Getting Started with VoIP Devices

Kerbo writes "If you have been wondering what kind of devices you need to use a voice-over-ip (VoIP) provider or Asterisk PBX, the guys at Geek Gazette have been doing up some reviews of different devices. These allow you to use a standard phone with VOIP providers. The newest review is of the Sipura ATA-1001 ATA." Before you get too happy with the possibilities, though, note what an anonymous reader submitted: "Several VoIP providers have started adding 'regulatory recovery fees' to their users' bills, even though the entire industry is unregulated. The latest one to do this is Packet 8. The whole reason so many are moving to VoIP is to avoid these kinds of bogus fees; it's unfortunate these providers haven't figured this out yet."

Comments

Recovery fees

[0kComputer]

Sound almost like the Spanish American War Tax that we've been paying for the last 100 years on our telephone bills.

How the hell do thes companies get away with these idiotic taxes?

VoIP phone recommendation

[grasshoppa]

The Polycoms IP500 are decent phones, I love them.

re: Voip

VoIP's main draw isn't that it's cheaper, or at least, it shouldn't be. It may be, but that can change on a dime ( heh, hat trick pun! ). It's a matter of usability. My asterisk server is far more useful to me than the old partner ACS system we used to have.

I have my voicemail emailed to me. I can record conversations on the fly. I can move my phones and have my number follow me. I can make any changes I need on the fly ( within minutes, typically ). I can train others to do the same with little trouble.

And when people say VoIP ( and asterisk in particular ) is difficult to learn, they are really referring to the POTS aspects of it. Old phone lines are complex, no doubts, and the parts of asterisk that are carry overs from a traditional pbx are similarly complex. However, asterisk itself is incredibily easy to work with. Have you ever setup samba? Apache? Asterisk is easier.

my voip experience...

[kebes]

I recently switched to Vonage from a standard phone, and I'm very happy. With regard to hardware, they ship you a Linksys router that is pre-configured with your details, so all you have to do is plug it in and it works. The router replaced my previous router for my home network, and seems to work great. The hardware hasn't caused me any problems.

The harder part was re-wiring my house so that all the phones would work using voip (instead of just having one phone plugged into the Linksys router). Even this is not too bad: just disconnect your internal wiring from the Telco, and then plug the voip router into a wall-jack, so that all wall-jacks are now connected to it. (Be sure to disconnect from Telco wiring properly, or you'll fry your voip hardware!!) Even getting my alarm system to work with voip was pretty easy (just had to invert its wiring...).

Serious geeks may want to shop around for the coolest hardware, but honestly the box that Vonage ships is good enough for most people. I think voip is fast becoming accessible to the "average consumer" and I'm now recommending it to everyone I know. For a low price you get every telephone service imaginable, free long-distance calling... The Vonage ads (phone bill going from 60$ to 20$) are not exagerations. So my hardware review is: you can use whatever the voip provider ships and you won't have any hassles!

Re:my voip experience...

[gregmac]

The harder part was re-wiring my house so that all the phones would work using voip (instead of just having one phone plugged into the Linksys router). Even this is not too bad: just disconnect your internal wiring from the Telco, and then plug the voip router into a wall-jack, so that all wall-jacks are now connected to it.

Here's another idea: if you want your POTS line as well as a voip line, phones only use two wires (red and green). Yellow and black are spare, and are often used to run a second line. If you hook up your ATA to the yellow/black pair, then you now have both lines running everywhere in your house.* Get a two-line phone, and you can access both lines (this may require adding an additional jack wired to yellow/black), or selectively you can wire yellow/black instead of red/green to any jack to make it use the second line.

(*: This is assuming that all 4 wires have been connected anywhere they split in the house. Most newer homes have all the phone jacks with one continous wire coming down to a central location, where it's connected to the telco demarc, but the old method was to daisy-chain or just randomly splice into a nearby wire to add a jack. If this was done improperly, or worse, yellow/black red/green were interconnected somewhere, it can fry your equipment and be very hard to track down. Make sure you know what you're doing before you try anything like this. If you blow your phones/ATA/computer/self up, I take no responsibility :) )

Re:Extra fee's

[the unbeliever]

Have you never heard of Skype? It's exactly what you describe.

However, the vast majority of people are still attached to the old telephone, myself included. I can't see using a PC with a headset or a microphone as a normal communications tool.

I am interested in more than what Asterisk has

[bayerwerke]

I want a PBX replacement with voicemail, call accounting "for hotel guest phone charges". The last item is where I don't see an Asterisk based solution is workable. I would like to be wrong, any suggestions?

Re:I am interested in more than what Asterisk has

[Anonymous Coward]

You are wrong. Asterisk has voicemail built in, and you can easily set up something to grep the Call Data Records for call activity, or just have all in/out calls go thru an AGI (think CGI) script to do a prepaid balance type thing.

You may be able to port your number

[lorcha]

From this page, go about halfway down the page to "Check Portability" and.. well.. you know what to do from there.

I'm sure other VoIP providers have as good or better number porting abilities.

Re:Cheap ATA adapters?

[ch-chuck]

I use a Grandstream Handy Tone ATA-286 - it's small, I'm using it with asterisk, it has worked w/o issue since last November. When you first get it you have to set the IP address with the analog phone (which is pretty wild, a little box going "to change IP address, press 1", etc) but from then on you just use a web page to configure everything else. There were a bunch of options I didn't even get into, just setup sip user and password, match it to an asterisk extension and go. If it loses connection to asterist the button flashes red, etc. Just google grandstream ata-286 for the manual in pdf.

Re:What's the best starting point?

[gregmac]

Is the on site documentation good enough or are there other resources you would recommend?

voip-info.org is like the bible of the VoIP/asterisk world. I definately recommend browsing around there before getting started, and keeping it bookmarked while you're installing and configuring asterisk.

I'm actually one of the developers for AMP, which is the web GUI that asterisk@home uses, and one of the biggest things I see is that there's a lot of people that want to just jump in thinking they don't need to know anything to get started. I'm not sure why this is, but you most definately need to understand basic concepts of a PBX, and some telephone technology, and how asterisk itself works in relation to those things. Most definately do not setup a mission-critical phone system (and I'd argue that any phone system used in a business instanly becomes mission-critical) without testing - a lot - first. Some people even setup test systems in their homes before hand.. and since the entry cost is so low, this is entirely possible. It's hard to recommend how much and what method to use for testing, since it varies depending on the size of your install. voip-info has some deployment tips though, that are probably very useful.