I’ve had nearly a week of working with my SPA-3102 and I have to say that basic setup is a breeze. Within an hour of opening the package, I had it connected and was making and receiving VoIP calls. Another hour or so and I had my PSTN line connected and inbound calls were ringing on the phone I had connected to the FXO port. But this little piece of hardware has so many features and capabilities that I just couldn’t stop there. It can handle a total of 2 inbound VoIP accounts and six, count ’em, 6, outbound accounts. OK, two of the outbound are associated with your two inbound but, still, that’s a total of 6. And that doesn’t include the phone line from your phone company.

Things start to get a little tricky when it comes time to configure these various accounts and choosing one or another to dial your outbound call. I have accounts with SIPphone, FreeWorldDialup, Callcentric and a few others. The only account so far that has any outbound calling credit on it, though, is my Callcentric account. So, I need to configure my router appropriately and that means dial plans. What are dial plans? You can look it up in this Wikipedia entry but, for our purposes, let’s just say they’re strings which tell the router how to interpret the keys you hit on your phone’s handset. You could direct the router to

1) Send 311, 611 and 911 calls directly to your PSTN (i.e. dial the number through your telephone company’s line),
2) send all calls that start with “9” to the PSTN line (ditto),
3) send all calls that start with “#1” to your primary SIP provider, making a VoIP call to either another VoIP user or a PSTN line,
4) send all calls that start with “#2” to your secondary SIP provider (ditto),
5) send all calls that start with “#3” to your tertiary SIP provider (ditto),
6) send all other calls to your primary SIP provider (ditto).

This is, in fact, a slightly simplified version of what I have set up as my dial plan. And let me say it took a lot of forum-reading, thinking, experimenting and, ultimately, having a conversation with a VERY good friend to rationalize and simplify it. As a matter of fact, if you live with somebody and share your phone with them and they’re NOT a techno-nerd, I’d recommend you use something similar.

What else have I done? Calls that come to my PSTN line ring on the handset that’s plugged into the SPA3102. That means I can take ALL calls with that one handset. And, as you can see from my dial plan, I can dial PSTN calls from that handset, too. And that means that, ecept for backup in the case of a power outage, I don’t need to have a phone plugged into my PSTN line.

OK, time to back off again and let that all sink in. I’ll have more later. I still haven’t discussed all of this box’s capabilities.

I bought this Linksys SPA3102 from TelephonyDepot.com. It should be here later this week and, hopefully, I’ll have time to set it up in the very near future. VoipSpeak.net has a good guide to setting it up here and I’ll let you know how I fare as I go through the setup process. I’ll also be selecting dial-in and dial-out providers and will let you all know who I go with and what I think of their service.

Time for another installment. Let’s talk hardware. If you have Vonage or CallVantage or Packet8, you’ve got a VoIP router. But it’s “locked” meaning that it’ll only work with the provider you got it from. Where can you get an unlocked VoIP router? Try the Voxilla store. Most of you will probably be interested in either the Linksys PAP2T (about $60 today) or the Linksys SPA3102 (about $80 today). Both are FXS devices. Well, actually, the 3102 can also function as an FXO device, as well. But, in both cases, you plug a regular old POTS phone into the router and you can make and receive VoIP calls with your POTS phone through your router.

S0, what’s the difference between an FXO and an FXS? The difference is in the characteristics the router exhibits. See, there are two ends to a telephone line: the Central Office (or PBX) and the telephone handset (or keyset, in telephone company parlance). An FXO sits on the telephone end of the phone line and simply translates VoIP packets to POTS signals and vice-versa, acting as an intermediary between your phone and the VoIP system. An FXS acts like a Central Office or PBX, providing power, signalling and call routing as well as some … well, some pretty neat functions.

And that’s why you would spend the extra $20 to buy an FXS — those function. With an FXS, you can assign extensions (I’m extension #101, my dog is extension #102, my cat is extension #103, etc.), program dial plans (select a VoIP service provider depending on the number being dialed, for instance), set up voicemail boxes (a real must if you assign extensions) and even do call routing (take an inbound PSTN call and route it to a completely different VoIP destination like your laptop at work, for instance). Pretty cool, huh? May be overkill for what you’re trying to accomplish but, for 20 bucks, I say it’s worth it.

OK, now’s the time I quit and let it all sink in. Think about what I’ve said and think about what it would mean to have your own PBX in your house, a PBX that you control. Or just think about being able to get an inbound phone number for about $6/month including all the inbound minutes you can use. And think about being able to make outbound domestic calls for between $0.007/minute — yes 7 tenths of a cent per minute — and about $0.02/minute. How does that compare to your Vonage, all-you-can-eat plan for $28/month? Lessee … $6 for unlimited inbound, so that means, to spend $22 on outbound calls, at $0.02/minute, I’d have to make 1,100 minutes of outbound calls. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.

One thing I forgot to mention in my last RYO VoIP entry: you can use GrandCentral and your Gizmo SIP phone to make free outbound calls, too! While in beta, when logged in, GrandCentral allows you to initiate a call from their website. Go to your Contacts page, click on the the number of the contact you want to call and on the resulting pop-up, select the number you want GrandCentral to call you on. GrandCentral will call you and, when you’ve picked up, ring your party.

In my last entry I made reference to but didn’t explicitly state that you can, and usually do, buy INbound and OUTbound VoIP service separately if you’re rolling your own VoIP service. This is an important distinction! If you get lousy outbound service from one provider when you’re calling certain states or countries, you can set things up to use an outbound line from another provider just for those calls. Of course, you don’t have to — you can certainly use one provider for all your calls, both inbound and outbound, but the point is you have the CHOICE. And, since most providers don’t require a contract, you can move from one to another quite easily: just quit using one provider and start using another.

It’s not quite so easy with inbound, though … unless you take some steps to make it easy. Think about it: your inbound number is what people use to get in touch with youso you need to move that number from one provider to another (called “porting”). Fear not — there is a way around this, too! How? Don’t give out your new VoIP number. Instead, use a service like GrandCentral as your sole inbound number and use it to route calls to all your phones. Don’t have a GrandCentral account? Drop me an email and, while I have ’em, I’ll send you an invitation. And, if you’ve got a VoIP account with the Gizmo Project, you can have your calls routed directly over VoIP to your Gizmo number. Voila — free inbound calls! And, yes, you can buy a router, plug your Gizmo account information into it and now you’re talking over a regular phone as opposed to having to plug a headset into your computer.

I think I’ll stop here and let that sink in. And if you’ve got any questions, feel free to email.

More later.

I’ve been sitting on this too long now and I’m just bustin’ at the seams with information … too much, I think, to be able to spew it out here in one entry and have it make sense. So, with this entry, I’ll just tell you what I’ve been doing.

Almost two weeks ago I decided to look into an alternative to Vonage. I started doing some searches for VoIP systems and uncovered a vast wonderland of technogeek-dom. It took almost a week for me to make sense of what is required to build your own VoIP solution from scratch and another week to get an idea of providers, prices and features.

Here’s the short story: if you’re willing to buy your own router (for about $60), you can build your own VoIP solution for your home, including connections to your normal, run-of-the-mill RJ-11 phones (yes, the kind you already have installed in your house and possibly even plugged into your Vonage/CallVantage router) for $10/month or less. That includes your own phone number, unlimited inbound minutes and outbound calling rates of about a penny per minute (ranges are from just under a penney to a little over 1.5 cents). At that rate, 1,000 outbound minutes will cost you up to $15.00. Lay that on top of your $10/month and your sitting at $25. Of course, that assumes you make 1,000 minutes of calls per month from your home phone. Me, I don’t use anywhere near that number of minutes per month — I average around 300, spiking up to about 600. So, at worst, I’ll pay about 600*$0.015 or $9.

Now, I realize this cost savings is really pretty trivial stuff. Going from about $28/month (Vonage + cost recovery fees + taxes) to about $15/month won’t even cover my Starbuck’s habit. But we’re talking about geek heaven here, take my word for it! That softphone that Vonage wants you to pay extra for? That feature is included with every single SIP provider that I looked at. I should note there are some very low cost providers (Magic Jack is a very popular one) that use a proprietary protocol and can only be used with their hardware. But, those aside, you can bring up a softphone client on your PC (at work, say) and both it and your home phone will ring when you get a call.

OK, I’ll stop here and let that all sink in. The takeaway from this entry? You can create your own VoIP solution for your home for the cost of a router ($60-$75). The service will cost you $10 or less per month for unlimited free inbound calls. Outbound calls to regular USA and Canada phones (landline and mobile) will cost about 1.5 cents per minute and, if you’re like me, making about 600 minutes of outbound calls per month, that translates to another $9 per month. In the process, you can have your phone number on both your PC and your home phone simultaneously.

What do my future entries on this have in store for you? How about the ability to build your own PBX with Open Source software? Not interested? No big deal, you say, you don’t have that many phones in your house? Well, what if I told you that you can assign extensions to your cell phone, your wife (or girlfriend … or both), your son/daughter, your grandmother, your brother. Yup, you can set it up so that you (or anyone) can reach anyone in your family at their own phone, by calling YOUR PBX and keying in their extension. Regardless of whether the called party is in the same house, the same city or the same state. And that’s just one thing you can do.

Stay tuned!