[ale] Slightly OT: recommendations for VOIP/SIP to replace POTS

[DJPfulio at jdpfu.com]

On 11/10/22 02:18, Alex Carver via Ale wrote:
> Whatever you do, set up a firewall in front of your terminating
> device (be it the ATA, a machine running Asterisk, etc.) and filter
> both inbound and outbound traffic to terminate at the VoIP provider's
> servers. Otherwise you may find yourself the unwitting accomplice for
> all sorts of phone calls.

When I was first setting up my VoIP stuff, I tried asterisk for a bit, then ran  freeswitch for a few years (much better call quality), then moved to external service providers because running a PBX inside a VM on a busy VM host was causing latency and jitter issues.

When running a PBX, the bad guys will hunt you down. I've never seen this at home, but in a few businesses, I have.

But we don't actually NEED to run a PBX. With an ATA sitting on a local IPv4 LAN, behind a router that blocks all inbound traffic (normal home LAN stuff), the VoIP ATA will still connect, register, and works fine. Just need a SIP service, which you'll need anyway. Have my ATA sitting on the ISP's 10.x.x.x/24 LAN subnet (like other IoS crap) while the public subnet is bridged through to my real router.

* $40 ATA device
* Standard phones connected to the ATA
* Solid internet with sufficient speed for g.711a/u (128Kbps / active line) and
* $5/month prepaid VoIP+E911 provider.

That's all you need.  $60/yr for a quality phone service with the PBX run by professionals remotely.  There are cheaper VoIP options, but when I was searching the call quality was really bad. VoIP.ms is all pre-paid, which makes managing risks of PBX abuse automatic.  Plus the config to block callers is very simple.

Here's the link to sample configs for ATAs: https://voip.ms/m/samples.php At the bottom of that page are 3 groups of samples configs - PBXes, ATAs, soft-phones.  Your computer or smartphone or tablet can run a softphone. When traveling, this can work with many hotel internet connections - basically giving you access to your home phone from almost anywhere.

I'd appreciate if you used my sign-up code for VoIP.ms.  We both get $10 for using the code - win-win!   https://voip.ms/en/invite/MTI0OTUw