I wasn’t having much luck with VoIP (SIP) softphones such as twinkle or ekiga, and I don’t trust the proprietary encryption in skype. So I bought a linksys PAP2T off craigslist. Before doing this, I made sure latency was not an issue with my broadband internet connection. You need broadband internet to use VoIP.

When I realized that I’m usually under 100ms latency, I started to look for a provider. callcentric.com seems to be the most popular, and offers a wide variety of services. In the end I went with Brama Telecom as they are on Canadian soil, so they are bound by PIPEDA. This is Canada’s privacy legislation, which pretty much contradicts the US Patriot Act. If you’re not as privacy conscious, callcentric or another internet phone company might work better for you.

With Brama, they charge you $9.95CDN a month for unlimited long distance in Canada, on top of the other standard phone services; Voicemail, call waiting, call display etc).

What does this all mean? Right now I am paying my telephone company over $50/month for the very same service using normal telephone jacks (technically known as POTS). With my PAP2T and a Brama account, I hook the PAP2T up to my home router, and plug my standard telephone into the PAP2T. Now when you call my number, it will come over the internet, and ring my telephone as I used before. The big difference is an 80% savings. The risk is that if your internet is slow, or even worse down, you have no telephone service. In my case, I’m fine with it going to voicemail in these rare cases, as you can call me on my cellular phone if it is urgent.

In summary, if you want to leave the old copper pair system and go to VoIP using the same telephone you need:

  1. An FXS device. The PAP2T is popular as it’s a dual FXS device, this means you can have two telephones, or a telephone and a fax connect to it.
  2. A contract with an internet telephone service (VoIP)
  3. A broadband connection with low latency