Thursday, May 15, 2008
Posted at 11:04am Permalink Comments (View)
VOIP As It Was Meant To Be
At our house we have Optimum Voice, which is Cablevision’s VOIP service. It works perfectly well with good call quality and a decent web admin panel. It even let’s you forward a .wav file of your voicemails to PhoneTag for transcription which is truly useful since Susan and I see both out of the house all day. But it’s not really VOIP as it was meant to be. The service is delivered in blackbox fashion in the form of a cable modem with two phone jacks on the back (we have two lines at home). I asked about SIP phones and the answer was simply ‘no we don’t support them.’ Now I am pretty sure that Cablevision did not build something crazy and proprietary (although one never knows). So inside the cable modem there is probably a clean interface between SIP and the part that’s driving the analog jacks but no obvious access to that. By looking on the Internet I found various folks on other cable systems who had figured out how to hack into the modem box to identify the SIP settings. I don’t have the time to try that for Optimum and the particular modem we have, but I have found a great alternative. CallCentric has a wonderful self service VOIP offering that was not only extremely easy to set up but offers great quality and competitive rates. Now I have a SNOM 300 phone which I can plug anywhere into our home network (or any other IP network for that matter) and get the full on VOIP experience as it was meant to be. So far I highly recommend this to anyone with a home office or small business / startup (will provide updates if I encounter any glitches).
