Graves On SOHO Technology

If you’ve been reading here for a bit you’ll know that I like my Plantronics .Audio 615m headset. I heartily recommend the Plantronics .Audio lineup for people who need a headset for use with a soft phone.

Since back when this review was published I’ve heard a couple of times that people have had issues with the Plantronics .Audio line not working correctly on Mac systems. Most recently this comment was posted to the review:

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When last we left this story our protagonist had returned the Cisco AP to BUY.COM leaving le maison du Graves without functional wifi for about two weeks. Fortunately I was out of town a lot during that period so it wasn’t much of an inconvenience. If anything it gave me some time to evaluate my options regarding replacement gear.

I’ve noted that whereas I had a lot of problems with 802.11n type wifi APs I’d previously had far fewer issues with 802.11g type hardware. Very recently I was reminded by someone who should know that 802.11a/b/g is more mature hardware than 802.11n. This certainly rings true as my very old Linksys WAP-54G ran for literally years with no problems at all.

How I long for the Linksys of old.

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What with the Mobile World Congress 2010 happening in Barcelona this week there’s some interesting stuff being announced. One that caught my attention today is the formal announcement of OpenPeak’s OpenTablet 7.

I’ve been following OpenPeak for some time, and was very interested in the Verizon HUB, which was also their hardware. However, Verizon Wireless managed to wrestle a possibly great product offering into failure with onerous contractual terms and their typical heavy handed insistence upon absolute control.

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Randy Resnick (a.k.a. Zeeek, or more recently Dulo Par) the founder of the VoIP Users Conference, has a guest post over at HDVoice News called, “An “ear opener” to HD voice in conferencing.” Randy details the advantages of wideband voice for large public conference calls. He should know, having produced thousands of hours of podcast based upon such calls over the past few years.

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There are myriad inexpensive consumer routers available that include wifi functionality, but far fewer freestanding wifi access points (AP.) I surmise that this is because every broadband connected home needs a router and wants a wifi AP, so a converged device is the most affordable approach to this marketplace. Yet in many ways it’s less than ideal.

The fact that your router and wifi access point are in one device makes that device a major possible single point of failure. It dies and your entire network goes down. While merely inconvenient for the kids coming home after school to play World Of Warcraft, it’s a whole different kind of failure if you’re a full-time home office worker who relies on internet access to be effective in your job.

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Hereabouts we do love our Gigaset cordless phones. Actually, that’s overstating the case a bit. Recent firmware releases, notably the November & December issues, have proven to be troublesome for some users. It’s tempered our enthusiasm just a little. An earlier post about Gigaset firmware developed a most impressive comment trail.

Not long ago Tony Stankus, Product Manager for Developing Technologies at Gigaset Communications, passed me a note about a new beta firmware release.

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