Tag: voip

Categories
General blog entries

VoIP providers

In my quest for VoIP support in the Netherlands I found a lot of providers. Most of them seem to be catering the consumer needs rather than the prosumer or even business needs. Most providers fall under one of 3 categories: consumer (“free” landline calls but usually not unlimited call time resulting in paid minutes after a certain time), prosumer (better defined call rates, subscriptions, professional level support) and corporate (meant for large businesses, lots of trunks, hosted PBX and so on).

Note that I omit the service providers that only provide services for their own customers. For example, Tele2 has a business oriented VoIP division but also provides VoIP telephony to their DSL customers.

Known ISPs with a VoIP service for their customers: KPN, Tele2, XS4all, @Home (Ziggo).

Note: the listing above is incomplete and based upon results I found in my search online.

Consumer ∞

VoIP Goedkoop ∞

This is a handy site containing links to multiple “free” VoIP providers. These are fine for consumer usage, normally are not suited for business usage (free equals no quality guarantee, no subscriptions) and usually do not come with DID services.

http://voipgoedkoop.nl/

VoIPBuster ∞

As one of the more wide known service providers, VoIPBuster advertises with free calls. The “free” here is relative as not all destinations are actually free and for example land line calling in the Netherlands is “free” for a minute (they call that a “Superdeal”, a choice of words which is not reflected by their meaning), after which an unspecified fee is charged. Also, every 120 days, a user needs to reactivate their account by paying 10 Euros, which is converted into 10 Euros credit. Also, mobile numbers cost 25 cpm, which is twice as much as every other VoIP provider I found, not a bargain at all…

www.voipbuster.com

Prosumer ∞

VoipQ ∞

VoipQ supports subscriptions, clear call rates and supports DID services as well.

www.voipq.nl

SpeakUp ∞

SpeakUp also provides subscriptions, DIDs and clear calling rates. The also offer hosted PBX or just trunk services.

www.speakup.nl

Voys Telecom

∞

Supports VoIP subscriptions from one to multiple lines and everything that comes with it. Does not seem to be the cheapest provider but they seem to have a good reputation.

www.voys.nl

Corporate ∞

KPN ∞

KPN is the leading Dutch telecom company for decades. Slowly they start to move from POTS solutions to VoIP, for example for their DSL and fibre customers. For the corporate markt they only aim for the big players, as only the start fee is 2000 Euros at the time of writing and subscriptions are expressed in 3 digit monthly fees for the smallest packages. Great for huge corporations and call centers, but useless for everyone else.

http://zakelijk.kpn.com/business/voip.htm

Categories
How-To's

Adding PBXes.org to Nokia N95

So you want to use your Nokia N95 with the popular PBXes.org service to start using VOIP calls? You have come to the right place. Note that these instructions will most likely apply to all Symbian S60 phones, like the Nokia E65. Also note that in case of the N95, this even works for phones without a SIM card, making it possible to call with those phones as well!

In this article I assume that you already have a PBXes.org account and have set up an extension for your Nokia N95, if not please look at this guide.

Let create the SIP profile to connect to PBXes.org:

  1. Create the profile:

    1. Open the menu
    2. Open Tools
    3. Open Settings
    4. Select Connection
    5. Scroll down and select SIP Settings
    6. Click Options
    7. Select New SIP profile

  2. Set up the new profile:

    1. Select Use default profile
    2. Change the profile name to something familiar: PBXes.org
    3. Leave Service Profile set to IETF
    4. Set Default access point to your current Wifi network
    5. Set Public user name to myuser-800@pbxes.org where you substitute myuser for your account name and 800 for the extension number you created for this phone
    6. Leave Use compression set to No
    7. Set Registration to Always on to force the phone to connect to the SIP service when starting up (or leave it if you are not planning on using it all the time)
    8. Leave Use security on No
    9. Leave Proxy server empty

  3. Set up the registrar:

    1. Enter Registrar server
    2. Set Registrar server address to sip.pbxes.org
    3. Set Realm to pbxes.org
    4. Set User name to myuser-800 and substitute like before
    5. Set Password to the password you set on pbxes.org for this extension number
    6. Set Transport type to UDP
    7. Leave Port on 5060

  4. Set up internet calling:

    1. Click Back to return
    2. Click Back to return to SIP Settings
    3. Click Back to return to Connection
    4. Select Internet tel
    5. Click Options
    6. Select New profile
    7. Change the name if desired.
    8. Select the SIP profiles to use, if you only added PBXes.org it will be selected by default.
    9. Click Back to “Internet telephone”
    10. Click Back until you reach the “Tools” menu.
    11. Select Internet tel.
    12. Click Options.

    13. Select Connect to service

The phone will now connect to the Wi-Fi network you specified earlier and a globe with phone icon will appear showing that the registration was successful. When you want to call using the SIP account, use Options and Internet call to activate the SIP mode.

To switch to SIP calling by default do the following:

  1. Open the menu.
  2. Open Tools.
  3. Open Settings.
  4. Select Phone.
  5. Select Call.

  6. Scroll down and set Default call type to Internet call

Next time you will call a number it will use your SIP account automatically! (Note: if the SIP account fails – no Wi-Fi etc – the phone will switch back to normal calling modes).

Common pitfall: ‘Address not in use’ when you try to call a number (meanwhile you can receive calls fine). This happened to me because I did not specify a Default route for the newly added extension, after making the standard route truly global all was well.