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Streaming vs Screaming Media: USB 3.0 Tries My Patience

Clarity Monitor-220 Preface: This is a wee bit off topic, but I haven’t ranted in a while, and you may find it worthwhile in the end.

For many months I’ve been toying with the idea of using streaming video as an alternative to some of the training and demonstration activities that haunt me in my working life. Historically, sending staff and gear to some distant location was the primary means of selling the gear, or post-sale, conducting end-user training.

In the past year one of our more experienced sales staff has found that demonstration given by remote means can be very effective. Initially this was merely his response to having limited access to my time, but it’s also become a way for him to get ad hoc demo’s accomplished on very short notice.

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HDVoice: On The Cheap & Analog RJ-11 Style

HDVoice RJ-11 Wall Plate A short while back I addressed the question of how DECT & CAT-iq may foster the broad deployment of HDVoice. At that time I described one possible scenario where carriers would deploy customer premises equipment (CPE) with an on-board cordless base station. Although a frontrunner, and the basis of Comcast’s (decidedly non-HD) HomePoint service, this is not the only approach afoot. There’s another possibility arising that involves conveying HDVoice over a plain old analog RJ-11 connection.

At first glance HDVoice and analog lines would certainly seem to be mutually exclusive. The common wisdom is that wideband telephony requires the use of an all-IP call path. This is in fact a generalization, and not absolutely true.

Firstly, it has long been possible to pass wideband audio, in the form of G.722 encoded media, over the PSTN by way of ISDN connections. Also known as BRI interfaces, an ISDN connection supports  up to two 64 kbps channels (bearer channels) and one D channel for the purposes of call setup & teardown signaling. High-quality voice using G.722 was one of the selling points of ISDN in the 1980s.

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Forbes On HDVoice

You know that a technology is going mainstream when it starts to appear in places like Forbes. A recent story in the October issue called Get Ready For HiDef Phone Calls profiles the lack of progress in the quality of…

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TechWiseTV Episode #37: Redefining the Remote Office

After my last post about Cisco’s TechWise TV I was a little surprised to be contacted by someone from Cisco offering me a pre-release look at the new episode that is due out later today. It’s episode #37 and all about “Redefining the Remote Office.” As a long time home-office dweller this sounded potentially interesting so I had a look.

The show covers a lot of ground including voice, data, VPNs, security, energy efficiency, SLAs, etc. There were some cool ideas in there. I especially like the idea of scheduled power-off/on of devices based on time of day, controlled by logic in the switch providing POE. That’s pretty cool for SOHO sites, and something I should do around my office.

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