Enough with the rants. I’m breathing fresh air and hope that this little howto will be helpful to some readers. Throughout my Vonage hell I started looking around and learning about SIP, hardware, providers, etc. I feel like I’ve stumbled onto quite a nifty little setup that saves me a ton of money and keeps the WAF factor pretty high.
Summary: I’m using MyPhoneCompany (MPC) for my main registration line and voxee.com for my outgoing calling. My hardware is the Sipura (Linksys) SPA3102 purchased from voxilla.com (You need to get one that is NOT locked to a specific provider…if you do you have a YASRW4PS (Yet Another Stupid Router With 4-Port Switch)!
Details:
In order to use your own hardware you need to go with a provider that has a BYOD (Bring your own device) plan. I went with MPC because of the LNP issue. It is hard to find providers that will port in my area. MPC’s myDevice plan is not well advertised here is a link to the PDF file that you fill out and fax to them. The current price is $4.99 a month and there are no hidden fees. This includes 60 min outgoing, but I don’t use them because my outgoing calling uses a different service. All incoming and 800 number calls are free.
As I mentioned above, I use voxee.com for my outgoing calling. They currently have US rates at 1.1 cents per minute with 6 sec billing increments. They use PayPal as there payment facility which makes them like a calling card service. You add money to your account and then you use the balance to perform calls. Note: even 800 number calls are charged at 1.1 cents per minute…so I use MPC for those calls.
Hardwarewise: Get yourself a Sipura SPA3000 or SPA3102, you can find both here. (Note: The Asterisk coupon code gets 5% off: use the “*user” code ). The 3102 is currently $91.95 and is completely “unlocked”. The SPA gives you some unique capabilities. Based on the digits you dial on your phone the SPA will route the call to a particular provider. This is how I have my voxee gateway enabled. There is even a trick that will cause voxee to use your phone number in the outgoing caller id. I will post my SPA settings separately including some cool tricks like: Free World Dial-up, e164 ENUM look-up, direct dial to the SPA from the Internet.
Well this should be a good starting point for those that are tired of Vonage’s increasing prices and want to control their own hardware.
September 7, 2006 at 9:32 am |
I’m looking forward to seeing how you got your Sipura to register for multiple providers, I didn’t think that my SPA-3000 could do that, but I guess I haven’t looked at it lately since I got my asterisk box (an old laptop) set up. Thanks for sharing!
~michael
September 7, 2006 at 6:59 pm |
Actually, you can’t register multiple providers
However, some SIP providers don’t require registration (they will take the user/password during the call initiation)…for this there is the gateway providers. I will be posting my setup details shortly.