I thought that I’d have another check of the Sprint 3G data rate now that we’re into the weekend. The performance in the mid-afternoon during the week was not bad at all. I was wondering if there would be any change on the weekend.
It seems to be markedly improved on the weekend. Today it measures: 1.94 Mb/s download, 520kbps upload with a ping time to Dallas of 155 ms. That was at around 2pm CDT.
The real test will be when I’m in SFO next week.
My roots in VoIP are closely intertwined with embedded systems. I really like the idea of small, quiet, lower-power hardware that just runs…and runs…and runs. That’s what drove me to my 2006 article about Astlinux on Soekris hardware and was in part the genesis of this blog.
When I saw the original FIT-PC I thought that it could be an interesting platform for Asterisk. However, with its 400 MHz Geode CPU it wasn’t that much different than the Soekris platform that I was using, so there was little motivation to make the migration.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Fit-PC Slim (pictured above) is now available on sale on Amazon for a mere $159.
Earlier this week Asterisk guru Ward Mundy pointed out an E-bay auction for a phone that looked kinda familiar and purported itself as offering “HDVoice” – the Dreamwave Networks D28p. A quick Google online revealed that Dreamwave Networks are based in New Jersey, and their web site looked to have both a brochure and some documentation about the device. I even found a tutorial on setting up the phone for use with various Asterisk distributions.
The Sprint Mifi results are encouraging thus far: 113ms ping time to a server in NYC, 1005k download & 413k upload. Should be VoIP-worthy. We'll see what happens next week when I'm back in SFO for a few days.
Matt Riddell of VentureVoIP is always informative and a great read. This morning I see that he has posted an article listing 39 Free Soft Phones. What a great resource! He goes so far as to only list those that…
Junction Network’s is more than a little unusual amongst hosted IP-PBX providers. They cater specifically to an SMB clientele with accounts typically ranging from 3 to 50 seats. One of the things that sets them apart from other providers is that they don’t force you into specific hardware. When you sign up with them you bring your own phones. (BYOP?)
It’s much more common that providers insist you buy their phones. If they can limit you to only using a certain family of phones it reduces their support requirements. The trouble is, it also limits the end-user flexibility. You might not be able to deploy the ideal sort of devices for your business.