IP phones at home

Ben. That wouldn’t be advertising. Just indicate the www url since everyone NOT interested can ignore. If you happen to be the boss of that company you would just be doing PR and there is nothing wrong with it if you give us the best deal at the best price. But dare you if trying to recommend something mediocre at a high price, you will hear from me right here. A cheap equipment for me means less than 150 USD. And it MUST be standalone (home pc is often turnded off) and SIP compliant for the home user since H323 ist for geeks and corporate users because it requires a gatekeeper server.
Murrarij. The best devices IMHO are from Cisco being the ATA186 (around 150 USD)and the IP Phone 7960 (manager version of 7940)(from 250 USD used and from 350 USD new). An alternative may be a phone from Arrayvox that I have seen around 150 USD on Ebay. I think it DOES help to exchange experience and expertise on real brands and models and not just generic talk. Because we need a REAL solution, don’t we. I will keep posting when I have tested the ATA186 right now shipping to me. Muarrij, you have not answered whether you want to call point to point over internet or you also like to call the public phone network. This DOES matter to recommend something good. Basically a cheap headset or USB phone (all cost less than 40 USD)will be O.K. togther with a software solution (anybody knows MSN messenger ;-), it is SIP compliant!) handling the voice encoding. However I think making phonecalls with a cheap headphone is no fun. For me it must be a phone or at least a handset. Prices are indicated in USD since you would probably not know the exchange rate from my Swiss franc to Pound Sterling. We all may or may not be so fond of that big transatlantic country but they DO invent better VoIP products than “old Europe”, so for the GOOD deal you may have to look at news and products from across the border.

Naser. Thank you for your post. Did you hear this or did you actually do this. I have seen controversial post on broadband forums. Some are saying just factory reset the vonage firmware will do and others say that the device ships without license and would not be enabled to upgrade firmware and cannot be used but with vonage. I would appreciate any personal experience, since asking vonage would return a clear answer.

Murrarij. I am sorry, in fact you did say that you want a simple plain IP to IP call from London to Paris.

I had a look on IP NETs (High Wycombe’s) site and couldnt find the IP phone you talk about?

Naser/Florian – what kind of figures are we talking about here for the ATA186 and FWD solution to use SIPS? Can I use a standard LINKSYS router – (nat router) with wireless 802.11? Ie… would it then be possible to use my pda (wireless) to make calls via the broadband connection to any phone?

(I hope that makes sense?).

THANKS

Hello Guys. I have a couple of those phones IP net . They are cheap sets, with not much quality on the making of the sets themselves.
Now, they work fine with my Quintum gateway/gatekeeper once I worked out some details.
They have a feature that is very nice. They will “masquerade” and I.P. address behind a NAT router. i have cable service with a Lynksys router doing nat and these phones are able to go trought it and register into the Quintum, using the I.P. address of the router,not the internal I.P. given by the DHCP server of the Lynksys.
I have seen a lot more expensive solutions that do not have this feature.
Not trying to sell anything, just a consumer.
Good luck!!!! By the way, those phones sell for about $80.00 american dollars a piece.

Muarrij

You can use your PDA as a VOIP device, all u need is a SIP client loaded on it. xten.com is offering a lite client for PDA’.

Muarrij, I today tested the xten software between a caller from australia (dial up) and myself on dsl in canada. when the caller called my ata186 I could not hear and when I called the caller using ata186, he could barely hear me. But when I switched to xten lite on my side the call quality became very good.
SO please keep in mind there will be problems when using hetrogenious equipments unless there is some kind of embeded information in the handshake to agree on the common codec used and dynamically change codec based on the QOS. my direct e-mail address is nhqamar@hotmail.com.

Best regards

Hello, does anyone have ANY idea whether its possible to run the above IP phone (Home) solutions when using a DSL router/Firewall package? Are there any associated problems with this?
In particular the LINKSYS 802.11g wireless router, switch, nat firewall?
Thanks !