Bluetooth USB receiver that doesn't suck?

[PliotronX]

Since the office has moved to Skype for business phones, I have enjoyed the wireless freedom that the Bresnan phones didn't have but I am not having luck with CSR or Broadcom based receivers. The CSR has a five year old stack that I could not for the life of me get to engage the bluetooth device management in windows 10. The broadcom BCM20702 pairs and works brilliantly driver-wise but all of my bluetooth headsets drop randomly or with the ones with multiple microphones for noise cancellation the outgoing voice becomes too quiet for the other end to hear. I know atheros and Intel make chipsets too but they don't appear to be USB and my office desktop is a POS optiplex minitower whose only two PCI-E slots are occupied by necessary graphics and USB controller cards. I've tried to limit interference with extension cables, grounded foil facing the computer, disabling power management and selective suspend for USB, etc..

tl;dr Do I need to swallow the cost of a DECT headset because bluetooth just isn't there yet?

 

[XavierMace]

I've never had much luck with cheap Bluetooth devices, but as you mentioned Intel's not available in USB form. My Logitech and Intel Bluetooth devices work fine.

 

[PliotronX]

Gah, its what I'm afraid of. This bottom rung optiplex just doesn't have enough expansion. I think I'd rather start building a ryzen box for the office with bluetooth 4.2 on board than an overpriced dect headset. This optiplex also has no airflow and fried a video card after its menial fan died. Thank you, I have a feeling I need to gravitate to a proper receiver

 

[XavierMace]

No way to pull the USB card out and use a hub instead? That would free up a slot for an Intel WiFi/Bluetooth card.

 

[PliotronX]

No way to pull the USB card out and use a hub instead? That would free up a slot for an Intel WiFi/Bluetooth card.

That's what I'm going to try as an interim, I actually got the PCI-E controller thinking using all kinds of USB 3.0 devices on the same controller as the bluetooth receiver might have caused some harmonic issue or something (3.0 introducing 2.4GHz interference).. Unfortunately all that did was make disk to disk transfers faster not sharing the same controller . I can live with lower transfer speeds if it means stable comms.