On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, Aditya wrote:
FWIW, I purchased a Cisco ATA-186 and then a 7960 on eBay (after trying out MS Messenger and finding it lacking) and they just work. I also have used the same units to get a PSTN phone number routed over IP using www.iconnecthere.com -- and you can make it work behind NAT too (but I can assure you it's easier without NAT).
Vonage (vonage.com) let's you get your feet wet at $25/month. Limited outbound, but unlimited inbound and you can pick from many area codes. They supply the ATA, and you have 30 days to play. IConnectHere.com is the consumer arm of Delta3. They are OK, but they offer no help if you get stuck. Vonage is truly plug-n-play. Works fine behind NAT, doesn't require any ports to be opened to function behind a nat or firewall. Just make sure 5060/udp and 69/udp can go out and you're off and running. As others have stated, it's more fun to talk about VoIP after you've used it. I've found the voice quality equals or exceeds my POTS line. There is some echo at times when the call starts, then the magic echo-cancellation stuff seems to learn and things get better. The delay is fine, but can be a bit off-putting during a multi-person conference call between excited tech and marketing folks. But if you regularly use a cell phone, you may not even notice this, as I find the delay on my cell to be worse. What I'm guessing Bill is getting at is the common VoIP implementations out there are running UDP. Since it's in "spray and pray" mode, you'll be worried more about it stepping on your well-behaved TCP traffic than vice-versa. I'm running a codec that tops out around 80Kb/s on an ADSL line and I've yet to find a way to affect my voice traffic. In 6 months of using the service I've yet to have a dropped call, and I regularly make 80 minute+ calls. All in all I think there's less voodoo involved than most people imagine. It just works. Now I need to figure out how to break into my ATA so I can use it for FWD as well (the ATA ships with an md5 key and the config it fetches via tftp is encrypted)... Anyone? C
I'm willing to play tech support via email if anyone has questions about getting started.
Adi