IP Telephony at home.

2007 Dec 13 at 07:28 » Tagged as :quadruple play, bootstrap,

My home network is supposed to carry all kinds of stuff including data, video and voice. The voice bit is causing trouble. There aren't any licensed VOIP providers in Sri Lanka (yes , our politicians are dragging us into the dark ages). So if you buy a phone it's a POTS terminal or a mobile. And the only kind of connection you can get is a POTS connection or a mobile connection.

The simplest solution then is to wire up your home with plain old twisted pair telephone cables, but that is consenting to live in the same dark ages as the politicians. A solution from Graham Bell's or Queen Victoria's time, would be to use cat 6 cable instead of phone wire but that like the Victorian moral values that Sri Lankans have embraced as our own would be extremely stupid.

So the proper solution is to use a combination of FXS to Ethernet and FXO or Ethernet adapaters. The wall socket would be connected to the FXS to Ethernet port (or is the other way round I always mix up FXS and FXO). That would allow the voice data to travel over TCP/IP with in the house. You will need an antique phone to answer the call. Thats where the FXO to Ethernet (or is it the FXS to Ethernet) adapter comes into the picture.

Of course it would be much simpler if you could use an IP phone and much better if you can use a WiFi phone. Unfortunately wired IP telephones are not easy to come by either. Same goes for WiFi phones. If you rule out the high end N Series phones by Nokia, or equally expensive imates and pocket PCs, you cannot find any WiFi phone at all. Obviously it's stupid to use an expensive PDA as a substitute for a cheap cordless telephone.

So what's the solution? Stay tuned, I will let you know.