US Senate bill HR 3043 (New and Emerging Technologies 911 Improvement Act of 2008) has been passed into law and requires traditional telephone companies to make available access to 911 services for Voice over IP operators.

An article at VoIP Weblog suggest that the old telcos may have actually been blocking access to 911 for some VoIP operators. Smithonvoip is similarly aghast that 911 services which exist to provide access to emergency services could have been blocked.

Snom is to release it’s M3 DECT / SIP handset system for the North American market and TMCNet has full details and review.

The Snom M3 allows for multiple DECT wireless handsets with full-color graphical displays to make and receive SIP calls over any compliant network.

The Snom M3 system involves a base-station which provides network and control facilities including a web confiiguration interface. Up to 8 individual wireless DECT handsets can be connected to each base-station. The base-station can handle up to three simultaneous calls.

Product video:

The Snom M3 is to be available in the USA as of June 2008.

Asterisk, the lead open-source digital Private Branch Exchange software has released version 1.4.21.

This is a regular bug fix version, a complete changelog can be found here.

An article in New Scientist reports that ISP’s intentions to use a compression technique to reduce the bandwidth required for VoIP calls could pose a significant eavesdropping threat to users.

The issue lies in the way the ’sounds’ of a conversation are compressed.

…the sampling rate is kept high for long complex sounds like “ow”, but cut down for simple consonants like “c”. This variable method saves on bandwidth, while maintaining sound quality.

Simply by analysing the encrypted stream for the difference between the sizes of the packets, researchers at John Hopkins university say they can identify entire words with a high degree of accuracy.

The John Hopkins team hope that they have caught this threat in time but I think it will take a good deal of shouting about it for the ISPs to take notice and change their planned deployments.

According to VoIP News, Snom has introduced a new handset dubbed ‘klarVOICE‘ which can be adapted to work with any of their VoIP telephones.

Compared with standard phones, the handset allows the capture of more than twice the spectrum of voice frequencies, providing enhanced voice quality.

The handset is said to offer quality akin to ’speaking to somebody in the same room’