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’

Counterpath, makers of the Bria softphone client have launched Quick Conference, an apparently easy-to-use audio conferencing server.

When deployed, Bria (and presumably other SIP standard) users will be able to dial a four digit number to create a conference on the Quick Conference server.

Quick Conference features web-based administration, IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook calendar integration and remote management via PDA.

S60tips.com has an updated article listing VoIP applications suitable for use with the S60 smartphone platform.

Listed and reviewed in the article are Nokia’s own Gizmo, Truphone, EQO, Skype, fring and Yeigo
.

The article updates an earlier review of S60 Voice over IP applications.

Silicon Alley Insider is speculating that a comment by Gary Krakow of TheStreet may indicate that Google are looking to produce their own ‘Gphone’.

Google have previously stated that they do not intent to produce their own hardware, rather they intend to develop the Linux based ANDROID mobile phone software platform for deployment on partner’s devices.

There is further speculation about whether some devices might be available around Christmas time.