Hi all

Just bought a Linksys SPA 3000 ATA box cheap off ebay and hooked it up t my adsl, signed up with Faktortel account $7.95 / mth unsure if that includes calls but heres what I've setup -

Calls to Local and national thru Faktortel at 10c unlimited as long as you can talk! Tested working fine.

Calls to mobiles just signed up free with Pennytel FREE for mobiles @ 12.78c/min

P.S my line is thru spin @ $27mth rental with 15gb ADSL2+ @$39.50

As for dial in numbers we now have our brisbane normal PSTN number and a Taree based number for the inlaws to call us at a local cal charge.

And Pennytel (yet to be received) recon the DID number I get from them can be a Newcastle based number so my parents can also call at local call charge also.

So to put it simply -

For us -

10c calls anywhere in aus untimed.

Plus mobiles @ 12.78c min.

Line $27 adsl2+ 15gb $40

3 dial in phone numbers, our brissy number, a Taree number and a Newcastle number.

And the missus doesn't have to learn anything she just dials the number and the box routes a mobile thur pennytel a local / national thru faktortel and a 1800 thru the normal pstn line.

The only thing I've told her is if she cant get thru to prees #1 which lets her dial thru the normal line but only if nessesary.

This is cool, still configuring it but any tips would be appreciated. and for those considering it well only made a couple of calls but I can't tell the difference in quality so far.

So what do ya's think? Cheaper options? Have you tired voip then gone back? Whats your experiences with Faktortwl/pennytel??

Edited 15/10/07 01:20 PM15/10/07 01:20 PM by Paranormal

I have VoIP with iiNet. I have not tried the SIP companies you use, but it does sound like a good deal.

The biggest problem with residential VoIP is the ADSL service being congested or unreliable. As residential ADSL is heavily contended (300+:1) this can cause choppy voice calls.

It is a great cost saving if you make a lot of calls, especially interstate or international.

P.S Make sure you configure your router to use the PSTN line for 000 calls as VoIP calls to 000 do not give location or might not even work.

Sounds like you've got everything pretty well sused out, call routing, dial plans and what not. The SPA is a good unit. I've been using VoIP for the past 5 years (both soft phones and hard phones) or there about and it has always worked as expected.

I would agree with what Zapper said though regarding the possibility of it being choppy at times. Normally though this is caused by saturating your own link more so than the provider (presuming they're one of the big 4 providers) and having a router that does not support QoS for whatever traffic you're dealing with. Typically you'd want a decent router that support QoS so that you can give a higher priority to SIP and RTP traffic over other things such has HTTP, POP, etc.

I myself have an Asterisk server running on one of my Linux boxes that accepts and routes calls which is behind NAT and my other hard phones are on another NAT network behind that machine. The hard phones talk to Asterisk and Asterisk in turn talks to my providers both national (recently tried Engin BYO account and could never authenticate so I dropped them, plus they were pretty clueless when you start quoting SIP response codes and messages to them and they don't respond to support requests) and international (I've got two SIP providers in the US, one is a mates ISP that also offers VoIP and then another national provider so I can call my other family members in other states). I've even went as far as to configure my Asterisk server to simulate an AXE and S12 exchange interface in terms of calling features and hash codes entered here in Australia to keep things consistent with normal PSTN services. Fun stuff.

I have a phone...I push buttons and it calls people....It's Great!

People need to be aware that QoS is not the answer to a saturated link QoS (as used in consumer-grade devices) is simply a low latency queue, ensuring that voice packets are sent out of the device before other packets.