Skype has released video calling for Mac users. The software can be downloaded here.

Sam Houston State University is dropping Cisco’s VoIP platform in favor of open-source Asterisk.

SHSU is in the process of moving its 6,000 students, faculty and staff off of Cisco CallManager IP PBXs and a legacy Nortel Meridian PBX over to Linux servers running Asterisk, which includes call processing, voicemail and PSTN gateway functionality. The driver for this project was cost, says Aaron Daniel, senior voice analyst at Sam Houston State University.

“We thought that it will be more cost effective in the long run to go with an open source solution, because of the massive amounts of licensing fees required to keep the Cisco CallManager network up and running,” says Daniel, who this week gave a presentation on his migration project at the VON show in Boston. In the Cisco model, each phone attached to the CallManager required a separate annual licensing fee to operate, Daniel says. In SHSU’s Asterisk/Cisco model, where it will keep its existing Cisco phones but attach them to Asterisk servers on the back end, the phone licensing costs are eliminated.

Sam Houston State University is dropping Cisco’s VoIP platform in favor of open-source Asterisk.

SHSU is in the process of moving its 6,000 students, faculty and staff off of Cisco CallManager IP PBXs and a legacy Nortel Meridian PBX over to Linux servers running Asterisk, which includes call processing, voicemail and PSTN gateway functionality. The driver for this project was cost, says Aaron Daniel, senior voice analyst at Sam Houston State University.

“We thought that it will be more cost effective in the long run to go with an open source solution, because of the massive amounts of licensing fees required to keep the Cisco CallManager network up and running,” says Daniel, who this week gave a presentation on his migration project at the VON show in Boston. In the Cisco model, each phone attached to the CallManager required a separate annual licensing fee to operate, Daniel says. In SHSU’s Asterisk/Cisco model, where it will keep its existing Cisco phones but attach them to Asterisk servers on the back end, the phone licensing costs are eliminated.

A number of companies plan to launch new products at VON this week.

One of the first hands-on reviews of the Mylo is now available at Laptop Magazine. They give it 3 1/2 out of 5 possible stars in their rating system. They were impressed by Mylo’s chic design, screen resolution, screen navigation, video playback and the quality of Skype calls. They were, however, concerned over the unit’s cramped keyboard, difficulty in displaying photo-heavy web pages and price.

We were blown away by the Skype experience on the mylo. Voices were clear and crisp with only a hint of occasional lag. The earphones’ integrated microphone makes it simple to call someone without purchasing additional accessories. You can’t plug your own headphones into the mylo directly, but Sony includes an adapter for this purpose. When you’re at home or in another quiet location, you’ll be glad to know that the built-in speakers deliver surprisingly good audio quality. Too bad these speakers don’t work when you’re using Skype.

Sony’s Mylo converence device should go on sale this Month. The handheld connects to 802.11b wireless networks and allows for web surfing, e-mail, instant messaging and Skype calls. Sony’s learning center now has video that shows the device in operation. When you get to the site, click on the “How To Guide” for some demonstrations of the Mylo in action.

Update: Engadget got its hands on a prototype model and posts many pictures of the device.

Skype for Windows 2.6 Beta is in public beta. New in the beta are:

• A new “Live” tab to get directly to Skypecasts.
• Plugins for making calls from within browsers
• Clickable links in mood messages
• Birthday notifications for your Skype friends

One of the nicest features on Hullo is the ability to transfer a call between phones. This allows you to establish a call on your home or office phone and then transfer it to your cell phone if you need to hit the road. Of course, you can use this feature to hand off a call to any phone.

The transfer when I tested it was seemless. I tested this by transferring from my home to my cell phone. While my cell phone was ringing the connection was maintained on my home phone. As soon as I answered my cell the call moved there. I’m not sure the party on the other end could even tell this was happening.

Because of the problems I’m having connecting at the office, it would be nice if Hullo could be run through the browser. The landline-to-landline calls I’m making don’t require the SIP application that’s installed on my PC. That would only be necessary for PC-to-PC or PC-to-landline calls. The landline-to-landline calls could easily be handled on Hullo’s servers.

I heard back from Hullo on the problem I’m having behind my corporate firewall.

The hullo client is using the port 15060, please verify that this port is not blocked by your firewall or your router. Please ensure that the hullo.exe is not blocked by your firewall. Please ensure that the SIP protocol is allowed on your router and firewall.

I am now not certain I’m experiencing a firewall issue. I connected the computer to a wireless router that is not blocking port 15060 and experienced the same time-out issue. For now I’m limited to trying Hullo at home. I’d love to hear from anyone else who has delt with this problem.

A new study released by Minacom Labs says the quality of VoIP calls in improving, not getting worse as a recent study by Brix Network stated. Minacom found one out of 50 calls using VoIP were of poor quality, where Brix found 1 in 5 calls were unacceptable. But, to be fair, the two firms were not studying the same type of VoIP calls. The Brix study looked at PC-to-PC calls via services such as Skype and Google Talk, while Minacom was testing VoIP by service providers using “telecom-grade equipment.”

“PC-PC VoIP quality is subject to many diverse impairments, including firewall settings, computer performance, antivirus installations, high-compression codecs, and Internet bandwidth shared with gaming, file downloads, web surfing and email,” Minacom said, in a statement.

Minacom also said its study showed 85% of VoIP calls exceeded the quality of traditional phone calls. Indeed, the mean opinion score for VoIP scored 4.2 on average veruses 3.9 for traditional telephony, where a 5 score is the best possible, Minacom said.

I had planned to put Hullo through further tests today from behind a corporate firewall, but every attempt to login returns the error: “The login process timed-out. Please try again later.”

Hullo’s forums indicate I’m experiencing one of two problems:

• If you install Hullo through one account and you try to use it with another, you will get the time-out error. Hullo’s customer support recommend using the same account on which the software was installed. I hope this is a bug that will be fixed before Hullo comes out of beta.
• Although customer support’s response is a little vague on this, the other cause for the time-out error appears to be firewall conflicts. They don’t have any specific recommendations for fixing this problem and are asking people experiencing problems to contact them so they can work on a fix.

My problem appears to be the later. I’ve contacted customer support and will report back on what they say. In place of what I had hoped would be more first hand experience with Hullo, I offer reviews from the following blogs:

• Hello Hullo! - Alec Saunders
• Beta Launch of Hullo - Jim Courtney
• Hullo: Versatile VoIP - Jordan Running
• Hullo To Enter VOIP War With Free Product - Michael Arrington

I began testing Hullo today. Hullo is a new service that lets you establish VoIP calls between traditional phone lines, much like Jajah. The best part about Hullo, at least for now, is that the service is completely free. In fact, you can’t yet spend money with them even if you wanted to.

The Hullo service requires that you install an application on your computer. The service only works on Windows machines, so Mac users are out of luck. Once the software is installed and an account created, you can establish calls between two PCs, a PC and a traditional phone or between two traditional phone lines. When calling between two traditional phones, the service first calls your number and then rings the number you are trying to reach. It then sets up a VoIP connection between the two phones.

On my test the telephone-to-telephone call quality was very good. Because I’ve just begun trying this service, I haven’t had a chance to run it through its paces, but I’ll be doing so and reporting back here. One feature I’m eager to try is the ability to transfer calls between phones. So, for instance, if you are on a call in your office and need to hit the road, you can have Hullo move the conversation to that phone. The service also allows you to set up conference calls for free.

Uber Gizmo has written long and honest review of SunRocket’s VoIP service. This is a full rundown of ordering, installing and using the service. He had a previous bad experience with VoIP in the home, but comes away pretty happy with the quality of SunRocket.

One of the calls I placed was to my parents – in France. I try to call them once a week, so I figured that they should have been able to tell if there was a difference in the call or not. I didn’t tell them the real purpose of my call right away. We chatted for a few minutes and I asked if they could notice something different with the phone conversation. They said that the call was pretty good and even better than usual. How about that! Not only was I going to save a bunch of money, but I was also getting a better overseas call connection.
Later that night, my wife called one of her out of state friends for 30 minutes and neither one could tell the difference between the POTS and the VoIP.

He concludes with these points:

- It will not be as reliable as the POTS. There would be outages – if it not from SunRocket, then it could be from your ISP. Hopefully you have a cell phone as a backup.

- Sound quality might not be as good as the landline, but so far it has been.

- Troubleshooting the service can be difficult – hardware problems, home network misconfiguration, ISP bandwidth issues, SunRocket service is down, or maybe all of the above. I wouldn’t count on the technical support for help. Granted, I have not called SR helpdesk myself, but that was the impression I got from reading SunRocket reviews.

- Cheaper than any existing POTS plan with unlimited long distance. $200/year is hard to beat.

Gizmodo has an early review of the new Belkin WiFi Skype phone and gives it good marks. It has the look and feel of a quality cellphone. Setup seems to be pretty easy and there aren’t any unecessary hoops to jump through to get your account or WiFi connection setup.

Connecting to a wireless access point is just as easy. The phone tries to connect automatically to the first available open WiFi access point. If that happens to not be yours, you can then select a different one and enter in your WEP/WPA/WPA2-PSK key—if you use one— and connect. Once that’s done, you’re ready to sign on.

The Skype connection’s exactly the same as on the PC, down to that same “blooooooOOP” login noise. You type in your username and password using the keypad, which is just as slow as on cellphones, and on you go. Then you hit the right menu button to see your contact list and you can choose to dial any of those, or just dial a regular phone number to use SkypeOut.

The call quality appears to be similar to the software version of Skype, with PC-to-PC calls showing better quality than SkypeOut calls.

Now for the call quality. How is it? Well, on Skype to Skype calls it’s fairly decent. Just about the same as if you were making a Skype to Skype call from a PC. Not a whole lot of delay present in the call and no real echo. SkypeOut, on the other hand, was a little different.

SkypeOut to a landline was fine and had minimal delay. Just about the same as doing Skype to Skype, or maybe a tiny smidge more. Nothing dramatic. Calling SkypeOut to a cellphone added a bit more delay though. It was noticeable, but it wasn’t terribly annoying. And if your home connection is currently running a lot of bittorrent traffic, your call quality would probably get worse. I tested this without bittorrent on, and just normal internet browsing and IMing and everything was fine.