February 5, 2013
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Hands, meet Feet
Being in Sydney, Australia, I use a VoIP account in Montreal, Canada, to call family. I’ve basically got the account details plugged into my smartphone (an HTC Desire HD), and I can toggle outbound calls between using my SIM card’s local account, or over the internet by the VoIP account.
Here at work, us underlings aren’t allowed to use the company WiFi. Well, more specifically, we’re not given the passkey to use it, so even if wanted to abuse the rule about not using WiFi, we can’t really. However, nobody told me that I couldn’t use “Internet Passthrough” mode on my phone to physically hook my phone to the computer and get internet through a cable, so that’s what I do.
This morning, I had to talk to my folks back home about something, so I tried dialing home. The phone rejected me, saying that it could only do VoIP calls if I had WiFi connectivity. Which is kind of dumb. I think the reason why they have this restriction is because they don’t want call quality going to hell when you’re trying to do it over a normal 2G or 3G data link– but technically speaking, shouldn’t a direct cable internet passthrough be more than enough for me to use VoIP?
I guess the software makers just figured that if it’s not WiFi, you’re probably using over-the-air data, and that wouldn’t be fast enough. Ironically, internet passthrough cable hookups I guess are such an old school method of internet connectivity that I suppose it got overlooked for VoIP usage, even though it should be the fattest and fastest pipe possible.
In other news, yesterday night, I went for bonus points and installed Pepperminst OS (3), 32-bit version– everything worked out of the box. Considering that it is very closely related to Linux Mint, I don’t see why LM14 64-bit broke or removed good things from the older 32-bit versions….
