[Ben]

IP net in High Wycombe have a very cheap ip phone. Find them in teh phone book cos if I put the details on this site the moderator will remove them….

[Florian]

Ben. That wouldn’t be advertising. Just indicate the www url since everyone NOT interested can ignore. If you happen to be the boss of that company you would just be doing PR and there is nothing wrong with it if you give us the best deal at the best price. But dare you if trying to recommend something mediocre at a high price, you will hear from me right here. A cheap equipment for me means less than 150 USD. And it MUST be standalone (home pc is often turnded off) and SIP compliant for the home user since H323 ist for geeks and corporate users because it requires a gatekeeper server.
Murrarij. The best devices IMHO are from Cisco being the ATA186 (around 150 USD)and the IP Phone 7960 (manager version of 7940)(from 250 USD used and from 350 USD new). An alternative may be a phone from Arrayvox that I have seen around 150 USD on Ebay. I think it DOES help to exchange experience and expertise on real brands and models and not just generic talk. Because we need a REAL solution, don’t we. I will keep posting when I have tested the ATA186 right now shipping to me. Muarrij, you have not answered whether you want to call point to point over internet or you also like to call the public phone network. This DOES matter to recommend something good. Basically a cheap headset or USB phone (all cost less than 40 USD)will be O.K. togther with a software solution (anybody knows MSN messenger ;-), it is SIP compliant!) handling the voice encoding. However I think making phonecalls with a cheap headphone is no fun. For me it must be a phone or at least a handset. Prices are indicated in USD since you would probably not know the exchange rate from my Swiss franc to Pound Sterling. We all may or may not be so fond of that big transatlantic country but they DO invent better VoIP products than “old Europe”, so for the GOOD deal you may have to look at news and products from across the border.

[Naser]

Amazon Sells ATA 186 at 99$ they are selling this device for vonage. can buy the device and not activate the service and use it for what ever purpose u need. Look for Vonage under amazon

[Florian]

Naser. Thank you for your post. Did you hear this or did you actually do this. I have seen controversial post on broadband forums. Some are saying just factory reset the vonage firmware will do and others say that the device ships without license and would not be enabled to upgrade firmware and cannot be used but with vonage. I would appreciate any personal experience, since asking vonage would return a clear answer.

Murrarij. I am sorry, in fact you did say that you want a simple plain IP to IP call from London to Paris.

[Naser]

The I got to know about this deal thru the FWD discussion forum. FWD.pulver.com

I my self have used vonage for the last one year and recently reset the ata 186 to factory default and am using it as SIP device with FWD now.

If u have access to ata186, I can send you the instructions regarding how to to reset to factory default.
Keep in mind that u need a router also to use the high speed with your pc as well as the ata 186. I myself us a Linksys router but others also work. I have tried , netgear, dlink.

[Muarrij]

I had a look on IP NETs (High Wycombe’s) site and couldnt find the IP phone you talk about?

Naser/Florian – what kind of figures are we talking about here for the ATA186 and FWD solution to use SIPS? Can I use a standard LINKSYS router – (nat router) with wireless 802.11? Ie… would it then be possible to use my pda (wireless) to make calls via the broadband connection to any phone?

(I hope that makes sense?).

THANKS

[Naser]

You can check for the ata186 at ebay. ATA186 is a FXS device that will connect to your linksys/LAN in the home. U will need a Phone to connect to ATA186. ANy cheap phone will work. Regarding your PDA, if you have a SIP client you can configure it and test it FWD. then You will be able to make calls to FWD community. The limitation with the FWD is that you can call only to the FWD community all over the world and not to any phone.

[wilson boyrie]

Hello Guys. I have a couple of those phones IP net . They are cheap sets, with not much quality on the making of the sets themselves.
Now, they work fine with my Quintum gateway/gatekeeper once I worked out some details.
They have a feature that is very nice. They will “masquerade” and I.P. address behind a NAT router. i have cable service with a Lynksys router doing nat and these phones are able to go trought it and register into the Quintum, using the I.P. address of the router,not the internal I.P. given by the DHCP server of the Lynksys.
I have seen a lot more expensive solutions that do not have this feature.
Not trying to sell anything, just a consumer.
Good luck!!!! By the way, those phones sell for about $80.00 american dollars a piece.

[Florian]

@ Wilson. Thank you for the post. I think this is a good price for people maintaining a gatekeeper and you are honest about the quality of the product. The abovenamed company “IP Net” has got no link on their website and upon inquiry they said the phone would cost 100 £ (GBP). That’s quite a bit more than what you quote. If it works well for you and many others I still strongly believe that SIP is most likely to be the near future quasi standard for private men (and women of course). However it may be an advantage to have control over your own gatekeeper. H323 is also an open standard. May I compare it to the situation like Linux and Windows. H323 is the Linux and SIP is the Windows in this comparison. With Windows you don’t really know what it is doing but it works quite well. With Linux you need to know what you are doing or you don’t have the slightest chance to get it running ever. Does anyone know a bit more on the history of H323 or SIP?

[Naser]

Muarrij

You can use your PDA as a VOIP device, all u need is a SIP client loaded on it. xten.com is offering a lite client for PDA’.

[Muarrij]

Naser, Thanks! I think this would be a valuable tool. Especially if you can roam around within your wireless range and make half decent calls using your broadband connection – obviously you can see what Im trying to achieve here. More over wireless pocket areas in the future may enable completely free communication!

Does anyone have any solid links to sites where I can order IP phones in the UK. (Excluding Amazon). I know there is a company in Scotland that do them but dont know their name. Thanks!

[Naser]

Muarrij, I today tested the xten software between a caller from australia (dial up) and myself on dsl in canada. when the caller called my ata186 I could not hear and when I called the caller using ata186, he could barely hear me. But when I switched to xten lite on my side the call quality became very good.
SO please keep in mind there will be problems when using hetrogenious equipments unless there is some kind of embeded information in the handshake to agree on the common codec used and dynamically change codec based on the QOS. my direct e-mail address is nhqamar@hotmail.com.

Best regards

[Joseph]

Please Help!!!

I only have one way sound on my port 2 ATA 186. Doing peer to Peer in SIP. Port 1 works very well.

ATA 186 > D-LINK –IP– D-LINK ATA 186

Thanks in advance

[Muarrij]

Hello, does anyone have ANY idea whether its possible to run the above IP phone (Home) solutions when using a DSL router/Firewall package? Are there any associated problems with this?
In particular the LINKSYS 802.11g wireless router, switch, nat firewall?
Thanks !

[Florian]

I have purchased an Cisco ATA186 for 99.99 USD (Vonage Digital Voice package) from Amazon and factory resetted the device. It works perfect with http://www.iconnecthere.com I can recommend this setting to everyone interested to use a standard analogue phone for Voice over IP. The voice quality and ease of use is perfect. I have only 62k upload bandwith and a network latency of 300ms to the US. Iconnecthere has a setup description and offers free 0800 calls to the US. This could be interesting for anyone living in a monopoly telco country with no access to cheap phone rates with prepaid cards from their own country. Via the US good rates are available. iconnecthere does have low but not very low rates for international calls.

[Author]

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