Graves On SOHO Technology

Aswath Rao On Why Trapezoidal VoIP Is Evil!

September 10, 2009
Michael Graves
VoIP

alt_vvx1500_2_1 This week’s VUC call sure is timely for me! VoIP pioneer Aswath Rao will be walking us through the evil that is “trapezoidal VoIP.” His words, not mine.

Why is this extra timely for me? Well, I spent considerable time today dealing with the very trapezoid in question. My forthcoming review of the Polycom VVX-1500 Business Media Phone has gone to the publisher for a final polish. With the text in their hands my task turned to producing the supporting images, sound files, etc that they might want to run. This time around they want to run a recorded video clip example of the what you see on the VVX LCD screen. It’s a good idea, but as it happens, not so easily done.

My First Month With The Sprint Mifi Service

September 7, 2009
Michael Graves
3G Wireless, Broadband

sprint_mifi_2200_2-432x479 It’s just over a month since I took the decision to buy Sprint’s 3G mobile internet service using a Mifi device. Thus far I’m really enjoying the device and the service.

During my first trip with the device I racked up 1.5 GB of data transfer and was starting to worry that 5GB a month was going to be too little. But then I had two trips to Canada where the roaming fees made using the Mifi impractical. So in the first month I used around 2 GB. Not too bad.

Dialing By SIP URI In Asterisk

September 6, 2009
Michael Graves
Asterisk, VoIP

Barrett Lyon is an interesting guy. He's the CTO & Co-founder of BitGravity, a company specializing in streaming media solutions for the web. Long ago I stumbled upon his blog which was then a very simple site. What caught my…

Logitech’s New Squeezebox Touch

September 5, 2009
Michael Graves
Audio

If you've been around here a bit you'll know that I really like my Squeezebox systems. In fact, enough that we have four of them and need one or two more to complete my master plan for whole-house, yard &…

Paul O’Flaherty: What if ISP’s operated like Cellphone Carriers?

September 5, 2009
Michael Graves
mobile, Telco

Paul O'Flaherty released this curious little vidcast that makes a good point.

No Jitter’s Matt Brunk: SIP Means Change

September 5, 2009
Michael Graves
Asterisk, VoIP

nortel_lo_ip_phone_1120e copy Earlier this week Matt Brunk penned a post over at CMP’s No Jitter blog entitled “SIP Means Change.” It’s a short piece detailing the contrast between SIP phones, Asterisk servers and legacy proprietary equipment. In particular it dwells on the boot times of the various items. He highlights how anything that takes longer, even just a little longer, ultimately has a higher cost.

Matt points out that the older, proprietary digital phones were effectively instant-on devices compared to SIP phones. This is a little obtuse in that SIP isn’t really the culprit. It’s just a protocol. Cisco phones running SCCP would have similar boot times to SIP handsets. I presume that Nortel phones running UNISTIM would also have similar boot times.