Microsoft products better than Cisco’s?

Wow, that is one statement I thought I would never say in my life. VoIP News reports that Microsoft’s Office Communicator is way better than Cisco IP phones.

Psytechnics, an independent testing firm, conducted tests to measure voice quality of Microsoft’s soft-phone(Office Communicator 2007 ) and it did much better than the Cisco’s 7961 series. The report says

The outcome surprised the testers, according to Benjamin Ellis, VP of marketing and product management at Psytechnics. “We were kind of blown away by the results,” he says. “To see that desktop software-based telephony outperformed an industry standard IP phone is actually quite a takeaway.”

This result is indeed mind boggling. I know why exactly Benjamin said what he said. In one of my previous ventures we had to develop a soft media server, and there was always cynicism that a software Media server could never do as well as a dsp based Media server ( say for example Convedia). The two cases are more or less similar from a RTP point of view. The main argument was that processing of RTP was faster through a DSP model.

Though I feel for Cisco ( how bad would they must be feeling to be beaten by Microsoft, that too on quality!!!), I feel vindicated that a software’s performance can more or less match a DSP based solution. Good job Microsoft ( I would have never thought that I would use ‘Good’ and ‘Microsoft’ in the same sentence )