David Gardiner - VoIP

Weather forecasts on our home phone using BoM data

2013-04-24T10:21:00.000+09:30

A nice feature of the Gigaset C610 IP phone that we use at home is that you can choose various information services to display on the handset, including during 'screen saver' mode. The default services include the normal news, sport and weather, but as I've noted before, the weather data these services use is invariably quite different to that published by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (and invariably quite different to what I see out the window).

As it turns out these services are customisable. You can add your own RSS feeds in via a web interface. The BoM doesn't provide such RSS feeds, and the only existing ones I could find were too detailed to be useful on a very small screen.

So I decided to find out what it would take to grab the forecast data from the BoM and massage it into an RSS feed suitable for displaying on a very compact display. I also thought it was a good chance to try out some shiny new things along the way. In particular ASP.NET Web API to produce the RSS feed and Windows Azure Websites to host the service.

The results of my efforts can be viewed at - http://gardiner-weather.azurewebsites.net. It's a very basic landing page for the service which lists what areas of Australia are currently supported (eg. only those states for which the Bureau provides XML data). Did I mention it's very basic? 😀

The feed I'm using for my phone is this one - http://gardiner-weather.azurewebsites.net/api/forecast/SA/Adelaide

Now all we need to do is to glance at the handset and we'll immediately know the latest weather forecast for today and tomorrow!

Configuring your Gigaset C610

Log in to your Gigaset's web page:
Go to the Settings | Info Services section
Click on the <www.gigaset.net/myaccount> link and go to the Screensaver tab
Select the 'News' row and click on the 'Edit' link. Select 'Favourites' from the dropdown and give your weather feed a name and paste in the URL to the RSS feed.
Click on 'Save' and your settings should soon take effect on your handset.

Naked ADSL and VoIP 2012-style

2012-04-02T22:46:00.001+09:30

Last month I decided to take the plunge and switch over to a Naked ADSL service. Late last year Internode had announced that they'd sorted out number porting for customers on existing ADSL2+ connections (like myself). More recently they also introduced a new tier in their Naked plans, so that leaving my old 50G ADSL2+ plan was now viable.

The switch to a naked line happened on the scheduled day. I didn't realise however that the porting of the phone number would take a few extra days. Not a huge problem, but something to be aware of.

Going naked means you have no dial-tone. If you want to keep your phone number, it needs to be ported to a VoIP service. In this case to NodePhone (Internode's VoIP offering), with $10/month call credit. I've been using first FreeCall and more recently PennyTel as outgoing VoIP providers for a number of years. It will be interesting to see how NodePhone compares.

Two nice features that I discovered was it comes with voicemail (you can customise the greeting, and you can get email notifications), and caller ID is included (instead of paying $6/month for the privilege)

I configured my trusty ATA (a Sipura SPA-3000) with new settings to work with NodePhone. All seemed fine, but it didn't work – the registration was failing. A call to Internode Support didn't identify any issues other than I was using more recent firmware than they were aware of, and that I was using relatively 'old' hardware. In any case just when I was about to give up for the evening, I noticed that it had started working all by itself.

All seemed fine for a few days, then I noticed that we were getting calls going to voicemail but no missed calls were on the phone. Strangely the ATA was still saying it was registered but most calls never rang the phone – they just redirected to voicemail.

Another call to Internode support, but again no joy. Nothing looked out of place with my settings, but they could see the registration was dropping out regularly (which would explain the calls not coming through to the handset). Their final suggestion – get some new hardware.

It turns out I bought the Sipura SPA-3000 way back in 2005. 7 years is a good innings for consumer hardware, so maybe it was time to update to something more current. The Gigaset C610 seemed to be well regarded so I picked up one from Internode's Adelaide office.

It was pretty straightforward to configure, but annoyingly I then discovered I was having the same problem still. Another call to Internode Support, but this time they said they had TWO active registrations – one for the Gigaset and one for the SPA! That didn't make sense, as the SPA was now sitting on a shelf – no power, no network. They reviewed the modem and Gigaset settings and things seemed to settle down, and I received an incoming call ok.

So hopefully that's the way things will stay for now on 😀

Is it worth going naked (2011)

2011-11-26T20:25:00.001+10:30

Internode have just announced that for customers with existing ADSL2+ broadband, transferring to a Naked plan whilst keeping your existing phone number is now possible.

Just over a year ago I compared the costs, and decided it wasn't worth it. So has anything changed since then?

Current monthly expenses (Nov 2011)

Service	Description	Cost
Broadband	Internode Easy-Broadband-Classic (50GB)*	47.45
Telephone	HomeLine® Budget#	28.95
Total		76.40

* – 'grandfathered' plan no longer available to new customers. Price includes 5% discount.

# – HomeLine Budget plan activated before newer conditions were introduced which disallow non-BigPond ADSL providers, and also includes $6 to enable Caller Number Display.

This is almost the same as last year, with the only change being Telstra are charging $2 more per month than they used to.

Easy Naked monthly expenses (Nov 2011)

Service	Description	Cost
Broadband	Internode Easy Naked Broadband (30GB)*	56.95
Telephone	Internode NodePhone2-Special	0.00
Total		56.95

* – price includes 5% discount

Whereas last year I could have got 150GB/month, now for the same price now I'd get only 30! There's also a one-off setup fee of $79 (for 2 year contract) or $129 outright.

So all other things being equal, there's a saving of $19.45/month, but with the downside being 20GB less quota. So, could I survive on only 30GB/month? Well looking at the last 12 months, apparently not always:

The next step up is the 200GB plan for $75.95 with 5% disc included. This pretty much nullifies the savings. It's a pity they don't offer something between the 30 and 200.

The other thing I'd need to figure out is how this would work with my existing PennyTel VoIP account. As I understand it, my trusty old Sipura SPA 3000 only supports receiving calls from one VoIP provider, and I assume that would need to be NodePhone for the number porting to work correctly. A bit more investigating is required on this front.

Is it worth going naked?

2010-10-08T15:24:00.001+10:30

Following on from yesterday's post I thought I'd run through the numbers to see what savings are possible with a change to a 'naked' Internode ADSL service and porting our home phone number to VoIP.

Current monthly expenses

Service	Description	Cost
Broadband	Internode Easy-Broadband-Classic (50GB)*	47.45
Telephone	HomeLine® Budget#	26.95
Total		74.40

* – 'grandfathered' plan no longer available to new customers. Price includes 5% discount.

# – HomeLine Budget plan activated before newer conditions were introduced which disallow non-BigPond ADSL providers, and also includes $6 to enable Caller Number Display.

There seems to be two possibilities – the "Easy" plan (which also counts uploads but tend to have larger overall quotas) or the "Extreme" (which don't count uploads). I've applied the 5% discount to the broadband plans.

Easy Naked monthly expenses

Service	Description	Cost
Broadband	Internode Easy Naked Pure Broadband S :: 150 Gigabytes	56.95
Telephone	Internode NodePhone2-Starter	5.00
Total		61.95

NakedExtreme monthly expenses

Service	Description	Cost
Broadband	Internode NakedExtreme ADSL2+ Pure Broadband 60 Gigabytes	66.46
Telephone	Internode NodePhone2-Starter	5.00
Total		71.46

So unless I've overlooked something, it looks like there's an opportunity to save up to $12/month.

One thing to be careful of – there does appear to be a risk if you choose the "Easy Naked" plan. Turns out that you could end up on either an Agile OR Optus DSLAM, and if you're not on an Agile DSLAM then I believe that NodePhone isn't an option. I'm waiting for clarification of this in the Whirlpool forums.

Internode introduced phone number porting

2010-10-07T09:09:00.001+10:30

Good news for some Internode customers – this week they've finally launched phone number porting, so that if you want to choose one of the "Naked" ADSL products, you can keep your phone number and have it linked to a VoIP service, whilst no longer having to pay separate line rental.

This is great, except for those of us already on an Agile DSLAM. Turns out that Telstra aren't being very cooperative in allowing people to move from LSS to ULLS (which is the position I believe I'm in).

The other problem I'd need to solve would be how to mix the NodePhone service that the phone number would be linked to with PennyTel – the VoIP provider I currently use. For our particular call usage pattern PennyTel has been a good choice. I'll do some further analysis but I suspect NodePhone's standard call rate of 18c per call won't work out as cheap as PennyTel's 1.6c/min (timed plan) or 8c per call (untimed plan).

Update 10am

One option that may be worth considering is ordering a new naked ADSL service on an existing spare copper pair, and then using the Simple Phone Number Port service to transfer the phone number to NodePhone VoIP and cancel the old phone line and ADSL services. The downside is some additional costs up front, but the hope would be over time you'd come out ahead.

ABB Day 1

2008-06-10T20:56:00.001+09:30

Today was my first day at ABB Grain Ltd. Carl (my manager) gave me a tour of the facilities where apparently 400 staff are based. I was impressed to learn that not only is tea and coffee provided, but there's even an on-site gym.

The location is very pleasant, overlooking the parklands. Veale Gardens is directly across the road, which is a nice place to walk around at lunch time. The office is reasonable quiet (yay, no loud conversations from people supporting video conferences! Some people will know who I'm talking about!)

I'm starting to learn a bit more about the application that I'll be working on. Timothy Walters has had a couple of weeks head start on me, but with the combination of C#, WPF, SQL 2005, NHibernate, ActiveRecord and CAB (and maybe the possibility of Castle Windsor), this is going to be really interesting.

Timothy also mentioned he's keen to do some pair programming on this project. Looks like we're going to get to do a bit of extreme programming.

Other good news is my computer did have dual monitors (though hopefully one will be replaced as I had trouble connecting with a funny DVI plug). They're also using IP telephony, which is cool. Unfortunately their SIP server is not public, so no free calls from home though :-(

Instead of TFS, they use OnTime for bug tracking and CVS for version control (though we might be moving to Subversion).

So all in all a pretty good first day, and I'm feeling excited about the project work (even if I did discover the database has no foreign keys at all - aargh!)

PennyTel supports Caller ID (CLI)

2007-05-31T14:04:00.001+09:30

PennyTel (who I use for calling mobile phones) have enabled outgoing CLI for both their timed and untimed services.

That means that when we call mobile numbers, they'll see our home phone number instead of 'Private'.

Now just to convince FreeCall to do the same.

New firmware for SPA-3000

2007-05-11T22:13:00.000+09:30

LinkSys (who bought out Sipura) have released version 3.1.18 of the firmware for their SPA-3000 analogue telephone adapter.

The comments in reply to my post on Whirlpool seem to indicate that this improves quality and reduces echo. I've just updated my box, so it will be interested to see if any difference is noted.

VoIP problems

2007-04-03T01:06:00.001+09:30

Before I left for CodeCamp on Friday, I'd done two things:

I'd enabled the Telstra Home Messages 101 service on our phone line (seeing as our answering machine had died a couple of months ago)
I upgraded the firmware on my Billion 7402GL modem to the latest release - 5.52e.

While I was away, Narelle mentioned that the phone had been playing up a bit. The Home Messages service takes a few days to activate, so I wondered if that was interfering with the Sipura SPA-3000's line detection somehow. I had a look this morning, and after power-cycling the modem and ATA, everything appeared to be ok. However tonight I noticed the phone dial tone was back on the expensive "Telstra" tone.

After fiddling with the modem settings for ages, I finally decided that maybe there was a problem with the new firmware, so used the emergency software to drop back to 5.04 then upgraded to 5.07, which had been very reliable and what I had been running for ages.

I managed to do this (though it would have been a bit quicker if I'd paid attention to the instructions where it said to ensure your PC has a static IP address before you start - kind of makes sense when you think about it). After power-cycling again, still no joy. I use the free SysLog daemon from Kiwi Enterprises to monitor what the SPA is up to, and it still looked like it was not able to register with our main VoIP provider - FreeCall.

Had my Sipura gone faulty?

As a last desperate measure, I checked the VoIP Forum on Whirlpool, and lo and behold - someone had posted about problems registering with FreeCall! A quick visit to their website confirmed in the hard-to-read scrolling notice that they're suffering some kind of DDoS.

Please be advised that our main Internet router is currently being attacked by virus. VoIP services are temporarily unavailable. Apologies for inconveniences caused...

So I updated the Sipura's configuration to point to our other provider PennyTel (usually we just use them for mobile calls), and bingo! we're back online again.

A pity I didn't check that first :-(

Skype

2006-10-06T22:28:00.001+09:30

Although I've been aware of Skype for quite a while, I've never had occasion to use it until now.

Our friend Jane was able to talk to her sister Ann who is now overseas, and it worked pretty well.

Not as seamless in my opinion as proper VoIP (like we use for our normal phonecalls at home), but it is still free so you can't complain about that.