VOIPing it up! SIP phone in the place one time!

Tags: VIOP, Bluetalk, Grandstream, SIP phone, doohickey
This morning I received me grandstream Handy Tone 486 which is a new doohickey that allows you connect a normal POTS (get me with me acronyms) phone to a SIP VOIP provider.

Translation : Allows you to connect normal telephones to an electric internet type magic phone thingy.

In theory this should allow me to have much cheaper phone calls, especailly international calls (I never make international calls). Any way the grandstream came with a voucher for a bluetalk account. Bluetalk are a SIP VIOP service provider, and give you the ability to call normal 80's David Hasselhoff/ Pop up head lights type phone lines. They also provide you with your incoming phone number so if you have invested in some freinds, they can ring you from there bog standard non futuristic phone. Bluetalk score highly here as they provide the ability to have localised incoming numbers (i.e. I was able to choose an 02392 Portsmouth number) this is cool as skype currently only offer you a choice of London number, and who wants people to think you live in London?

So far in my huge test of one phone call the clarity is excelent, staggeringly better than googletalk or skype which surprised me. Currently im trying to work out my SIP address so in theory it should be able to also call any other SIP phone for free, (googletalk, is working on SIP functionality for a later release, skype wont be as they use their own proprietry doohickey cleverness). Also tests need to be done on how bad teh quality gets when downloading lots of legitimate purchased software. Which may lead to to start looking at QOS.