You guys all know I like to play with tech. My parents recently got rid of their home phone to cut costs and now regret it, not only due to inconvenience of never hearing their cell phone ring, but also because when they read stories to my kids, cell phone speakerphones suck and my mom can't just pick up a second extension.
So, my quest for free home phone service began. The requirements were:
Free incoming and outgoing calls within the US
Very little to no cost (ie, Ooma is too much $$)
Works with the standard POTS phones they already owned
Secondary requirements
Reliable (would be nice, but when free, can't expect that)
Plug and play (non technical parents 1500 miles away)
Preferably with a Florida phone number
So I started with the basis that the only completely free phone service provider out there that I could find is Google Voice. But you can't hook up a SIP based VoIP phone directly to GV. For those of you interested in this, you can purchase an Obi110 for about $50, sign up for GV and pretty much be done right there. But I didn't want to spend $50. I did have an old Sipura ATA hanging around (converts POTS phones to SIP VoIP phones essentially). So if you don't have one of these (who does?), then buy the Obi110 and be done. If you DO.... then it gets interesting.
Sipsorcery is a free service that lets you register all of your SIP devices with them then can route calls amongst various trunks you set up with them based on a dialing plan. So I linked them to GV, but that's still not enough to make it work. Enter ipkall now. Another free service that assigns you yet another phone number.
Incoming calls to the GV number i set up for my parents are forwards to the ipkall number which passes it off to sipsorcery and down to the ATA.
Outgoing calls are routed from the ATA, to sipsorcery and from sipsorcery out to GV via sys.GoogleVoiceCall which nobody else out there supports.
So after 4 hours of figuring out all the magic to make this work, I boxed up the ATA, send it off to the parents, they plugged one end into their router, the other into their cordless phone base, and voila.... free phone service (at least until Google decides to start charging which may be as soon as January 2012).
Anyway, I know there's been some discussion in here about home phone service (I have Ooma thanks to recommendations here) but just wanted to provide another avenue. For most, the Obi110 is probably the golden ticket. $50 one time fee to free unlimited incoming/outgoing domestic calling (until Google charges). Google could decide to break it at any time, it's not supported, but it's apparently worked now for a few years.
So, my quest for free home phone service began. The requirements were:
Free incoming and outgoing calls within the US
Very little to no cost (ie, Ooma is too much $$)
Works with the standard POTS phones they already owned
Secondary requirements
Reliable (would be nice, but when free, can't expect that)
Plug and play (non technical parents 1500 miles away)
Preferably with a Florida phone number
So I started with the basis that the only completely free phone service provider out there that I could find is Google Voice. But you can't hook up a SIP based VoIP phone directly to GV. For those of you interested in this, you can purchase an Obi110 for about $50, sign up for GV and pretty much be done right there. But I didn't want to spend $50. I did have an old Sipura ATA hanging around (converts POTS phones to SIP VoIP phones essentially). So if you don't have one of these (who does?), then buy the Obi110 and be done. If you DO.... then it gets interesting.
Sipsorcery is a free service that lets you register all of your SIP devices with them then can route calls amongst various trunks you set up with them based on a dialing plan. So I linked them to GV, but that's still not enough to make it work. Enter ipkall now. Another free service that assigns you yet another phone number.
Incoming calls to the GV number i set up for my parents are forwards to the ipkall number which passes it off to sipsorcery and down to the ATA.
Outgoing calls are routed from the ATA, to sipsorcery and from sipsorcery out to GV via sys.GoogleVoiceCall which nobody else out there supports.
So after 4 hours of figuring out all the magic to make this work, I boxed up the ATA, send it off to the parents, they plugged one end into their router, the other into their cordless phone base, and voila.... free phone service (at least until Google decides to start charging which may be as soon as January 2012).
Anyway, I know there's been some discussion in here about home phone service (I have Ooma thanks to recommendations here) but just wanted to provide another avenue. For most, the Obi110 is probably the golden ticket. $50 one time fee to free unlimited incoming/outgoing domestic calling (until Google charges). Google could decide to break it at any time, it's not supported, but it's apparently worked now for a few years.
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