Graves On SOHO Technology

The deed is done. We now have Comcast Business Class internet instead of their consumer offering. This is in addition to our realiable old Covad DSL.

The tech finally arrived about four hours late. Prior to that Comcast actually called to tell me that he was going to miss the 11am – 2pm window for the installation. That was nice.

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The great thing about the weekly VUC calls is that there’s just so much to learn from the various participants. I sometimes struggle to know if I prefer when we have formal guests vs those weeks when we just ramble aimlessly through the seemingly endless universe of VoIP geek minutia.

Here’s a case in point, some weeks ago VUC regular Karl Fife indicated that he had Comcast Business Class internet service…to his home. This got me thinking. When we added the cable modem about a year and half ago we just ordered it through Comcast’s normal consumer channel. That seemed simple enough. It’s how we had the similar service from Time-Warner Cable long, long ago. I simply never occurred to me that we could go through the business services office.

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What with all the action surrounding Skype gateways the past few weeks it seems fitting that Digium chime in with a status report on their own Skype-For-Asterisk effort. From this post it seems that phase one of the beta program is wrapping up and the broader second phase about to begin.

Digium reports over 3,000 applications for participation in the beta program. That’s encouraging since it will take a significant number of sites to really flush out the software and expose a diversity of potential end-user applications.

After following Tim Higgins saga trying various netbooks I’ve pretty much settled upon the HP2140 as the one I want to buy. I seems like a really nice device with fine build quality.

However, the model presently available has a 10″ display with resolution of 1024 x 576 pixels. There is soon supposed to be a new model with an “HD” display that’s 1366 x 768 pixels. This model is anticipated in “late February or early March.”

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Apparently Skype gateways are all the rage in 2009. Yesterday saw the release of Karaka, software that forms an XMPP gateway to Skyp IM and presence information.

Wow! The crew working on Freeswitch are certainly pushing forward. Michael Collins just post a notice of the availability of v1.0.3 which includes 127 fixes & changes. A couple of the more interesting include leveraging the Digium TC400B hardware for multi-channel G.729a and G.723.1 transcoding,  also AMR-WB passthough.

Kristian K of Star2Star and Astlinux fame has also worked to make Freeswitch compile within the Astlinux development environment. So you can have a high-performance SIP proxy and Asterisk running on small format embedded hardware. OMG, I love that!

Since Freeswitch is now an installable module for pfsense you could also have it running on your router. That’s great, too!