Personal Bytes

My Linksys PAP2, flying directly from Hong Kong, has just arrived. It was a bargain I picked up at eBay and I was fortunate enough of not being charged at Customs. So I got at $30 while the retail price is $64 (it’s used though).

The idea of the Linksys PAP2 is to connect a normal POTS phone and then receive or make calls through it. It requires nothing more than a connection to the internet and a router. This way I can call home 100% free without the need of having a computer always turned on. It will be of extreme usefulness since I’ll be living far away from Portugal for the next couple of months.

Configuration was another different story though. First, selecting the provider. Skype was out of question since they use a proprietary and closed protocol not compatible with SIP and SIP hardware therefore. VOIPBuster has excellent rates (although its primary use won’t be outgoing calls) but unfortunately they only have a Windows softphone and I’m not a Windows user — they’ve just lost a customer. I was then referred to the Gizmo Project said to have clients for the operating systems I use — Linux and Mac OS X. And they do. The Gizmo Project is a softphone from SIPPhone and so I created an account there.

I did a reset to factory settings first and then set the IP address so I could connect to its web administration interface (dialing numbers to introduce settings utterly sucks). Afterwards I followed this post. Everything should be fine by now but it wasn’t. Status was reporting “Can’t connect to login server” so I double checked the values. Everything was OK. I’ve tried port forwarding some ports on my router but still no success. I’ve then give up and put the PAP2 on the DMZ host address. I don’t like this patchy solution but it works. If you know how to solve this issue I’d be truly pleased.

All in all, it’s a nice piece of hardware. It saves you from the burden of configuring Asterisk all by yourself plus buying a PBX, has two telephone lines (so you can connect different providers) and it doesn’t take up much space. LED color, blue, is also fine. :-) It’s also a much cheaper solution than having a VOIP Phone.