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Overview of Portable USB Speakerphones

For the past few years a little USB speakerphone has been a constant fixture on my desk. This fact was initially driven by my UK-based coworkers who have a habit of using Skype. Most of the Skype traffic was simply IM, but once in a while it would escalate to a voice call. In those cases I needed a suitable audio device, but it wasn’t routine enough to merit keeping a headset immediately available.

usp-speakerphones

Over time I started to see increasing value in using other soft phones as well. At first it was for the convenience of being able to effectively turn any PC I happened to be working on into a phone. The scope of this sometimes goes beyond telephony. For example, I’ve used a USB audio device to record screencast training movies. Since server class motherboards often don’t have built-in audio interfaces, using a USB attached device makes it possible to record the narrative of the training on the host system along with the screencast.

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Power-Over-Ethernet Mythbusting

The .e4 blog has a good new post on power-over-ethernet, which I see as an often overlooked area of SOHO VoIP. It goes into some detail P.O.E. network switches, power management and mid-span P.O.E injectors. Just last week we suffered…

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Wideband Voice Thread At Broadband Reports

polycom_ip650_256I don’t generally hang around in public VoIP forums but I do monitor several using Google Reader. So it was that Tuesday evening I found a new thread about “HDVoice” at the VoIP Tech Chat forum on BroadbandReports.com. Someone had posted a question about the significance of HDVoice and a few braves souls were weighing in with their take on the matter.

There was some good information, but a little confusion about data rates and the possible use of ATAs with wideband voice. It looked like the start of a good conversation on the subject, in a potentially interesting crowd. I thought I’d offer my two cents…which kind of unexpectedly turned into more like half a dollar.

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