End-user perspective on small office tools & technology

Point-CounterPoint: Hosted Voice vs. CPE

This post is part of a Point-CounterPoint open debate with fellow telecom blogger Dave Michels. In this new series, we both take extreme positions on a given topic. In combination these two opposed views are designed to provide a more complete perspective of the issue. To read a different perspective on this topic, click here.

Let me get this right out into the open…it seems to me simply insane for a small company buy a PBX. Buying a PBX takes precious capital for something that is often not a strategic asset in the life of the business. It’s at best “a necessary evil.”

We’re a small business, around sixty staff in total. Most of them live out their days in our corporate HQ in Cambridge, UK. But the “we” that I’m describing here is actually the dozen of us who earn our keep in the North American operation.

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Point-Counterpoint: An Introduction

Journalist. Reporter. Columnist. Writer. Blogger. These are all very different things, yet there’s a lot of commonality to their activities and presentation. Most often, to have some semblance of credibility one must consider both sides of an argument or treatise in addressing a topic. This is done in the name of being “fair and balanced.”

The problem is that being fair and balanced can also lead to a kind of blandness in the writing. We might still convey some useful insight, but without expressing what is truly opinion it’s often difficult conveying a passion for the topic.

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ONSIP Becomes First Hosted PBX Service Provider to Support HD Voice for All On Network And Conference Bridge Calls

Nobody’s perfect, but isn’t it great when a good service keeps getting better? I’ll admit that I completely missed it when way back on January 6th Junction Networks’ issued a press release about the availability of HDVoice in their OnSIP hosted pbx service. I must’ve just overlooked the announcement. Of course OnSIP does HDVoice….I’ve been using them with G.722 capable phones for almost two years.

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USB Audio Interfaces: Mac vs PC Applications

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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A Tale Of Wonky Wifi Part 4: A Doubleheader Featuring 802.11B/G vs N, And WLAN vs Mesh

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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OpenPeak Intro’s OpenTablet 7

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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