Comments | athenian_abroad: Technology

athenian_abroad

Technology

Dec 30, 2010 19:54

So...I'm re-arranging my telecommunications infrastructure for the new year. (Did we even have "telecommunications infrastructure" back in the twentieth century?) Here's the plan, for those who are interested in such doings and goings-on.

First, I've retired my aging, Windows CE-based, T-Mobile MDA with a spiffy new Android-based G2. And I'm ( Read more... )

Comments 3

heron61 December 31 2010, 04:38:11 UTC

Is Clearwire proving to be good? Their prices looked attractive, but I've read fairly dire things about their reliability and customer service.

athenian_abroad January 3 2011, 01:01:15 UTC

It's mixed. As a DSL customer, I've been used to the idea that my bandwidth is pretty constant. Unlike cable, DSL customers don't "share" neighborhood network capacity. But it appears that local congestion is a problem for wireless. So there's variability in performance that I find kind of strange. But performance is almost always better than my DSL line at lower cost.

In your neck of the woods, things could be different. I'm in very good signal-strength area, so network congestion is really the only problem I'm facing. But things might be different where you are. (And you do seem to live in the Land that T-Mobile Forgot...my Android gizmo goes all 2G in your neighborhood.)

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athenian_abroad January 3 2011, 01:09:03 UTC

Yeah...Skype is a weird thing. It's built on a peer-to-peer design, which means that you're using your own resources to handle other people's calls, and which results in uneven quality. (Of course, nothing VoIP-ish is going to be flawless in that respect; it's just contrary to the nature of IP. But Sykpe seems worse than necessary.) Skype is also oriented mainly toward Skype-to-Skype calling. "Skype-In" and "Skype-Out" (which let you receive and send calls to "real" phones) seem to be sort of bolted-on extras, and I believe they involve extra charges as well ( ... )