December, 2011

Announcements / Product Updates / Updates — 4 Comments
30
Dec 11

Announcing Spokn 3.0.0

The last few months have been an eye-opening experience for us as far as VoIP in the Middle East is concerned. Customers in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait etc have been facing connectivity issues and have generally had a hard time making calls over VoIP. We thought a VPN-integrated Spokn dialer would work well, but with help from helpful customers like you, we found that VPN connections too were getting blocked by ISPs.

We’ve quickly engineered a solution that relies on obfuscation of the VoIP stream and we’re thrilled to release it today. As an added bonus, we’ve tweaked the codec for improved voice quality. We’ve beta tested this with customers from different countries in the Middle East and all of them had very good things to say about it. So here it is – Spokn for Windows v3.0.0.

As always, do let us know your feedback and suggestions – it helps us make Spokn better for you.

Here’s wishing you all a wonderful new year! We have something exciting coming up for our Resellers and Android users, so stay tuned…

Update: Some users may experience voice distortion during calls. This is due to HIGH microphone volume. Please reduce the volume manually for now. We are working on an automatic mechanism for our next release.

Uncategorized — 1 Comment
16
Dec 11

A new strategy for the Spokn dialer

Last month we asked for your support to help us test our upcoming VPN based dialer in the Middle East. Thanks to our helpful users who chipped in, we discovered something that left us quite surprised.

For example, when a user in Oman was logging in using the experimental dialer, we noticed that the ISP was detecting the VPN tunnel being established and was blocking the connection. Apart from the first packet, nothing else was reaching the Spokn server. Clearly, the ISP in question was performing deep packet inspection before allowing packets through to the Internet! We believe the same is happening in certain other Middle Eastern countries as well and this has forced us to rethink our implementation.

We’ve quickly come up with a new solution which relies on obfuscation of the data that the dialer is sending. Since the data is obfuscated, the ISPs will not be able to detect a standard protocol ‘signature’ in the packets being generated by the dialer. This will also allow us to increase the voice quality by using higher-quality codec bit-rates as will hopefully not be restricted by speed throttling tactics implemented by ISPs.

Yet again, if you are in the Middle East, we need your help to validate our assumptions and to verify that our new implementation works well for you. So please write in to us at support@spokn.com if you can help us make Spokn better for you and others like you.