Thread: VOIP Harware, ISP Advice

Originally Posted by landyprincess

You will need to put the states area code in front of all phone numbers. For example if your folks want to dial you in Melbourne they will need to put in 03. Similarily if someone was in adelaide and wanted to phone someone else in adelaide they would need to add in the 08.

This is only true of some providers, and is all down to how they implement the dial plan (Which is the thing that determines how you dial as well as what the numbering plan is for a given country or area.) and whether they care about your geographical location. Some ISP's let you choose which dial plan to use (For example, with my Pennytel account, I set it to WA so I don't have to dial 08 for WA numbers, but obviously still do for SA which is a different subset of 08.) and others do it for you based on your geographical location - so for iiNet, I dial exactly as I would with Telstra.

One other issue with VOIP is you can't dial 1300, 13, 12, 1800 type numbers. You need to physically disconnect the line from the ADSL router and plug that into your normal handset.

Again, not necessarily. The VoIP provider may choose not to allow access to these numbers, but it has nothing to do with the fact the service is VoIP. Again, iiNet do support this on their iiTalk service, and I suspect others do too.

The dial tone is distinguishably different from Telstra's dial tone also.

Dial tone is provided by your hardware on VoIP, not by the ISP. Therefore, you can have your ATA, IP Phone or router play whatever dial tone you like as long as it is configurable. Same with ring tone - this is provided locally too. Look for settings regarding country in the phone/line configuration pages, which some of the better devices have.

Originally Posted by cwiley

Get a router with Quality of Service (QOS) built in. Give VOIP first priority and - voila - no voice breakups anymore, even with large downloads/uploads happening.

That's not true either - you can't really prioritise your downstream data as the settings only apply once the traffic is at the router. So although you are unlikly to max out a high speed ADSL2 connection, it's pretty easy to do so on a slower service is running things like Bitorrent flat out.

Also, although QoS will give priority to your VoIP traffic leaving your router, once it's on the wire, any packet marking you have done will likely be ignored by the ISP, so from the next hop onwards all traffic is mixed in and has equal priority. This is especially important when you are using VoIP from someone other than your ISP, as the traffic has to go onto the "real" Internet instead of just within your ISP's network where they have control and there is less likely to be contention between your IP phone/router the VoIP gateway.