Further, their new service caught the attention of the BBC, who offers yet another nice online example of HD vs PSTN call quality.

Step ahead just one week and we find that XConnect has announced their HD Voice Exchange peering effort is now available globally. In addition, they have joined in partnership with Polycom, Broadsoft and Dialogic in a new effort to promote the increased adoption of HDVoice by UK-based ITSPs.

Doug Mohney has a nice summary of the situation over at HDVoiceNews. Dean Elwood has a UK perspective to offer as well.

Over the past month or so the effort to find and move to new hosting was considerable. It was certainly much more involved than I had anticipated. I did not make it through the process on my own.

During the course of my search for hosting and the various migrations between hosts I’ve relied upon the invaluable advice and assistance of a few friends. In particular, I’d like to express my gratitude to Fred Posner of Team Forrest and Randy Resnick of Resmo / VUC.

Not only do these two guys truly know their stuff, but they’re patient with the quirks of foolish newbies like me. Imagine how great that must be if you’re one of their clients!

The newly live server at VPS.NET was crashing at least once every day or two, but it remained live while I poked around the TKL web site investigating the other hosting providers that had partnered with the project. The biggest was Amazon’s EC2, but recent events lead me to shy away from Amazon for my own purposes.

Late one Sunday evening while researching online I sent an inquiry to UnmeteredVPS.Net. I used a form on their web site to submit the inquiry. That form included a phone number. To my surprise someone called me immediately!

Of course, it was after 10pm on a Sunday. I had not expected such an immediate response to a simple sales inquiry. Unfortunately, I had given them my office phone number. Since I wasn’t near my desk that late at night they went to voice mail.

When I returned the call Monday morning I was pleasantly surprised to find myself talking to Neil Aggarwal, the owner of the company. Actually,UnmeteredVPS is just one of his companies, the other being Jamm Consulting.

I was even more surprised to find that they are headquartered in Houston, just a few miles from my home. They operate out of a data center along I-59 that I’ve driven past many times. They’re also in a data center in Dallas, TX.

Neil and I discussed my requirements and my recent experience with VPS.NET. He offered to setup a trial instance of TKL-WP, free for one week. He does this for all new accounts.

Neil was careful to explain how his business model differs from most other VPS providers. Whereas most providers assign you some nominal amount of permissible data transfer per month, his is a truly “unmetered” service. Transfer as much data as you like….well, kinda.

If 95% of your continuous transfer rate is under 500 kbps then you don’t pay for bandwidth at all. However, if your continuous bandwidth needs are greater than this you purchase additional bandwidth. My option would be to get a full 1 Mbps stream dedicated to my VPS if it was required. Not likely!

By the way, he provides a “Cacti” bandwidth graph as a handy way to monitor your data transfer over time. Given what I knew about my bandwidth use at BlueHost, I was not going to even scratch the 500 kbps continuous stream that he would permit as an account baseline.

Given the host hardware and connectivity, Neil’s billing model makes a lot of sense. He’s careful to ensure that the sum of all the accounts on the server hardware doesn’t swamp the physical connection to the upstream bandwidth provider. But since he doesn’t pay for bandwidth per GB of transfer, so he doesn’t bill that way either. It’s unmetered.

My needs being simple I started out with a single vCPU, 512 MB of memory and 15 GB of disk space…which would cost me $25/month. In the end I increased the memory allocation to 1 GB, driving the final cost to $30/month.

From a hardware perspective, as I was speaking with Neil, I was able to get an understanding of the kind of server that he deploys. His preference is for Supermicro 2U Twin-2s as pictured above.

Each 2 rack unit (3.5″ high) server contains four independent motherboards or “nodes.” Each of the four nodes holds two quad-core CPUs, 6 DIMMs of memory and three 3.5″ hard drives in a RAID5 configuration. I’m told that, depending upon the nature of the accounts, he can load 12-20 accounts on each node.

The reality of the hardware aside, my account was likely to be one of the smaller accounts on the physical server. Still, it’s nice to know that the account resides on enterprise grade hardware, with suitably redundant hardware resources.

From a software perspective he uses virtualisation based upon KVM.

Returning to my task at hand, I once again rebuilt the blog, this time on this new VPS, again running TKL-WP. I was getting pretty good at this by now, the process going faster each time I did it. It was also going more smoothly, with fewer minor errors along the way.

I was very careful to get this third installation running well, including removing several of the WordPress plug-ins that I had previously been using in an attempt to keep memory use down. I would start out without some of the niceties like Twitter integration and automatic insertion of links in favor of a stable host.

When the new VPS seemed fit for traffic I made the DNS changes to bring it live, and hoped for the best.

Once the site was running in the new VPS for a few days I was saddened to find that it was again becoming unstable over time. Running in 512 MB of memory and with 1 GB of disk swap file available, it’s memory use would climb slowly until it would eventually crash.

Whereas my past experience with the debate between TKL Project and VPS.Net has been fruitless, Neil dug right into the matter to try and find out what was happening. He found that the release of Apache included in TKL had a bug with respect to child processes not releasing memory when they are killed. The recommended workaround was to not let the child process live as long as normal.

Child processes default to serving 4000 requests before each is killed. By dropping that number to something much lower (512) he was able to reduce the impact of the memory issue. He reduced, but did not eliminate its impact. Increasing the memory available from 512 MB to 1 GB also helped.

Neil eventually offered to setup another VPS based upon CentOS5.5 instead of TKL-WP. He said that this was the platform that he most often used, and so could best support.

Since CentOS is commonly used in the Asterisk community I could see no problem with this. While it might lack some of the administrative niceties of TKL-WP, it would be very familiar to some of the friends that might some day help me with admin tasks.

For the fourth time in as many weeks I found myself rebuilding the site. I was now very good at this process! After just a day or two I pointed the domain names to this second VPS at UnmeteredVPS.Net.

Happily, with only minor tuning this version of the site has been reasonably stable. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but it’s been more reliable than the BlueHost server that I sought to leave just eight weeks ago.

I still make use of TKL-WP in-house for development and experimental purposes. I think that they have an interesting and useful project. I look forward to their coming release based upon Ubuntu 10.04.

In the telling of this tale I’ve now reached the present day, but the story is not yet finished. How can it be? What I’ve learned is that I have so very much left to learn.

The question that I failed to ask myself back when I decided to change hosts was, “Just how much effort are you willing to put into this on an ongoing basis?” Not having asked and answered that question I failed to appreciate the merit in paying more for a “managed” hosting solution.

One really should consider carefully how much you’re willing to take upon yourself vs rely upon the expertise of others for administrative tasks. If that’s not something that holds any interest then you are much better off paying for a managed host.

Yet, as of today, this site remains live at UnmeteredVPS.Net. I feel that my experience dealing with them has thus far been quite good. I may yet decide that a managed host is a more appropriate solution, but for the moment I’m not feeling any pressure in that direction.

P.S. – The image at the top of this post is me pondering the circumstances of one of my employers broadcast graphics systems while working on a major project in San Francisco during the spring of 2009. The patient survived. Only minor surgery was required.

In truth I have no interest in the iPhone as a cell phone, but I look forward to having an iOS platform on which to try some of the more interesting apps that have been offered. With its built-in microphone the iPhone 3G is, for me, a better option than an iPod touch.

In just the day or two that I’ve been tinkering with the iPhone I’ve loaded the Media5 soft phone. Zeeek raved about it some time ago, and it’s G.722 capable which dovetails nicely with our Polycom & Gigaset phones.

While interoperability with our various existing phones seems ok for the purposes of out-of-house calling, I don’t get call media between the Media5 phone and other in-house extensions. There must be some NAT issue with the hand-off of the call from OnSIP to the other in-house phone as OnSIP doesn’t hold onto the media path.

This issue aside, my initial impressions have been good. The call quality is very good, easily on par with the Gigasets.

I made a couple of test calls to compare call quality using the built-in mic & speaker against the Bluetooth headset. While on a call to a wideband capable conference bridge I made a short recording of my voice.

I did this again once I paired the iPhone with my Plantronics Savi Go Bluetooth headset. The Savi Go is a wideband capable headset, so the question I sought to answer was whether the Bluetooth radio on the iPhone would permit wideband calls?

When displayed in a waveform editor the call using the built-in mic & speaker clearly shows energy well beyond the 3.4 KHz limit imposed by the PSTN.

Sadly, the call made using the Plantronics Savi Go headset does not show this same wideband energy distribution. As you can see in the above screen shot, the energy is clearly clipped at around 3.4 KHz. Apparently the Bluetooth radio on the iPhone does not permit wideband audio calls.

C’est la vie.

I look forward to learning something new about voice-over-Wifi using the iPhone. It’s been a while since I last gave that a try.

In some regards the growth of a blog such as this, and the related hosting issues, is a little like being a teenager. Living at your parents home is very cheap, but you’re limited in what you can do, and the sort of traffic that they will allow. Ultimately your desire for freedom will force you to find your own place to live, where you have greater control of what goes on, even if that means you always have to clean up after yourself.

The decision to seek a more private host is only one step in this migratory process. The next question that arises is, “what kind of host?” Windows? Linux? If Linux, what distribution? Which supporting applications? How much CPU, memory, storage, etc?

As a Linux newby I was hoping to ease my transition into administering my own server by using a pre-packaged, appliance style Linux distribution. In researching my options I had been pointed to the Turnkey Linux project as a very nicely packaged WordPress appliance. Several people that I know had used TKL to build a server quickly and easily. Based upon the Ubuntu distribution, the package includes the OS, database and everything you need to launch a site, all nicely bundled with a web-based administrative GUI.

Since I’m no Linux guru I latched on TKL as being a very attractive platform to get me started.

Not wanting to imperil my site through my own ignorance I had thought that it would be good to gain some admin experience on a server on my local network. I started by trying to load the TKL WordPress appliance onto a tiny Fit-PC2 net-top. The “appliance” software distribution on a small, appliance-like net-top seemed liked a great combination. Unfortunately, it would not load.

It turns out that TKL at that time was based upon Ubuntu 8.04, which lacked some drivers for the Atom-based Fit-PC2 hardware. More recently, the TKL project is moving towards using Ubuntu 10.04 as the basis for their appliances, but these are not yet available.

I located an old PC that had once been my desktop, deciding to use it in place of the Fit-PC2. Happily, I had TKL-WP installed and my existing site loaded to that server in just a couple of hours work. This was very encouraging, and seemed to support the idea that TKL-WP would serve me well.

With a version of the site to work on offline I turned my attention to finding a host. The TKL project web site listed a handful of hosting partners* providers that supported the project. I decided that I liked the look of VPS.Net so I setup an account and started to experiment with their service.

* I see that as of Aug 28, 2010 VPS.Net is no longer listed as a TKL hosting partner. Let’s just call this a foreshadowing of events yet to come in this tale.

At VPS.Net you provision your server by purchasing “nodes.” Each node is supposedly the equivalent of 600 MHz of CPU and comes with 376 MB of memory, 10 GB of disk space and 250 GB of monthly data transfer. Two “nodes” seems to be the minimum practical size for a site like mine, scaling up involves only assigning more resource to the site…..and of course paying more each month.

I purchased two nodes and launched the TKL-WP image on those nodes. Thus my VPS was supposedly the equivalent of a 1.2 Ghz CPU, with 752 MB of memory and 20 GB of disk space. For my needs this should have been, to quote the horsepower rating of a Bentley automobile, “adequate.”

Just as I had done with the local server, I built the site on the VPS. I updated WordPress, installed the various plug-ins I use imported the WordPress XML file exported from the existing site. I allowed the import process to FTP all the graphic assets from the old site.

Once again, I was pleased to find that the process was fast and painless. I did find that I had to remedy some bad links resulting from a failure to import all the media from the old instance of the site. I was able to manually FTP the missing files and use the Add From Server plug-in to make the necessary corrections.

In the process of making this migration several times I discovered some handy tools & techniques for migrating WordPress blogs.

• Velvet Blues URL Updater – a WP plug-in that globally changes URLs in the WordPress database from within the WP admin panel. This is especially handy for changing the root address of a test site to be the root of your URL when it goes into production.
• Add From Server – a WP plug-in that adds media to the WP database, allowing you to FTP an entire set of files, adding them to the media database in one quick step.
• I also learned to make global changes to the MySQL database directly, which is the old skool approach to migrating between hosts.

The process of VPS setup and TKL-WP installation was trivially easy and completely painless. I was impressed, and I said so in the TKL forums.

While I have owned the mgraves.org domain since I started blogging I eventually came to own mjgraves.org as well. “Mjgraves” is an identity that I assumed when I started using Twitter. More often than not I find that “mgraves” is already taken as an account name. Further, as I was making this migration someone offered to sell me mjgraves.com, which I eventually decided to purchase.

Now with several domains I thought it wise to consolidate management of them at one company and not just do it through the hosting provider. Asterisk wizard Ward Mundy recommended Omnis Network so I consolidated the management of all my domains over there. Omnis Network have thus far been very good to deal with.

By the time the domain management had been transitioned I had the VPS at VPS.Net ready to go. It had been running for a week or two without any apparent problems. At the same time, the BlueHost server had been down an ever-increasing amount, so on Friday, July 9th I changed the DNS settings to take the VPS live.

I thought it had been quite a ride, an adventure even. I’d learned a lot, had some fun, but was now running my own server…kinda.

To my dismay, by Tuesday of the following week the VPS was crashing about every eight to ten hours.

It appeared that the VPS was running out of memory over time. Digging into the issue I found that this was a known issue with the combination of the Xen virtualization used at VPS.Net and the TKL project.

There were several threads in the VPS.Net support forum that documented this trouble. I’d post links here, but the relevant VPS.Net support forums only allow active customers to log in. Management at VPS.Net seemed to think that this is was an issue for the TKL project team to solve.

I posted a related question at the TLK support forum. For their part the TKL project thought it was only an issue with VPS.Net infrastructure, and not something that they could address.

So I found myself caught in a mild sort of dispute between the hosting company and the open source project. In truth, I felt duped by both parties.

If there was a known issue then neither should have been promoting the combination as viable. VPS.Net in particular was promoting how easy it was to launch any of a myriad appliance images, including many TKL images, into their hosting environment. I felt that they were being irresponsible making such statements if those appliance images were not reliable in production.

I was paying VPS.Net for the hosting, which means that in theory I should have had some recourse with them, but they seemed unwilling to help with what they felt was a pure software issue. So I decided that I would move off of VPS.Net as soon as I could find a suitable replacement. I had not yet given up on TKL as the hosting platform, just VPS.Net as the host.

This is where one of the nicer points of VPS hosting came into play. It seems that most VPS hosting does not require a long term contract. The VPS.Net site boasts:

• Daily billing – only pay for what you use
• No commitment – upgrade, downgrade or cancel at anytime

In the mean time, given the fact of the memory issue I decided to simply stoke the VPS with more CPU & memory to extend it’s up-time between reboots. I bought a couple more nodes to gain the additional hardware resources. That worked for a week or two while I considered my options.

In Act Three: The road weary blogger, battered and bruised, finds a new home…very near his actual home. Even that’s not without some scares along the way.

Hello Michael,

I am contacting you on behalf of Customer Loyalty here at Research In Motion Limited (RIM) with regards to your recent update to BlackBerry Desktop Manager 6.0 and the inability to forward emails from your MS Exchange Server.

As you already know BlackBerry Desktop Redirector is no longer a feature in DTM 6.0; however if you have the ability to setup OWA on your Exchange server, you can use BIS for your email.  If this is something that is possible in your environment and you would like assistance configuring, please let me know and I would be happy to setup a technical support call.  Unfortunately, if this is not an option you may need to continue running DTM 5.01 in your environment.

Please feel free to contact me Michael if I can be of any further assistance.

Kindest Regards,
Tammy
CSO Customer Loyalty
Research In Motion Limited

This past weekend the Blackberry Desktop application on my home office PC informed me that Blackberry Desktop 6.0 was available, and I should let it do an automatic update. Like an idiot…I did.

The truth of the matter is that I don’t really use much of the Blackberry Desktop software. It’s functions are many, but tend to revolve around sync’ing the handset with Outlook. Simply put, my calendar and contacts are not that dynamic, so I rarely sync the phone with my PC.

However, I absolutely rely on an application called the Blackberry Desktop Redirector to forward email messages from Outlook on my desktop to the phone. Since my employer does not run a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) the email redirector is the next best way to have tight integration of my business email and the handset.

One problem arises….Blackberry Desktop 6.0 does not include the email redirector…and worse, it automatically uninstalls an existing redirector with no notice to the user. Even the user notes on Blackberry Desktop 6.0, while careful to expound upon its many new features, does not clearly indicate that desktop email redirection is no longer supported.

Users like myself are simply left hung out to dry.

Finding myself no longer able to read email on my phone I had a quick look a T-Mobile online support pages. The carrier was still offering Blackberry Desktop 5.0.1, not having yet caught up to RIMs new release. I downloaded this version and installed it along side v6.0. That did not restore the email redirector.

So I decided to give T-Mobile a call and discuss the situation. Their first tier support staff were quick and courteous, reminding why I like T-Mobile as a carrier. They took only a few minutes to make some notes, then passed me to their Blackberry specialist group.

The Blackberry specialist heard my tale and searched the various resources at her disposal. She found only the same series of recent support forum threads indicating that others were feeling the loss of the email redirector. She could not offer a solution, but promised to forward the matter to management, and suggested that I take it up with RIM directly.

By this time I’d spent a considerable while hunting on RIMs web site. It’s extremely navigable, very easy to the latest release of anything that they offer. But I found it impossible to locate older releases. There is no archive. Their search tool pointed to numerous documents that referenced the software in question, but no links to download the older release code. Also, no statement explaining its absence in the v6.0 release.

In the end I went to a box of old CDs hiding in my office and found the v4.2 release that originally came with my Blackberry Pearl, circa 2007. I was able to install that release of Blackberry Desktop, then upgrade to v5.0.1 and finally get back to the operational state I enjoyed before this little adventure began.

I had killed about five hours in total. RIM was unreachable except by email or forum, referring all support to the carrier. Of course, the carrier had nothing to offer.

An associate who also carries a Blackberry noted that he accesses the corporate email using a web-mail gateway. Ok, that’s possible, but it gives up on push completely. Not an acceptable solution.

To me the lesson in this is very simple. RIM is not being very careful about its software release process. They don’t understand how many people don’t fit nicely into the “enterprise” customer base that they feel they own. On the other hand, they’re making a great effort to compete with Apple’s iPhone & iPad. In their myopia they’ve convinced me that SMB customers may be better served by the Android platform.

My loyalty to the Blackberry has been tested to its limit. My faith in T-Mobile renewed. I suspect that a T-Mobile G2 is in my future.

My efforts at blogging began in fall of 2007 on the free hosting at WordPress.com. While a fine place to get started I eventually wanted to tweak WordPress beyond the scope that was allowed on that service. In particular, the desire to include more multimedia content provided the motivation to move the site to a paid host.

Asking around about possible hosting companies I was referred to BlueHost as being a suitable option. Based upon their apparently good reputation and very cheap pricing I setup shop over there.

I took advantage of some down-time presented by the aftermath of Hurricane Ike to make the migration in September 2008. Yes, in the wake of Ike we had about a week when working wasn’t really possible. Even though we had no utility power our home & office IT infrastructure was functional, so migrating the site gave me something to do.

The BlueHost site was on a shared server, so mine was one of many, many accounts on the hardware. I didn’t have root access, which was likely a good thing since at that point I’d have caused more problems than I could solve.

The BlueHost server quickly became home. I tried a new theme framework, tweaking it to meet my needs. I also tried various WordPress plug-ins for Twitter integration, tracking traffic, database backups, etc. As time passed traffic to the site grew slowly but steadily. For almost two years the site was pretty stable. The only down-time experienced was when system admins did software updates.

Then in Q2 of 2010 the site started to suffer a lot of down-time. Initially I was told by BlueHost tech support that the problem was an issue with some aspect of my WordPress installation, possibly a plug-in being misbehaved. They noted that my site was CPU throttled a lot, suggesting that something was over-taxing the server.

I experimented with various changes and eventually found that the “Cross-Linker” plug-in that I was using was very inefficient about its use of MySQL. I really liked Cross-Linker as it automatically inserted links based upon a table of phrases. This was very convenient and made posts a lot more link laden. It gave me a way to include links to reference sites when I was using technical terminology. It also allowed me to direct readers to VUC sponsors when I was mentioning products and services.

I removed Cross-Linker and searched for something new to replace its functionality, eventually settling upon SEO Smart Links as a good alternative.

I also tinkered with the use of a page caching plug-in. This offloads work from the database by caching the pages as they are built. Subsequent access to pages in the cache bypass the database altogether, being effectively static html. This can dramatically speed up a WordPress site.

My suspicion is that when I opened my BlueHost account the physical server that it was on was lightly loaded. It was essentially on the front-line as their business was expanding. As they added more and more new accounts not only did it take on a heavier load, but it was subject to the programming foibles of some perhaps less than enlightened customers.

While my few changes helped to make the site a bit more stable it was still suffering a frightful amount of downtime every week. In trolling through the server error logs I kept seeing references to other sites on the server…other people’s accounts. I eventually determined that another account on the server was inducing most of the problems.

BlueHost support was generally good about bringing the server back online after a fault, but I was seeing far too much down time…even for a very cheap hosting service. In frustration I eventually, I decided that I was done with shared hosting…it was time to move to something more private. Happily, I was only a few months away from the end of a two-year prepaid hosting agreement.

Researching web hosting a bit I found that there are various forms of private hosting, from a dedicated server to semi-private, where a limited number of accounts share a server. A dedicated server is costly, and beyond the scope of my requirements. Semi-private seemed like a possibility, but still carries a considerable price. The most interesting, and seemingly applicable type of host was a “virtual private server” or “VPS.”

A VPS is a virtualized instance of a server on a shared hardware host. Unlike my old shared host, virtualization ala VMWare, KVM or Xen is used to give you what looks & feels like your own server, but it’s actually just one of a handful of accounts running on a big, robust, hardware platform.

Since each account runs it own OS, MySQL, PHP, etc they are effectively separated. Erroneous settings made in your VPS will usually not impact other accounts on the hardware. You get root access to the OS and can tune, or even reboot your VPS at will.

VPS-based hosting also scales easily. You simply purchase more of the hardware resources of the machine on an as-needed basis. The underlying VPS software manages access to hardware resources. You can easily add more CPU power, more memory or more storage as you need it.

Perhaps best of all, a VPS is relatively affordable. It costs more than the cheapo shared hosts, but far less than even a lowly spec’d dedicated server. This seemed like a great solution to my needs.

In Spider Man Peter Parker’s uncle said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” This is good advice to give anyone moving from a shared hosting environment into a private host. Whether real or virtual, this host is all yours. That means you must perform all the admin tasks that are typically done by sysops at the cheapo hosting providers.

When a MySQL update comes down the wire you must install it and see that the site comes back online. Apache updates this week? Same thing. Hackers bombarding you from EC2? You have to take steps to keep them from compromising your server. There’s a lot more maintenance to be done when the host is your own.

You can pay someone to perform all these maintenance tasks for you. For some “managed hosting” is the best plan since it lets you get back to writing, which is why you have the blog after all. In my case I was hoping that I could count on the help of some Linux savvy friends to guide me as I learned to DIY.

This brings me to the end of Act One, and sets that stage for Act Two where our intrepid non-hero stumbles through an alphabet soup of TLAs, SLAs, VPS and OSS before eventually screaming WTF!

I’ve put the device to good use over the course of the year. It’s been very handy indeed. However, I suspect that we shall part company shortly.

I really don’t have any complaints about the Sprint 3G service. It’s been pretty good. There have been a few places where the Mifi could only connect at 1xRTT, but I’ve usually had decent 3G data rates in the locations where I tend to travel.

The Mifi itself, and Sprint’s handling of it as a product, is another matter. There have been some issues.

The battery life on the Mifi I find to be in the 2 hour range, which is merely adequate. The simple fact is that I most typically am not sharing the wifi with multiple devices. That implies that it’d be a lot more convenient to have a USB dongle and not need to worry about the battery life at all….ever!

There have been a dozen occasions when the Mifi was shared between several laptops. Typically these were family gatherings in my wife’s home town….a rural place. Without the Mifi there was no internet access at all. The Mifi let everyone kill time online when it was too cold, hot or dark outside to be doing other things.

The Mifi made me unusually popular on such occasions, as I was the only one in the family who had such a device. Even so, most of the time it only needed to service one computer, so a USB dongle would have sufficed.

At the point when I ordered my new netbook, an HP Mini 5102, I gave some consideration to ordering the built-in 3G modem. However, a built-in device would be too limiting. There are times when I need access from my larger laptop, and even occasions when I need ‘net access from a customers computer. The USB dongle provides a necessary level of portability.

I also find it problematic that in order to have 3G/4G cellular data access on multiple devices I require multiple accounts, incurring multiple monthly charges. If I can share voice minutes across a family plans then I should be able to use any number of 3G/4G capable devices on one account as long as I stay within my allocated data each month.

It would be great if the ability to share the access over Wifi could be retrofit using another device. For a couple of years an Apple Airport Express lived in my luggage permanently. When traveling I used it to provide Wifi in hotels where only wired connections existed.

Such things came to known as “travel routers” and are now available from several manufacturers. It would be outstanding is such a device existed for the 3G/4G USB dongle. Just a small, cheap embedded host that used the 3G/4G as its WAN connection, and shared the service out over Wifi.

Returning to the issue of battery life, some will surely note that you can tether the Mifi to a PC using a USB-to-micro-USB cable. When you do this the Mifi shuts off its Wifi radio, acting as a USB modem to the attached PC while at the same time charging its battery…or at very least running on the endless power from the USB bus.

Well, Verizon provides the requisite cable with every Mifi that they sell. Sprint doesn’t. I could not find the cable offered on Sprint’s web site so I bought one online for a few dollars. However, I’ve never been able to get the Mifi to load drivers to my laptop. It’s supposed to have a small flash partition on-board and auto-start the installer, but mine simply doesn’t. So the only thing I’ve been able to do with the USB connection is charge the Mifi.

My motivation for thinking about all of this is the most recent offer that I’ve seen from Clear. They offer a 3G/4G USB dongle for $40/month. The service is unmetered when in 4G coverage, and capped at 5 GB/month in 3G areas. The 3G service is provided by Sprint who is a partner in Clear.

As described previously, I used Clear while in Las Vegas for the National Association of Broadcasters Annual Convention back in April. That experience was very good indeed.

The Clear offer is one third less than the monthly cost of my current Sprint 3G contract. That contract has another year to run, but I could buy it out for a $200 early termination fee. Since the Mifi was free in the first case the ETF really only amounts to paying for the device at the end of the contract.

I could be free of the Mifi’s headaches, enjoy 4G speed in some locations and 3G everywhere else. And I’d be paying less each month. It certainly is tempting.

Then again, T-Mobile has rolled out their quasi-4G HSPA+ service which is supposed to be faster than Clear’s Wimax. Also, they’ll soon be launching their new G2 phone which just might be the Android phone that I’ve been waiting for. If the G2 acts as a pocket hotspot then perhaps it could be a cheaper alternative to separate voice & data accounts?

Perhaps I should practice some patience? Yes, patience….that’s the thought for today.

The idea itself is not wrong. You could have a very plain phone on your POTS line, and it would work during a power outage. However, the simple fact is that at least in the US…almost noone has a simple line powered phone anymore.

Consider as supporting evidence the following photo:

My apologies for the image quality. It was taken with my Blackberry Bold…a superior phone, but inferior camera.

This pic was taken in a Target store near my home. My wife had asked me to pick up a couple of things on the way home. Since I was in the store I thought I’d check out the aisle where they sold phones. They had a selection of phones, mostly cordless, and every last one…corded or cordless… required AC power.

Herein lie the transformation into myth that I referenced earlier. Even if you have an analog line, it’s very unlikely that you have a phone powered by that POTS line.

This same situation can be seen at retailers from Best Buy to Fry’s, and Micro Center to Sears. The line powered analog phone has long been MIA at American retailers.

Should this be cause for alarm? Are we left exposed? Should there be new legislation?  Probably not.

The simple fact is that as we have become a more technological society this transition was essentially inevitable. Most people have cell phones, some have only cell phones and not home phone at all.

Those of us who still have home phones can use a simple UPS to provide power in case of emergency. Some people, most notably AT&T U-Verse users, get a UPS as part of their service. Their voice line will be sustained during a power outage.

When we had the late, lamented ION service from Sprint it too included a UPS built into the CPE (pictured below)

People who use other VoIP services may have to take more direct responsibility for providing such capabilities. As we have not had POTS lines since 2005 we’ve taken care to ensure that our core network and phones remain functional during any short power outage. Back when I established this blog that was one of the first strategies that I sought to share.

Can we now lay to rest the idea that a line-powered is a real benefit to the PSTN? If you don’t have such a phone it remains an unrealized benefit. If you’re providing a UPS to run your phone then you could also be running your network and using your VoIP service, as we do.

I’m reminded of the old boy scout motto…”Be Prepared.”

Nuff said.