. I have not found GUI apps to be
satisfactory, for one reason or another. Some examples:

In Clients --

Twinkle: Fully accessible via CLI, but not on the GUI as it's QT based.

Linphone: Fully accessible on the cli, and possibly close on the GUI.
Worth checking into further as it does run with Orca.

I'm currently using linphone with a Sennheiser PC166 USB headset for all
my teleconferences.

In Hardware Clients:

I like Snom: http://snom.com. I have three Snom 320's and a couple Snom
300's. You configure these through their builtin web servers which are
very accessible via Orca and FF (or even Lynx).


In Servers:

Free Switch is the current fa vorite because it supports CELT. Asterisk
is also fully accessible. Note that these can be used as clients as
well.

In gateways and service providers:

I'm currently liking Vitelity, http://vitelity.net. Their web based
management screens are pretty bad from an accessibility point of view,
but this seems generally the case in the Vo/IP industry. I have learned
to deal with them. I buy phone numbers from Vitelity, and I use them as
my gateway to the "Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)." One can,
however, also use Vitelity as a service provider.