Voice over IP explorations
Sunday, 22 July 2007 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daI'm playing around with VoIP and VoIP services. Since I don't talk on the phone nearly at all, I don't want to pay $20 a month for Vonage or a similar full-service provider, and also we don't want to switch our home number and lose regular 911 service. But I would like to save money on my cell service and get a more convenient setup at the same time.
I want my cellphone number to be "smart": incoming calls will ring in my office, at home, and also the cellphone, simultaneously. Whichever one I'm closest to, I can pick up. Of course if I'm near a landline, this will save me money and have better call quality. There are other features that would be handy, like emailing messages to me like Vonage does; or announcing the caller before I answer the call.
I've been playing with Asterisk, on a server run by a friend. I have an IAX phone-number account with Unlimitel which looks like it will handle nearly all of my must-haves. Incoming calls cost 1.1 cents per minute, outgoing is the same and long-distance is 2 cents per minute. I'm not sure what my friend's incremental server costs are, but I think it's vanishingly small. I like how flexible this can be. If I don't want my "other features", I'm pretty much done. I can port my old cell number over to unlimitel, and have it dial my cellphone plus softphones at work and at home.
Another option is Grand Central, a "single phone-number" service with quite a few attractive features. They were bought by google a month ago and they claim to remain free for most of their offerings. (I signed up for an account right before they got bought- they're now on an invite-only basis and if you'd like to try them out I have 5 invitations to share.)
They only offer US phone-numbers, but they can forward that US phone-number to Canadian numbers just fine. I've tried it, and I like this service a lot. Plus and minus: I get a free US phone number with no extra work. But I don't get a Canadian number, which is inconvenient. Another problem with Grand Central is that they don't support soft-phones (directly). * But wow, what options. If you pick up a call that was routed by Grand Central, you can listen in while the caller leaves a message, interrupt if it's someone you want to talk to, switch phone-lines during a call (such as: cell to landline) without the other party knowing, dial out by clicking a button from your address book on their website (and it will call you, as well as the other party).
Hm. Stuff to play with, for sure. But I need to make a decision, because I need to port my old cell number to some service, either my VoIP line or my new phone.
* On the problems of no Canadian number and no soft-phone support, I think I could solve both of these problems with my VOIP account: calls to my VoIP line from Grand Central could get direclty routed to my soft-phones, and otherwise incoming calls to my VOIP line could get routed to Grand Central. Follow the bouncing packets; since they'd then get routed back to my VoIP line and over the internet to my office and home computers. I've got no idea if this would work; since there are limited numbers of channels available to my VoIP account. Like, two. If the outgoing soft-phone connections don't require channels, I'm OK.
Excuse my noodling thoughts. I'm having fun playing. Yesterday I finally figured out how to get the soft-phones to ring properly. This afternoon I figured out how to effectively give my office at work a direct incoming line, by forwarding the VoIP number to it and auto-dialing my office extension. Tomorrow? Well, I have to do real work tomorrow. :)
I want my cellphone number to be "smart": incoming calls will ring in my office, at home, and also the cellphone, simultaneously. Whichever one I'm closest to, I can pick up. Of course if I'm near a landline, this will save me money and have better call quality. There are other features that would be handy, like emailing messages to me like Vonage does; or announcing the caller before I answer the call.
I've been playing with Asterisk, on a server run by a friend. I have an IAX phone-number account with Unlimitel which looks like it will handle nearly all of my must-haves. Incoming calls cost 1.1 cents per minute, outgoing is the same and long-distance is 2 cents per minute. I'm not sure what my friend's incremental server costs are, but I think it's vanishingly small. I like how flexible this can be. If I don't want my "other features", I'm pretty much done. I can port my old cell number over to unlimitel, and have it dial my cellphone plus softphones at work and at home.
Another option is Grand Central, a "single phone-number" service with quite a few attractive features. They were bought by google a month ago and they claim to remain free for most of their offerings. (I signed up for an account right before they got bought- they're now on an invite-only basis and if you'd like to try them out I have 5 invitations to share.)
They only offer US phone-numbers, but they can forward that US phone-number to Canadian numbers just fine. I've tried it, and I like this service a lot. Plus and minus: I get a free US phone number with no extra work. But I don't get a Canadian number, which is inconvenient. Another problem with Grand Central is that they don't support soft-phones (directly). * But wow, what options. If you pick up a call that was routed by Grand Central, you can listen in while the caller leaves a message, interrupt if it's someone you want to talk to, switch phone-lines during a call (such as: cell to landline) without the other party knowing, dial out by clicking a button from your address book on their website (and it will call you, as well as the other party).
Hm. Stuff to play with, for sure. But I need to make a decision, because I need to port my old cell number to some service, either my VoIP line or my new phone.
* On the problems of no Canadian number and no soft-phone support, I think I could solve both of these problems with my VOIP account: calls to my VoIP line from Grand Central could get direclty routed to my soft-phones, and otherwise incoming calls to my VOIP line could get routed to Grand Central. Follow the bouncing packets; since they'd then get routed back to my VoIP line and over the internet to my office and home computers. I've got no idea if this would work; since there are limited numbers of channels available to my VoIP account. Like, two. If the outgoing soft-phone connections don't require channels, I'm OK.
Excuse my noodling thoughts. I'm having fun playing. Yesterday I finally figured out how to get the soft-phones to ring properly. This afternoon I figured out how to effectively give my office at work a direct incoming line, by forwarding the VoIP number to it and auto-dialing my office extension. Tomorrow? Well, I have to do real work tomorrow. :)
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Date: Monday, 23 July 2007 03:51 pm (UTC)1) they don't do number-porting. So I'd need to do that via my other VoIP account, the same as with GrandCentral.
2) my cell phone isn't smart enough for the neat stuff you described. :)
3) my perspective on their technology is that they're network-hoggy. They like people with fast connections, to turn them into "supernodes" to route their traffic; you give them permission to do so implicitly by their EULA. They don't allow Windows users to turn that off in their software; you need to do it via firewall, which leaves me a slightly bad taste.