Can you hear me now? Check the web page

If you are wondering about the title of this post, I took it directly from that Verizon Test Man commercial. I saw a hilarious one last night where he was testing cell phone connections in a blizzard.

I know that's a cell phone ad, but testing and performance displaymethods seem to be more intuitive in the VoIP world.

Today's batch of recently published, VoIP-related patent applications includes one for a method of adapting a Web page so that various IP network performance criteria can be shown on a Web interface.

Nothing sexy, nor especially innovative, but quite functional and necessary.

Here's the batch of three, as promised:

Method of monitoring the availability of a messaging and VoIP network:

A method of monitoring the availability of a network on a monitor web page, includes the steps of: reading query information and depositing query requests into a corresponding one of a plurality of request queues; reading the query requests from the corresponding request queue and sending the query requests to at least one remote network device by sending calls over the IP or SNA network; receiving a reply to the calls from the at least one remote network device indicating an availability status of the at least one remote network device and processing the availability status; depositing the processed availability status in a Web Site Queue; and retrieving the processed availability status from the Web Site Queue and displaying status information for the at least one network device on the monitor web page, the status information being derived from the processed availability status.

The two other patents for today are a coding system for a multi-rate codec and a proxy terminal call agent for an IP network.

Hey ya:

Source and channel rate adaption for VoIP:

A coding system and method for a terminal including a multi-rate codec is disclosed. The terminal includes a multi-rate adaptive coder that is capable of transmitting a continuous voice stream transmission at a source code bit rate and a channel code bit rate. A quality of service probing module probes an end-to-end network path of the continuous voice stream transmission to obtain at least one quality of service parameter. A quality of service management module determines at least one constraint associated with the continuous voice stream transmission. An adaptive bit rate algorithm module dynamically adjusts the source code bit rate and the channel code bit rate as a function of the quality of service parameter and the constraint to obtain a maximum value of perceived user performance during the continuous voice stream transmission.

and:

VOIP Systems:

A call agent, which acts as a proxy terminal is included in a network termination between a user network an access network. The proxy terminal communicates with a gatekeeper VoIP server in a managed IP network. The proxy terminal is first registered with the VoIP server to which it appears as a terminal device. The individual terminal devices are then registered with the call agent. This may include POTS phones if a gateway is included between the POTS phone and the call agent. This arrangement means that all devices in a users home can have a single public IP address and that each can answer VoIP calls and each device can make VoIP calls. The proxy terminal also provides bandwidth management, rejecting or renegotiating calls if there is insufficient bandwidth to handle them.

This completes the list of nine patent applications with VoIP titles that have been published in the last four months. The first three are here and the second three are, well, you know what to do.

We're not done yet. Tomorrow, I'll examine three recently published patent applications with "IP Telephony" in the title.