I’ve recently jumped on the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) wagon, and what fun it is! My reasons range from the mundane, i.e. did you know your credit score with some companies is higher if you give them a land line number than a mobile?), to exotic: I wanted to be able to have various inbound numbers to give to different people/organisations, and have different phones in the house and my mobile ring (or not) depending on which number was dialed, the time of day and lots of other factors. Family should be able to wake me up at 2am for an emergency, but Southern Water doing a customer survey at 9pm should get sent straight to voicemail! My other  reason was since my wife left me I’ve moved back in with my parents; It was impractical to have another physical landline installed by British Telecom – not to mention expensive - so I started looking at how I could get around that.

VoIP was the answer.

Up until today, I hadn’t spent a dime in setting all this up, either. I’ve just splashed out £70 on purchasing a Siemens Gigaset C475IP DECT Phone so I can take advantage of my VoIP setup with my computer switched off and my mobile phone not continuously logged in. How have I otherwise managed to get all this for beans? SIPGate is currently offering free inbound geographical UK numbers to UK residents (1 per account but they don’t mind you signing up for more than one account). I’ve got 3 SIPGate accounts providing 3 DIDs (Direct Inward Dialing) geographic telephone numbers, and a Connexin account providing 1 more.

All of these are then centrally managed using the fantastic service over at PBXes.org, who provide (for free, and upwards) your own VoIP PBX (Private Branch Exchange) based on Asterisk. The configuration takes a little getting used to as the terminology can be somewhat foreign, but the wiki and forums provide ample assistance and you’ll be flying in no time. I’ve got 1 extension configured within PBXes at the moment and that’s used by my mobile phone (Nokia N95) to login either via wi-fi or HSDPA as required for outbound internet calling. Inbound is also possible but keeping it logged in eats the battery unless an external source is available, so currently all inbound calls get sent straight to voicemail, which is then emailed to me as an attachment. When my dedicated Gigaset phone arrives, I’ll just create another extension within PBXes and add it to the dial-plan for the various inbound numbers and actually have a phone that rings.

By signing up with various VoIP carriers, I’ve managed to get some of my outbound calls entirely for free. SIPGate provides free outbound calls to UK 0800 numbers, for example. 999 calls are routed out via a specific SIPGate trunk that has my details registered to it so it’ll appear on the operator’s screen with my name and address should I dial 999. I’m still searching for a SIP provider that does free outbound USA calls so I can ring my sister for free – if anyone knows of any please leave a comment. By setting up some nifty intelligent dial-plans within the PBX, it’ll automatically choose the least-cost route to send out my call on.

All in all, it’s been great fun setting all this up over the last few weeks on and off. As my needs expand, the Gigaset can handle up to 6 phones on one base station and the PBXes service will grow to accomodate with ease!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 5:21 am and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.