[OT] Vonage and VOIP

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 03:17:58PM -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Please report on it once everything is up and running. I probably
> only need a couple of ringers.

I was deep in the SPA-3000 manual the other day, but I am not quite
ready to order because I want to make sure I understand what I am
doing and whether it will work.

What I have in mind:

We live in Boston but also have an apartment in Montreal.  In both we
have DSL and local telephone service.

The SPA-3000 has:

 - power connector,
 - ethernet,
 - RJ-11 for hooking up to a phone (or phones), an "FXS" connector,
 - RJ-11 for hooking up to phone company, an "FXO" connector. 

My idea is to have one here and one there.  Say I pick up a phone here
and dial.  If I dial a local number it completes the call through
Verizon.  If I dial a Montreal number it goes out the internet, into
the SPA-3000 in Montreal, and then completes the call through Bell
Canada.  If I dial something else, it goes out the internet to
some-IP-phone-provider and they terminate the call.  Calling from
Montreal would behave similarly.

When incoming wired calls happen they would ring the regular phones.
But, if I wanted to I could switch it over to have incoming calls at
one location forward to the other and ring the wired phones there.
Or, I could get more clever and have Montreal calls come in to Boston
then back out to my 617-area code cellphone.

All of the above would work without my having an inbound VoIP phone
number, just using iconnecthere.com or the like to place calls.  And I
can shop around.

If I got caller ID on my home line I could have it recognize my cell
phone and give me the opportunity to dial back out over the internet.

I am pretty sure a pair of SPA-3000 boxes could do all the with a mere
dose of configuring.  I don't know how cumbersome it will be to switch
incoming calls between ringing locally and forwarding.  I also don't
know if I will need to get a static IP address in Canada.  Finally, I
wonder whether I will want some QoS magic to give VoIP traffic higher
priority through my routers.

How's that for ambitious?


-kb