Off the Phone Grid

I have officially cut the cord with AT&T. Landline anyway. For now, I'm stuck with AT&T Wireless for our iPhones, but like many others who have complained, they don't work at my house. This wasn't a landline for wireless move, or even a move to Vonage or MagicJack, this was dropping a $2000 a year AT&T for an almost-free roll-your-own internet phone set up. And it was pretty easy.

This photo shows the box on the side of my house (the important sounding Telephone Network Interface) with three telephone jacks disconnected, a sign of Victory!

I didn't do this on a whim. I worked at Bell Labs for five years and they sent me to grad school, so I have been a loyal customer, no MCI or Sprint for me. But even I got fed up. Every month its $16.45 per phone line plus $9.99 for CallerID for one line, plus $8.95 for a voicemail box plus $3.95 for International Savings Advantage Plan plus $13.20 for a Federal Subscriber Line Charge plus a 75 cent Rate Surcharge plus a 12 cent State Regulatory Fee plus $1.77 Federal Universal Service Fee plus $7.95 for a One Rate plan plus 14 cents a minute for calls in California plus 7 cents a minute for the rest of the country plus $2.86  for a Universal Connectivity Charge plus $2.39 for a Carrier cost recovery fee and finally $16.14 in a hodgepodge of Government Fees and Taxes. And without any of the even simplest features of Google Voice such as ringing calls on my landline and cellphone and letting me pick which one to answer or transcribed voicemails. It was time to drop AT&T like a bad habit.

I have three phone lines for six of us at home. One for our main number, one for a fax machine and one that rings on my home office desk. I now have three phone numbers with two different VOIP providers. The tricky part was keeping my main phone number that we've had for 18 years. I paid $10 extra for it, as it ends with 5377, which is KESS (pretty nice, eh?)

I currently pay Comcast a confiscatory $75.41 a month for internet access, call it IP dialtone if you will. $69.95 a month for Blast which claims 20 megabit per second service, which I've never seen, plus $5 to lease the cable modem plus 46 cents in State Sales Tax. Another ripoff, but we'll work on cutting that cord another time.

Dropping AT&T requires buying an Internet Phone Adapter. I've got an old Panasonic phone system that came with the house, plus a half dozen wireless phones, so I needed something that looked exactly like a real phone line, dialtone and rings and all. The one that is used widely is the Cisco/Linksys PAP2T. Think of it as one RJ-45 Ethernet jack in (from your router) and two RJ-11 phone jacks out. Exactly what you need and $45-50. The reason for going mainstream is that most VOIP serivces can tell you exactly how to configure the PAP2T. 

Next, you need a VOIP or Voice Over Internet Protocol service. I use two. The first one I signed up for, Sipgate, was free for the first line. They have local numbers in my area code and I spent probably an hour hitting refresh until i got a number that I liked. I probably shouldn't have bothered, as I use Google Voice to ring this number, but more on that later. I unplugged the telephone  jack on the outside of my house for the number that rings on my desk, plugged the phone line into the PAP2T picked up the phone and...nothing. OK, it's easy, but  not that easy.

Sipgate has a pretty good support section of their website that shows exactly how to configure the PAP2T. You hit "****" and then 110# and over the phone, the PAP2T tells you the IP address of the device. You plug that into your browser and get the configuration page for the PAP2T. My router is at 192.168.1.1 and my computers get assigned via DHCP IP addresses starting at 192.168.1.100 so I set the IP address for the PAP2T at 192.168.1.95.

Sipgate shows you what settings to change, mostly account number and password. Two numbers that are important are the SIP Port under the Line 1 tab in administrator view, which is probably 5060 and under the SIP tab, the RTP Port Min and RTP Port Max which is probably 5004 and 5020. These are the ports to control your device and to handle the actual phone calls. They are important because you will end up setting your router to forward those ports to your PAP2T.

I got a dial tone, made a few phone calls, and it all worked like a charm. You get 60 minutes of free calls, but I then entered my credit card and set Sipgate up to charge me $10 for credit every time my balance runs low. Domestic calls are 1.9 cents a minute, and so are calls to the U.K. or France (around 20 cents per minute to international cell phones). No need for One Rate or International Savings Plans.

After a while, I would notice that one side or the other of the phone call would drop. I couldn't hear the caller or they couldn't hear me. A common problem it turns out. SIP, or Session Initiation Protocol is one of those that doesn't work well with most routers that are set up for web surfing, specificially NAT or Network Address Translation. Read this for an explanation. No matter. Inside your router, probably under security, is a page that let's you forward ports or a range of ports. I forward 5060-5064 to 192.168.1.94 (I'll explain the range in a moment). I also forward those RPT ports, 5004-5020 to the PAP2T as well.

No more dropped voices. In fact, it works great. Or did.

Confident in my new abilities to drop AT&T, I immediately cut the cord on the fax line and plugged it into the second line of the PAP2T. A second line costs $2.90 per month and the same 1.9 cents per minute. Well worth it. You could try to create a second free account with a different email address, but why bother? You can pay another $1.90 per month for emergency 911, "required" by law for primary lines, but I didn't need it on what are basically secondary lines.

I set the SIP port for Line 2 to 5061 vs. 5060 on Line 1. All of a sudden, both line screwed up. Intermittent dial tones, sometimes dropped calls, wouldn't dial out, would dial out, etc. Lots of back and forth with support via email for 48 hours until we figured out I should set the SIP port on Line 2 to 5062, and keep the SIP port for Line 1 at 5060. Works great. That's why I forward the range of SIP ports. The RTP min and max ports where already forwarded.

Again, confident, I decided it was time to port our main phone line. Getting a new number was a non-starter. So I called AT&T and asked how much it would cost to forward our existing number to a new number. Well, I never did get a real answer. It might be $16.45 a month, which is the cost of the line today, or it could be $23.44 which is the cost of the line plus call forwarding. Does CallerID still work? Does it just pass it through? Well, it might be another $9.99 a month for that. Forget it.

Fortunately, there is something called LNP or Local Number Portability. Phone companies have to let you keep your number and just port it to another phone service on request. Unfortunately, Sipgate doesn't do LNP. I turns out LNP (probably designed by phone companies) is a very paperwork intensive process. Very little is automated. It's why Google Voice doesn't let you use your existing phone number. Google hates human intervention and paperwork.

So I did some digging around and found a service Voipvoip.com. $6.99 per month including e911. Calls are 1.5 cents domestic and 1.9 cents per minute to London. And they do Local Number Portability. It takes about three weeks. You need your old phone bill which has your complete account number. You digitally sign some paperwork and they do the rest. Three or so weeks later I got an email that said my number is ported. Voipvoip charges me $7 per month.

I had bought a second PAP2T. Setting it up different from the other one was a little tricky, because Voipvoip and Sipgate do things a little differently and you need to forward different ports to different PAP2Ts. I set up the second at 192.168.1.94. I used port 5160 instead of 5060, as recommended by Sipgate if you use more than one PAP2T. Voipvoip never really said what to use.

Voipvoip does have a automatic configuring system. You plug in an address under the Provisioning tab under Profile Rule and your PAP2T is set up by Voipvoip. You still have to go in and find the SIP Port and RTP min and max so you can have your router forward them. In my case, they are 5466 and 16384 and 16482. I still had issues until I plugged in Voipvoip STUN server address, stun.voipvoip.com, under the SIP tab. STUN is Simple Traversal of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Through Network Address Translators (NATs). Another way to fix the incompatiblity of SIP and NAT. This sounds like a pain, but it really isn't. My three VOIP lines now work like a charm.

Each of the VOIP services have voicemail and CallerID and call forwarding built into the basic plan. But you also get total control. Forward to another number after a period of time, block certain numbers and more. But I happen to like the Google Voice voicemail transcription, so I set up our main number to forward after 15 seconds to Google Voice which pretty quickly emails me a transcription of the message. That costs nothing.

And I haven't even started on customizing my lines. There are tons of settings at both VOIP services, plus lots of things you can change inside the PAP2Ts to change ringtones and the like.

So I am out $6.99 per month for Voipvoip plus $2.90 a month for Sipgate. If I talk for 500 minutes a month, way more than I do on my cellphone, I'm out another $10 per month. So maybe $15-20 per month instead of my $125-175 per month to AT&T local and long distance. Almost a factor of ten savings!

A few issues. CallerID is just a number, not a name, which is annoying. Also, on all VOIP calls, you get some tiny slight delays and the full duplex/half duplex thing can be an issue. You start talking and the other person doesn't hear you to stop talking. It is a little different that AT&T landline. But certainly not 10 times worse. And way better than cell phone calls.

Finally, I've read a few descriptions of using Google Voice to dial out and save the 1.5 cents a minute per call. I wouldn't recommend it. I find that Google Voice calls have even more delays. It is hard to have a long conversation with Google Voice because of the delays and duplex issues. Plus, on my line anyway, a voice occaisionally interrupts saying "this call is being recorded", a bug that others are having. Or maybe Eric Schmidt is listening in. Either way, embarrassing to have to explain. A stupid bug. So stick with your VOIP provider for now, who my guess will improve quality in order to keep or attract customers.

But in the mean time, no more AT&T landline! (An important tip: You're AT&T local cancels automatically when your number gets ported away from them, but you have to cancel AT&T long distance yourself at 1-800-288-2747). I'll work on ditching AT&T Wireless when an alternative is ubiquitous, and then I'll work on Comcast and DirecTV. Five more years? Maybe so.

 

Simple Traversal of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Through Network Address Translators (NATs)

Comments

[Chris Nystrom]

Watch HD TV over the air with an antenna or TV shows on the net from Hulu all for free. Watch movies very cheaply across the net from NetFlix. Anything else, just don't watch. :)

[Gary]

You do a good job of documenting the confiscatory telecom taxes - usf is absurd in this age. Telecom is a license for local governments to steal...sign up for that $49.99 all inclusive wireless fee and your first bill arrives at $75.00...welcome to the telecom world and try reading your invoice! Our most regressive series of taxes.

[hailey]

VOIP and digital telephone answering systems really supports the modern communication needs of modern work force.

[AnneWalters]

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[home loans]

Cars and houses are quite expensive and not every person can buy it. Nevertheless, credit loans are invented to support different people in such situations.

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And I haven't even started on customizing my lines. There are tons of settings at both VOIP services

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Love it- thank you! I never got September's put on my screen so I've really been looking forward to October!