SIP – Brian Roy

One of my greatest frustrations with Mac has been the lack of a VoIP SoftPhone. To be completely clear, when I say VoIP SoftPhone I mean that the way you would mean “email client”. I’m not interested in a SoftPhone tied to a particular service provider or network.

This search has been frustrating me for almost two years now. In that time I’ve tried and rejected so many SoftPhones I’ve lost count. I know I’ve been to Pure-Mac’s VoIP page about 600 times. I’ve also been to VoIP-Info’s phones page about 600 times. I’ve tried everything from CounterPath to Ubiquity and had not found any SoftPhone that was both high quality and configurable.

I’m happy to say the search is over. iSoftPhone from Call4Mac is a robust SIP SoftPhone. It supports everything you would expect and enables peer to peer calling on the LAN via Bonjour. Configuration is a snap (see screen-shots below) and the implementation of SIP is flawless. I’ve connected iSoftPhone to OpenSER, SER, Asterisk, BroadVoice, Teliax, and Gizmo with no issues.

Perhaps most importantly, the call quality is excellent. Even over wifi on my MacBook Pro – with the usual complement of just about everything running – the call quality is excellent, even with the built in microphone/speakers. There is a slight echo for the other party, but this is easily overcome by plugging in headphones and using the built-in microphone.

isoftphone-config.tiff

Admittedly – this is for the geek crowd or the SMB IT folks. If you don’t have a SIP server/PBX Skype/Gizmo is still the right choice for you. But having said that, this SoftPhone is as easy to install and configure as the average email client. This makes it ideal for those who have a VoIP account/server and Mac Clients in their house/organization.

2008 was supposed to be the year we began to see real-time web take shape. And while Twitter and FriendFeed have begun to show us some bits of what a real-time web might look like mostly it has been a year of discontent.

While I hate year end/beginning “predictions” (what am I Nostradamus?) I’m predicting 2009 won’t be much better. Why? Well that is the interesting part.

I’ll let you in on a secret (shhh, this is just between you and me). Real-time services on the “web” are nothing new. We have a pretty good idea how they work (and don’t work). We know what the challenges are – and to a large degree how to architect/engineer the solutions. The problem is we aren’t leveraging the work that has already been done.

More after the jump…

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