I am using an older laptop with a usb 1.1 port only. Occasionally my outgoing speech is broken up according to those I call. How critical is it to have usb 2?
USB 2.0 would not help. At a time when you are having trouble, test to San Jose at http://www.testyourvoip.com/ . If your outbound MOS is poor, it could be caused by other traffic on your LAN, other running processes on your PC, etc.