Low Cost VOIP Providers

I heat my house with firewood. When the power dies, a regular event during winter storms, I cook on top of the wood burner. During summer, I have a home made grill and a smoker that I use outside. For small jobs, I use a rusting hibachi.

Keeping the refrigerator alive is somewhat more complex.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

While we are at it:

For us the freezer was the problem. Now we have two Weber charcoal barbies but even with the help of neighbors it is not possible to eat that much.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

The *core* bag has very little in it -- things that we could carry for *days* if need be (knowing that *water* would be what we were carrying in the other hand!).

E.g., a radio that operates off solar or a "crank"; a flint; "workman multitool/knife"; balls of cotton & vaseline; some meds; plastic sheeting (think tarp/tent); socks; mess kit; etc.

I'm either working or trying to get a handle on the nature of the outage. E.g., the natural gas outage wasn't immediately apparent as such. Happened in the wee hours of the morning so its not like I could call neighbors and ask if *they* had heat.

So, I spent a fair bit of time diagnosing the furnace (seemed more likely that the furnace not lighting would be a local problem to *this* house and not a city-wide gas outage! :> ). Checking for news reports (online and OTA broadcast). And, calling the gas company (I detected this *so* early that the folks at the gas company weren't even aware of its extent).

Then, arranging so SWMBO wouldn't be uncomfortable when she woke up to a cold house.

Thankfully, only heat and hot water are gas-fired, here. So, we could still prepare meals indoors, etc. But, showers are out of the question! (I delight in LONG, HOT showers!)

Once the sun came up and I could suspect the neighbors would be stirring (they're up early to prepare for work), I could phone them and compare notes...

Only after I *knew* there was nothing else that I could do would I turn back to my "work".

(apparently, the plumbers got a boatload of business as folks woke up without heat and naively called plumbers -- who undoubtedly charged them for a visit and left them with a diagnosis of "the gas is out all across town" :> )

We consider the refrigerator to be largely expendable.

The *freezer* usually will last a good long time in an outage -- if we don't open it (it's a chest so it doesn't lose as much "cool" when it is opened). We typically have

10+ gallons of OJ stashed in there (think: blocks of ice)

And, the most perishable items stored *low* to stay as cool as possible for as long as possible.

I've thought of a small genset just for the freezer/refrig but that draws too much "attention". And, the alternative of powering it off a UPS seems like it would need a whopping big UPS to not fail under the starting load (perhaps a FERRUPS?)

Thanks for the suggestions, but the minutes is only part of my problem. Cell phones are crap for voice quality so I *much* prefer to use a land line, even if it is VOIP as long as the quality is there. At one of my locations cell coverage is spotty at best and it is not uncommon for calls to be impossible, such as one end of my house...

The other reason I realized that VOIP was the solution to my problem is that I spend a week at a time at my other house and the office phone doesn't get answered.

So I can replace my office phone with VOIP and drag it around with me (or have two adapters). Then some 90% of my calls are now at $0.02 a minute plus I get great voice quality (relatively speaking) and I get to answer my office phone when I'm not there...

I guess when I mention VOIP I am thinking of a service like Vonage where they just sell you a solution, not something that requires a lot of programming and crap. I don't think I need to pay $30 a month and some of the lower cost similar services have a bad reputation for voice quality and other issues. Someone mentioned paying per minute to Vonage, maybe I'll look into that.

Callcentric seems like a reasonable deal although it is a little hard to figure out what I'll be paying. Some places they talk about E911 fee as being mandatory, but under some plans it is "included". I think they just don't get that they are making it very complicated and it could be better if they just priced it all into one figure. I get the impression from some here that it might be a bit difficult to get it setup though. I remember when getting your network to work was difficult, but eventually that process was made simpler by all parties involved and most of the time things just work now. Why can't they do that with VOIP? That's a rhetorical question. I'm not interested in a lot of technical stuff on the issue.

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Rick

Well, we aren't quite that prepared. Yet.

We like to keep things autonomous, in our case a wood stove. The pellet stove downstairs and the central gas heating can't be depended upon because neither will work when the power is out. The wood stove has fans which I could either take off within minutes or feed from a little inverter and backup battery.

Just imagine, in the olden days back when I was at university there was a pressure meter on the gas line. Nowadays this has been dumbed down just like operating systems and cars, no pressure meter. In the olden days you would have known in seconds what was going on. Sniff around ... no gas smell. Turn valve to off, meter still at or near zero -> Aha!

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

NG for the Weber keeps working during a power failure. I think their service standard is ~7 days. After that, if it ever happens, a lot of stuff is going to be toast, including wastewater treatment which could freeze and destroy the lagoons in winter (they're naturally heated by bacteria, but if the city water pumps go out, then the flow down to the lake stops and the bacteria run out of poo^H^H^H fuel).

I've been thinking about buying a small backup generator (maybe 4kW) that would keep the furnace, fridge and other stuff running.. storing gasoline in large quantities doesn't appeal to me, but a dual fuel type that takes a propane input might be okay.

BTW, the original question in this thread-- I've been using Clearswitch for a few SIP lines (including an 800 number) and it works well enough (not as good as a good landline, but better than a cell phone for North American calls anyway. I did splurge and get top-drawer equipment.. I get the impression that a lot of those complaining about VOIP quality are using a marginal ISP with a crappy router and a $15 phone. Although the handsets on the Polycom HD phones are not quite as substantial as those on the old black phones, they don't get dragged around by the cord. Got mine from voipsupply.com (no connection).

(...)

I dropped CallCentric before they had simultaneous ring, which is what you need for your remote office. Today, they have it: Note that each phone has a different phone number, so you're adding additional cost per number. On my system, there's no additional cost for an "extension" on a single phone number.

Short answer: The money is in the service, not the product. With that arrangement, there's no incentive to make things easier, which might reduce service revenue[1].

The service model you seek is the cable set top box model. You buy/lease/rent a powerful set top box that can do many things. The service provider does everything for you. All you do it plug it in, turn it on, play, and pay the price. You don't get to do anything to the set top box programming. That's how Vonage, Ooma, and others work. The "locked" VoIP adapter that you get is locked in the firmware for their system. Trying to move it to a different provider is very difficult.

[1] The typical VoIP provider pays about $0.005/min to $0.008 wholesale for terminating a domestic POTS call. Typical rate schedule: If you burned 1000 minutes per month, that's a $5 to $8 cost to the VoIP provider which they resell for $10 to $25/month. Since call termination is only charged on outgoing calls, most providers offer large amounts of free incoming minutes.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Careful. Generators and constant voltage ferroresonant transformers are mutually incompatible. A ferroresonant xformer does a great job of voltage regulation but only if it gets exactly 60.0 Hz line frequency. Any variations produces variations in output voltage. Roughly, a 1% change in frequency produces a 2% change in voltage. That's not a problem with typical line frequency variations but might be a problem with a generator where the operating frequency varies somewhat with load. I have a big Sola something ferroresonant xformer from an old minicomputer at a radio site.. It's great for power line glitch removal, but a problem when the generator is running . It also is rather inefficient (90%), gets warm, and creates enough buzzzzzz that I have it hidden outside.

A ferrups has the advantage of having the UPS section run by a clock oscillator. No variations in frequency like in the generator. When the UPS is not active, it acts like a voltage regulating ferroresonant xformer. It's probably overkill because the fridge or freezer motor can easily handle voltage and frequency variations as well as glitches.

Drivel: I have 3 generators, none of which work. There's a 4th generator, that was scorched by a garage fire, waiting for me to drag home. Yet another project.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Hurry! "The End is near" :>

It was relatively easy to diagnose. I *assumed* there was a fault with the furnace (seemed like a logical starting point).

First thing I had to sort out was the recovery time of the furnace's internal controls. I.e., if it couldn't light after a few attempts, it won't *try* to light for a certain time interval. So, even though the thermostat was still calling for heat, the furnace wouldn't act on it.

Yanking the plug is a great way to make the furnace forget any timing loops that it may have started (and the folks who coded them probably didn't think of this!).

Then, I watched the igniter and vent fan while listened for gas. Poof! Flame when expected -- but quickly extinguished. (i.e., once the gas pressure in the *indoor* portion of the gas line had been released).

Drag out volt meter to watch the coil on the gas valve and you can see the furnace *wants* gas (i.e., it hasn't detected some bizarre error condition and deliberately shut down the gas supply).

Lather, rinse, repeat.

An automechanic's mantra ran through the back of my mind: "If the car doesn't start, it's either fuel or ignition" (which I always considered amazingly humorous!).

I know ignition is happening. I know it's calling for fuel. So, only alternative is there *is* no fuel!

I then went to check the pilot in the water heater and realized *it* was struggling (*two* appliances BOTH having issues? either my gas meter/pressure regulator is toast *or* there's a systemic supply problem)

Needless to say, when I replumbed the water supply, I added gauges upstream and downstream of the (water) pressure regulator so I could make these sorts of diagnoses easier!

Actually no. It's enterprises who had a new VoIP system installed. Mostly by large telco providers and tunning over the same LAN as the computer stuff (that's IMHO a big mistake).

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Yes. I was commenting "one or the other". E.g., pondering whether a FERRUPS would fare better when dealing with the motor load of the refrigerator/freezer compressors than a traditional UPS...

I'd be more concerned about the compressor motor frying the UPS.

Projects keep our minds agile! (at least, that's my story and I'm sticking with it!! :> )

[Of course, they aren't necessarily easy on the *body*!]

I figure car's are a poor man's genset *if* you have a UPS that can tolerate whatever load you want to feed. And, they deal with the issue of "fuel storage" very conveniently -- while ensuring the fuel never grows old from disuse! :>

Back in the '80s, I was a CO equipment maintainer on SxS switching. Got hired on in Palm Desert, because they were going electronic, trained all the existing guys to work on that, and then realized it would be a year before they got rid of the other half of the switch!

I can still pretty much recall all the different relays, and what they did in each switch...

And yes, you could HEAR when a switch went bad. You are talking to a visitor, you pause, walk over four rows, climb a ladder, and busy out a switch on the top row...

Charlie

Yep, it provided the intermittent action of ring voltage (five different frequencies for party line service!) and ring back. You had to periodically lube and clean it!

Charlie

Yup. Much safer to have an entirely separate LAN. The office I'm sitting in now has good quality (Cisco) phones and a separate LAN with It's pretty good, but there have been outages due to external factors that don't often happen with gramps' land lines.

When we bought our first house, the back yard (all 400 square feet of it!) was bare, so we decided to plant grass. Using an old rake, we started trying to at least 'rough up' the surface, since it was hard baked clay. Back in the middle of area, we hit a piece of old wire that didn't want to come up. Get out the shove, go down about three inches, hit what looks like plaster or cement! Start digging around, and about an hour later we had a two foot deep hole around three feet wide and a trash can full of construction debris.

We planted our lime tree there!

Or leave the old PBX system in there and maybe upgrade that a little, then use the saved funds to buy everyone a trip to the Caribbean :-)

I am sticking with gramp's landline. There is a cost but I am willing to pay for reliability.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

You don't need a separate *physical* LAN if you can provide QoS guarantees on a *shared* LAN. E.g., here, I pass video, audio, general network traffic (HTTP/FTP/etc.) on the same physical lan. But, enforce what gets routed where very carefully. I think you can do this with some COTS gear -- but you probably need more than your nominal IT guy to set it up properly!

In my case, run CAT1 (in my case, CAT3 & CAT5) alongside your network drops *just* for voice service.

Agreed. Having known several friends in need of "emergency services" recently, I am sure they were happy they "got dialtone" when they

*really* needed it!

They all tout QoS as the magic buzzword. But then you have a phone conference and "We should also discuss the .......ility of ..... lato .... up" ... "Ahm, could you repeat?". The worst is the low dynamic range where it seems there is artificial noise piped in or where the system decides what is a silent period despite the fact that someone in the background was talking.

If it's in a household without teenagers downloading everything they can get their hands on it can work. In a company, not so well IME.

Same here. And it's kept separate at all times. I thought about piping in Skype but found it not to be reliable enough for my taste. It's ok for one-on-one video links though.

Oh yeah. It's somewhat similar with the newfangled cell stuff. GSM with its range limits, phone switching over to WiFi at times, and whatnot. Numerous times I handed my trusty little CDMA phone to someone because he couldn't get through on his highfalutin $200+ phone.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/