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www.voip-news.comBy Robert Poe
It was clear from the start that WYDE Voice LLC's new audio-conferencing bridges were innovative. A week after their introduction, the devices won a Best in Show award at the Spring 2008 VON.x Conference and Expo, thanks in part to the superior voice quality they offered compared to conventional bridges. What wasn't immediately clear was how the products, which handle from 500 to 7,000 callers, would best benefit end users, especially SMBs (small- to medium-sized businesses). That would have to wait until potential buyers figured out how best to use the new products.
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The Asterisk-based VM1000 and VM3000 "conferencing appliances" handle both PSTN- (public switched telephone network) and VoIP-based calls, and they cost between $140 and $160 per port. A key sales point is that the products sample VoIP conversations in 16-bit slices at 16 KHz, compared to the 8 bits and 8 KHz of standard PSTN telephony. That means that the WYDE Voice products can vastly improve the voice quality of VoIP conference calls.
"We want to allow VoIP to differentiate itself over the PSTN on pure quality," said WYDE Voice CEO David Erickson. "With this quality, you can feel the shape of a room where someone is talking." And because the bridges use a Global IP Solutions' iSAC codec that requires as little as 32 Kbps to transmit the voice stream, compared to 64 Kbps for traditional telephony, transmission costs can also be lower, Erickson added.
The most obvious buyers for such equipment are Web-conferencing providers. Such companies typically combine voice conferencing with other Web-based functions, such as the ability to display slides and share whiteboards. These businesses could easily find the improved voice quality attractive, along with the ease the bridges offer in integrating VoIP and PSTN calls in the same conference. Erickson said that WYDE Voice will announce a large deployment in such a company in 30 to 60 days.
The new products could also be useful to Internet-based VoIP providers, according to Wyde Voice vice president of sales Michael Eastman. Such operators typically offer individual users and small businesses the ability to hold conference calls for a limited numbers of participants. The bridges could let these VoIP providers dramatically boost their conferencing capacity, and thus better serve SMBs.
Overall, any provider that produces its own softphones for VoIP calls is a potential buyer of the bridges, Eastman said. Distance learning is also a particularly promising application, he added, noting that such services could integrate high-quality VoIP conferencing directly into their online teaching applications.
Yet more interesting possibilities grow out of applications like social networks. Clear-sounding, high-volume Web-based voice conferencing could prove a winner for such services, especially if they can make money from it. A recent announcement involving VoodooVox could help that happen. VoodooVox provides a service that inserts ads at appropriate moments, such as hold times during phone calls. WYDE Voice includes a VoodooVox plug-in with its bridges so that providers can easily make use of the service. More generally, the VoodooVox arrangement could lead to a new VoIP business model built around free, ad-supported conference calls with superior sound quality, Eastman noted.
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