I thought I’d document my current phone setup, probably look back in 10 years time and think how primitive it was. The brains of it are handled by freeswitch, I luurv freeswitch ;), running on a little VM with 128M of memory, and a few gigs of disk.
My internet provider is iinet, I get 10Mbps down and 1Mbps up. My VOIP provider is pennytel, chosen for their price. $5/month, includes $4 of free calls, it’s 8c a call untimed for Australia and about 20 other countries. Mobiles are 10.5c/minute billed by the second. They have a fax to email service for another $5/month, but no email to fax. So I can’t throw away the fax machine just yet. There’s a few other handy services they offer that I use, they come with the plan.
I was willing to pay extra and go with iinet’s VOIP for the reason of being closer network wise, and unshaped if I exceed my monthly download limit. But iinet only lets you use their VOIP from the iinet network, not sure why that would be, but I ruled them out based on that. Pennytel has the disadvantage of being further away network wise, and affected by shaping, so my phone doesn’t work from home if I get shaped. But it works wherever I am on the planet, assuming I can get a fairly consistent trip time. (I could be in America, and take and make calls from my Australian VOIP number)
My VOIP phone is a nokia E65 with WiFi and SIP. Dial a number, and it goes via SIP if it’s available, otherwise it uses the mobile network. Wifi drains the battery, but I’ve gotten used to charging it every other day, or whatever it is.
The only thing I haven’t tested much is QoS, I’ve recently adjusted it on my ADSL router, but there’s no real way of seeing if it works, other than experimenting. I’m considering putting the router in bridge mode, and using tc on linux. That’s going to require another network card, though.
I still have a landline, my fax machine is connected to it.
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2 Comments
FreeSwitch is great but too difficult to set up.
Olavo
I noticed that you said that you used Pennytel. Did you get this working with FreeSwitch? You seemed to have another provider in your example.
I am trying to get Pennytel working but with no luck yet!
Scott