Fnord.

The old (Hitachi WirelessIP 5000):

The new (Sipura/Linksys 3102):

I had a fair bit of grief with my Hitachi phone and finally eBay’d it off. In its place is the Sipura 3102, a 3-interface device of considerable sophistication. It has FXS, FXO, WAN and LAN ports, meaning that it is:

1. A router and firewall
2. An analog phone interface (FXO)
3. A telephone network (PSTN/POTS) interface (FXS)
4. An ethernet bridge
5. A SIP client/server

There are several things I really appreciate about it:

1. Small, low power, no fans or moving parts
2. If power fails or VoIP drops, it has a relay to reconnect the analog phone to the wall. Failsafe!
3. Plays well with Asterisk, the VoIP server software of choice.

You connect your existing analog phone to the Sipura, wire it into your network, and voila! Our existing (cordless) phone works a lot better than the Hitachi, so this is an enormous win. Once in place, it all seems easy - VoIP in and out, analog in and out, software phones, quite cool…

The outgoing connection is via the commercial service Broadvoice, which for 25/month has more-or-less unlimited to most countries we care about. Seems to work pretty well, and we’ll really be giving it a workout now.

Getting it working

…took some doing. This page on InfoWorld was by far the most useful, and once I fixed my dialplan I was good to go. The VoIP wiki page is also somewhat useful.

Big note: The VoIP has to go via the WAN port; the LAN port will not work. The Infoworld doc covers this, but I’ll also note that you can just configure the Sipura to ‘bridge mode’ from the Web interface, and don’t have to use the PSTN dialing hack.

I also setup QoS (quality of service) on my router, so hopefully other traffic won’t screw up the voice connections. I also plugged the Sipura (and analog phone base station) into the UPS, so we’ll still have phone if the power goes out.

So far, so good: Recommended!

Update 10/11/07: We’re now using Telasip with better results than Broadvoice. Been six months or so now.

Update 4/16/08: We had a persistent problem with too-quiet audio; this page explains that gain setting are buried on the ‘Regional/Advanced/Miscellaneous’ page. Yeesh.

From the NY Times:

FREE INTERNATIONAL CALLS You can now call any of 50 countries from the United States, free. Talk as long as you like. You pay only for a call to the access number in Iowa, which is 712-858-8883; if you use your cellphone on nights or weekends, even that’s a free call.

There’s no contract, no ads, nothing to sign up for. At the prompt, press 1 for English. Then punch in 011, the country code and the phone number. The call rings through immediately.

Fine print: In some countries, you can reach only landlines, not cellphones. And in part because FuturePhone’s lines have been flooded, its success at placing calls is not, ahem, 100 percent.

But it’s hard to argue with “free,” which, according to the company, it will be until at least 2010.

I haven’t tried this, and I suspect that the NYT mention will saturate them, but it’s perhaps worth a try. The other one that caught my eye was this:

As you inspect something you’re tempted to buy, dial 888-Do-Frucall (888-363-7822; leave off the last two L’s for — well, for now). When prompted, plug in the bar code on the package. After a 10-second ad, a voice is usually successful in identifying the item by name (“Luv’s Diapers Value Pack, 208 Diapers Variation — not available used”), and provides the prices from three sample online stores.

Simpler than surfing with a smartphone, worth adding to the addressbook.

Update 7/23/07: Looks like its gone down, sorry…

Finally got my cheap-from-ebay Hitachi WirelessIP 5000 phone working. Took a lot of doing:

Seems to have semi-poor wireless reception, worse than my not-great aluminum powerbook. Audio quality is still in progress, not sure I have it setup right. I’m getting a lot of these from Asterisk:

    -- Got SIP response 606 "Not Acceptable" back from 204.128.136.100

No help from google, surprisingly.

Since the manuals were hard to find, I’m mirroring them locally for anyone else who needs them:
WIP-5000_WebInterface.pdf

WirelessIP5000_SE_Manual_jul.pdf

WirelessIP5000_Users_manual_jul.pdf

We’ll see how this goes. I really, really love the idea of unlimited phone calls for twenty bucks a month. In other words, email me if you want to talk and I’ll send you the new VoIP number.

Update 11/23/06:

I still get 606 errors, but I have new firmware I need to try. The wiki page on this phone has some ideas, so maybe when I get home I’ll try a firmware update. I’m also considering just selling it and switching to a Nokia N80, which has SIP/Asterisk support.

Update 12/20/06:

Sold it on Ebay and bought a Sipura 3012 FXS/FXO adapter. Too much hassle with the Hitachi.

Preferably one of these. $400, silent, 1U, with Compact Flash for hard drives. It’d make a killer box for OpenBSD. I really miss having pf and level-2 firewalling in place.

Nice for VoIP, too, since you can use pf/altq to prioritize your VoIP traffic as well. Cool.

I just added SIP and IAX2 records for phfactor.net to UltraDNS, so in theory you can SIP-dial pfh at phfactor.net and it’ll work…

Got the idea from slacker, and found the details on the wonderful VoIP wiki.

Looks like we’ll convert over to Broadvoice VoIP for all phone - been using their BYOB $6/month plan and a cheap Grandstream 102 with good results. Noticed that Wired Test top-rated them (Broadvoice, that is) and am now shopping for a good Wi-Fi VoIP phone, suggestions welcome!

I just stumbled on an interesting article, using Bluetooth to tell Asterisk about presence. The idea is that, if you’re not around, Asterisk can redirect calls to your cell phone or similar.

Clever, I must admit. I use Asterisk now, though I’ve a way to go to really get the most out of it.

Check it out.