Pierre’s Lab

Did it again! Looking for a good VoIP solution, I search stores, eBay and other market places unfortunately I didn’t find anything affordable with all the features I needed.

I searched among Asian suppliers and found several with quite extensive products.

Now, I’m the proud owner of a very powerful and reliable VoIP network Based on High Link products, the network works like a Swiss clock. IP phones are GF302 built on the famous AR1688 the model selected is not POE so they need external power supplies.

The gateway is a good rock solid GW202O with 2 Ethernet ports, 2 FXS and one FXO. The network support analog phone as well as IP phones and PSTN.

These products are so good, I decided to import some and sell them first on eBay and why not later in a B&M.

I’ll keep you posted on my selling progress.

Being a happy Vonage customer since long time, I wanted to look at several options to get a soft phone line for my computer.

Vonage offer a monthly $9.99 solution using the XT-Pro interface which is not the best one, the contact list is awful, the speed dial doesn’t work unless you use a 3 digit scheme etc…

I tried Skype IN and OUT which are not free but offer nice features that Vonage lacks. I called France - free with Vonage, Few cents a minute with Skype.

Quality wise, Skype is far behind Vonage between echo, cracking, silence and other weird noises Skype’s quality is not really land line quality. Vonage offers a quality almost as good as a land line and it’s free to almost all countries in Europe, Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico.

Between Vonage and Skype you have to choose, quality and features. Vonage’s interface lacks features and Skype lacks quality.

In the past, I wasn’t very happy with D-Link. I had several problems with my previous wireless network. I tried Buffalo, D-Link and both were regularly failing, the worse being Buffalo. The LinkSys wireless router was the best.

After the fire, I upgraded my equipment with the latest LinkSys 54G but it didn’t work very well and it lacks 2 major features: GiGE ports and switching capabilities. So the darn box crashes each time we tried to download or print big files and I’m not talking about video streaming. I called customer service but all I heard was the computers’ fault.

I purchased the D-Link DIR-655 at BestBuy for $149. The D-Link is a full duplex GiGE and according the specification with a 10G switching capability. The web interface is also way better than the one I was used to have before and way better than the LinkSys. The only real annoying feature is that you have to reboot the box each time you make a change.

The router is installed since 2 weeks, no connection dropped even while watching video streaming, no slow connection nor wireless problems. Bottom line, for $149 you get a real piece of network supporting more than you can expect.

After testing it on my computer, I installed Windows Vista on 3 of 5 of our computers. I just love it, it seems running much faster than XP and I’m very pleased with the network capabilities. No problem with drivers, wireless mice, keyboard or other USB devices. Even the Bluetooth ones got installed and configured smoothly without any help.
I remember when I installed my first Windows XP. I had to run everywhere to find compatible drivers.

Windows Vista, so far so good!

When the house burnt down in April 2006, it was a catastrophe. Fortunately we were very well insured and the house has been rebuilt and we financially didn’t loose anything and I had the opportunity to create a real network. Real network for me means 54G wireless, Fiber vertical cabling and Cat6 horizontal cabling.
Some call me crazy but as all the walls were open, I installed 1” orange tubing network around the house.
I got a new office, that was a kid’s bedroom on the main floor and I used the closet as a technical room. I’d enough space to place a 7’ rack and I could bring tubing from the top and bottom of the closet behind the rack. Each room receives at least 2 conduits with a special sub-closet for the kitchen/earth room area where 5 tubes are running from. The basement, not finished for now but has already a sub-closet.

Crazy may be but now each room is equipped with fiber, GiGE, cable and receive enough 54G wireless to watch a movie.