To open up another can of technical worms, I’ve been investigating voice over IP - I’m about to get into some remote collaborative development so am setting up my tools. I also need a new phone number so I can keep work from home, but being a skinflint I want to do it as cost effectively as I can.

So I read up on VoIP, and investigate Skype and the like, but feel I need something a bit more commercial. Gradwell keeps cropping up as a name, and I’ve had dealings with them in the past and know them to be a reputable company on the bleeding edge of technology.

So I sign up for a trial, and to do it properly buy a proper phone off them (the Grandstream GXP2000 for reference) but while waiting have a quick play with soft phones - on this case X-Lite.

Now I immediately run into problems that registration with the SIP server is flakey, and although when registered you can ring out or in it’s not often you can get voice through - it’s sounding very much like problems I had when trying to set up videoconferencing, and that turned out to be firewall issues and was only really resolved by putting the conf units on dedicated public IP addresses.

When the Grandstream turned up from Gradwell though, it was preconfigured for my account - and I have to say that I just plugged it in and it worked … almost. There was still something going on in my network that caused connectivity to drop occasionally, which was bad if it happened in the middle of a conversation, but I did have a one hour call with little or no sign that it wasn’t using a ‘proper’ phone. So I’ll put that down to my network and not the service. I’ve since swapped out my router, changed an old HP network hub for a shiny Netgear gigabit switch, and reviewed what boxes are plugged in and chattering away all the time. I’ve also unplugged a redundant wifi access point. Things now seem a lot more stable.

Following on from that long call I decided to extend the trial, and upgraded from a single user account to Gradwell’s ‘Centrex’ package - it basically allows multiple ‘extensions’ to connect as if on a virtual PBX exchange - you can configure all sorts of neat stuff like how external numbers ring through to extensions - IP or external, hunt groups, voice menus, forwarding … and the individual extensions can be anywhere. Very cool.

When I get an opportunity I’m also keen to try using mobile phones that have SIP functionality - my N95 should be one of them but unfortunately I’m with Vodafone who in their infinite wisdom decided that I should be protected from IP telephony and removed those bits of the firmware. Time to swap provider perhaps?

I do have reservations though; although the bandwidth of individual calls isn’t great (less than 100kbps per conversation) the experience is severely compromised if your network isn’t as tight as a gnat’s chuff - anything blocking connectivity will play hell with things. VoIP isn’t the only thing that will suffer, but if the service is business critical it could become a big issue. And that leads me to general concerns about networks - I don’t know if I’m still missing a trick but they are a bugger to diagnose when stuff starts misbehaving. At the moment I think VoIP isn’t for the faint hearted!

It’s still early days and the system hasn’t really had an opportunity to be used in anger, but I’m sure once the initial teething troubles are sorted it will be a fantastic system, with some very useful features and very economical to operate.