Panoramisk / The VoIP druid 

The Counterpath new release of the X-lite softphone¹ is now supporting the Speex codec. This one is a high definition codec, that is mainly called HD and promises an enhanced quality than G.711 standard PCM that we have on standard telephony. The main reason why is the encoding combined to a sampling performed on a wider frequency band (up to 32 kHz versus 8 kHz). This should push competition in the softphone and standard IP phone industry to move towards these new HD codecs and especially Speex which is available under an open source license. Further more, G.722 is not widely adopted at this time even with new high range product announced, like at Polycom on the 6xx serie.

Installing Speex codec on Asterisk requires before compile that the library is available. You can either compile it from sources or use one of the packages available at Speex web site, no major point here. Recompile Asterisk, en codec_speex.so module should now be available. Beware of the sppex library location that can require an adjustment to the /etc/ld.so.conf on Linux.

Last but not least, the stability of both softphone and Asterisk during our Speex lab was not very good, we encountered some crash on the softphone and quality issues on the voice path. But, the way is now open to HD telephony and since the available bandwidth on our networks is still growing, why don’t give this a chance?

1. version 3.0 build 41150 [↩]