Phone solutions, Microsoft's acquisition of Skype and other musings

I haven't updated my blog in a very long time, due to having a lot of work, stress, etc. Today I would like to share some information about my latest home phone set up and share my comments regarding the acquisition of Skype by Microsoft and its potential implications.

A few years ago, I got rid of my U.S. Skypein number that Skype was charging me $60 a year for when I found out about IPkall.com, which offers free U.S. phone numbers that can be forwarded to SIP services. Free is cheaper than $60, of course.

With my voip adapter registered with a sip service such as nonoh.net or voipblast.net (see previous posts for screenshots) and ordinary landline phones plugged into the adapter, which is plugged into the adsl modem and requires no computer to run, my phones here in Prague ring when people call the IPkall number, which is a Seattle number that is local to most people in the U.S. This is the same functionality that Skype provides, but is free and not $60 per year.

I used to own an expensive futuristic looking set of cordless phones that had built-in Skype and could receive Skype and landline calls and did not require a computer. They had cool ring tones and were attractive. However, I stopped using Skype to make outbound calls to ordinary phone lines when I found a cheaper solution. Voipblast and Nonoh charge $0.10 per minute to call Czech mobiles and charge nothing to call landline and mobile numbers in the U.S. and Canada and to call Czech landlines, while Skype either required purchasing of a monthly subscription for an unlimited calling plan or charged 2 cents per minute to call U.S. numbers and landlines in most other countries and charged almost 20 cents per minute to call Czech mobiles. Another disadvantage of using Skype was that I could not receive calls to the expensive Skypein number on any phones other than the Skype cordless phones.

My current set up is as follows.

All of my old fashioned landline phones are plugged into the sip adapter (similar to the little boxes provided by companies like Vonage), which is configured for nonoh.net, and I hear an American dial tone when I pick up any of the phones. My Seattle IPkall number is pointed at my sip account, which makes my phones ring when people call the Seattle number. Rather than use the Czech landline number provided together with my ADSL home internet service, I am using a Czech landline number that costs only $2 per month that I purchased from flynumber.com, and it is also pointed at the sip account. There is also a digital answering machine, which I bought for one dollar last year at a thrift store in Ohio during a visit to the U.S., which is plugged into the sip adapter along with the phones and takes messages for both the IPkall U.S. number and the flynumber.com Czech number.

The only thing I really ever use Skype (on my Linux machine) for any more is IMing and occasional video calls, both of which are free. In my opinion, Skype is shooting itself in the foot by charging so much more for inbound and outbound calling services than its competitors and for not being compatible with SIP. Apparently there is now a way to configure Skype SIP settings, but Skype charges for this service, which is ridiculous. I'm curious to learn what Microsoft's acquisition of Skype will mean. I find it odd that Skype did not respond to competition by lowering its prices, but actually increased them.

Lost parrot in Zbraslav!

Here in Zahradní Čtvrť, the neighborhood in Zbraslav where we live, we and our neighbors have been "treated" for quite some time now to an annoying parrot owned by the people across the street, who whistles, talks and sings at the worst times of the day. Certainly, parrots are cute, but when I am in the middle of translating a 20-page lease agreement from Czech to English, the last thing I need is a whistling parrot to throw my concentration! Closing the windows usually solves the problem, but in the middle of July or August when it gets up to almost 40 degrees Celsius, who wants to close all the windows and make the apartment as hot as a sauna just to be able to concentrate on work without being disturbed by the frickin' parrot?

About a week ago, I noticed that we no longer heard the parrot any more, and I began to wonder why. I admit, I missed its whining just a little. Yesterday, I may have found the answer to my question at the bus stop, where I happened to snap this paper notice someone had taped up there. It was taken with my mobile phone, so I apologize for the blurry image.




The notice reads:

PARROT

found in a garden. Owner please call 732 308 265 18 August 2010


For the sake of preserving peace and quiet, the new owner can keep the parrot or donate it to an animal rights organization, as far as I'm concerned! Life is so amusing sometimes.

Translation of "bad English" song into standard English

I am too busy to write an entire blog entry today, so here is a humorous video instead. Learners of English will especially enjoy listening to the words and reading the subtitles.

Some musings of mine for the day

To reactivate this lame blog, or not to reactivate this lame blog? That's the real question.

I read a very interesting serious article this weekend in the Czech gay magazine Lui, which presents evidence that Jesus was gay and that all or many of the churches existing today in the world would be disowned by him if he the man, not to be confused with the modern solar deity of the same name, were alive today. In fact, based on the description of him in the article in Lui, Jesus was in fact much more like a modern neo-Pagan civil rights activist than he was like one of the many church leaders of today, some of whose doctrine sometimes even seems to revolve almost entirely around violent condemnation of gays, Muslims, and children murdered in Nigeria and other African countries by local clergy upon being labeled "witches" by American evangelical missionaries, not to mention the numerous extremely hateful "Christian" organizations in the United States calling for the death penalty for gay people, demanding that their Wahabi-like extreme fudamentalist brand of Protestant Christ worship become the official religion of the United States and the only one that people should even be allowed to have and who behave as though they are ready to wage a violent holy war against anyone who disagrees with their arrogant views in order to speed up the Second Coming.

As the article in Lui (If you want to read it but don't speak Czech, you may order a translation of it into English from me or another reputable translator) points out, Jesus lived his life according to his belief that judging others, attempting to force your views on others and being intolerant of dissent are wrong under all circumstances. The article also suggests that he and John the Baptist had an intimate relationship that was more than just friendship, based on writings in The New Testament.

Legal disclaimer for the authorities in any country where freedom of speech is not fully respected and "blasphemy" or "slander" are illegal: This blog post merely describes to people who cannot read Czech and/or do not read the Czech gay magazine Lui an interesting article published in that magazine. It makes for an interesting read, irrespective of anyone's personal views on the subject. By mentioning the fact that a magazine published such an article, I, as the author of this blog, am neither claiming that Jesus was definitely gay nor presenting any evidence to the contrary.

I reiterate, it was truly an interesting read. Ironically, the more I learn about Jesus, the more I am convinced that the churches that claim to be the houses of His worship are in fact not his temples at all.

In my previous posting, I wrote about how to get a free US incoming telephone number from ipkall.com to use to receive calls with a free voip service such as voipraider. For those of you who have unlocked an old DTA310 adapter formerly used with Packet8 home phone service and want to configure it for use with voipraider, I am posting snapshots of sample sip configuration settings for the DTA.


I've made these images large so that you can read the configuration settings, but YOU HAVE TO CLICK ON THE IMAGES TO VIEW THEM FULL-SIZED.

New improved phone solution: US number for $0, outgoing calls for about $10 per year to over a dozen countries

I have come up with a home voip solution that is even cheaper than the previous solution I blogged about before that involves using Voipbuster and Skype.

This new solution does not involve Skype.

What you'll need:

A broadband internet connection with one extra available ethernet port

An unlocked analog telephone adapter that can be configured for any SIP provider.
(Personally I use an old former Packet8 adapter that I have unlocked. Do an Amazon.com or ebay search for "unlocked vonage adapter" and you should be able to find an inexpensive similar device.)

A Voipraider account (www.voipraider.com) or a similar account with one of the other Betamax services, such as Voipbuster.

An ordinary phone (yes, any phone that you'd use for normal landline service!)

An answering machine (Personally, I have one of those old ones that were popular in the 1980s that uses a cassete tape and even includes a speaker phone. I bought it used at a Salvation Army thrift store in Dayton, Ohio, in about 1995 for $2. It still works like new! No need to subscribe to home phone voice mail!)

A free Washington State US phone number provided by ipkall.com that you can use with sip. Register for free on their website and they give you a number.

(If you need to have a number in your own geographic area code) a free Grandcentral number from Google. The Grandcentral number will be in your US area code, and you can set Grandcentral to forward all incoming calls you receive on that number to your free Washington State number you got from Ipkall, which will MAKE YOUR PHONE RING WHEN PEOPLE CALL YOU! A novel idea.


How to make it work!

1. Plug your ATA into your cable modem or broadband router.

2. Plug your phone into the phone line jack on the ATA. If you need to plug multiple phones in, such as a cordless phone and an answering machine, plug a splitter into the ATA first and then plug both phones into the splitter. DO NOT PLUG THE ATA INTO A WALL JACK WITH A LIVE PHONE COMPANY (non-VOIP, think Verizon, AT&T etc.) PHONE LINE, OR IT COULD DAMAGE THE ATA.

3. Configure your ATA to use voipraider, voipbuster or a similar service by following the SIP device configuration instructions on http://www.voipbuster.com/en/sipp.html or by Googling for configuration settings if your particular device is not shown. Note that the sip server address for voipraider is sip.voipraider.com and not sip.voipbuster.com, but otherwise the settings are the same for either service.

> If the above step was successful, you should hear an American dial tone when you pick up the phone.

4. Make a test call. Services like voipraider give you a certain number of free minutes for test calls before they make you buy credit. Call your Mom and ask her if she can hear you. It will seem no different from any other ordinary landline phone call.

5. Connect your ipkall number to your voipraider account so that people can call you.

Log into your ipkall.com account and enter and submit the following settings:

(Example: You are Barack Obama. Your email address is barack@presidentialemail.com, your voipraider user name is "obama" and your voipraider password is "president")

Sip phone number: obama
Sip proxy: sip.voipraider.com
e-mail address: barack@presidentialemail.com
password: president
Seconds to ring before hang up: 120

6. Call your ipkall Washington State number from a different phone. Your other phone will ring. Don't answer, let your answering machine pick it up and leave yourself a message!

7. Now that you know that you can both make and receive calls, you need to buy $10 of prepaid credit from voipraider. When you do that, voipraider will award you 90 free days of unlimited calling (actually their free calls are limited to 300 minutes per week, but who calls that much) to all of the countries on their free list, which includes all landlines and cell phones in the United States. Voipraider won't start eating away your credit until after your 90 days of free calling have passed UNLESS:

a) you call American "toll-free numbers" (Yes, it's weird, but voipraider charges you 2 cents per minute to call "toll-free numbers" but charges zero for you to call "non toll-free numbers". So use your cell phone to call toll-free numbers, or call them with Skype since Skype doesn't charge anything to call toll-free numbers.

b) your phone calls to the free countries exceed 300 minutes per week. Unless you are operating a call center from home or intend to make endless calls, don't worry about this!

c) you call a non-free country (like North Korea) or you call a mobile number in one of the countries where only calls to land-line numbers are free (like the Czech Republic). Those charged calls are stilly extremely cheap but not free.

8. Enable outbound caller ID:

Set up a second voipraider account but don't buy any credit for it. Temporarily connect your ipkall number to that second account by following the above instructions.

Download the voipraider Windows program from their website and run it. In the program options, enter your ipkall number (or Grandcentral number if desired, see above) as the number you want to be shown as the number you're calling from and click verify. When your phone rings, pick it up and when the voice with the British accent asks for the 4-digit verification code, enter it as shown on your computer screen. Then it will tell you your number has been verified.

Exit and close the voipraider Windows program on your computer. Log out of the 2nd voipraider account that you created and log your ATA back into your original voipraider account that you bought the credit for.

(Outbound caller ID may need a bit of tweaking with your ATA settings if the voipraider number verification steps alone didn't make it work. Google for help!)

NOTE: You CANNOT call 911 in the US from a phone with this set up. Have an alternate method of reaching them, such as a cell phone.


Comparison:

The above solution

- incoming US number: $0 per year

- outgoing calls to numbers in the US and other free countries: about $10-20 per year depending on how quickly you use up the prepaid credit each time your 90 free days expire

- voice mail: $0 per year (You're using your answering machine!)


Skype as your phone service:

- incoming US number: $60 per year
- outgoing calls: $3 per month unlimited to US numbers, about $10 per month unlimited world (to land-line numbers only in countries besides the US)
- voice mail: Last time I checked, Skype charges about $30 or more per year, or they give you free voice mail if you have one of their unlimited calling subscriptions.

Skype has much better caller ID functionality, but that's about the only advantage I can think of.


Neither of these solutions lets you make emergency calls! If you need cheap "real phone service" in the US and don't want to pay a lot, go with something like joiphone so that you get things like 911, and then make the above solution your second line.

This blogger does not necessarily support the political parties that purchase Google ads displayed on this blog

As many of you know, the Czech Republic is scheduled to hold early elections in October. For the record, I support the Green Party, even though I am an American citizen living and working here and cannot vote in Czech elections. I am not very enthusiastic about the Civic Democratic Party (ODS), even though I mind it less now than I did when it was controlled by its founder, current Czech President Vaclav Klaus. I don't really like the Czech Social Democrats very much either, but if forced to choose between them and the Civic Democrats I'd probably choose the Social Democrats.

Some of you may have noticed the banner ads for the ODS appearing on this blog. Apparently the ODS is advertising on blogs in the Czech Republic, including mine. I urge you to click on the ads if they interest you, because the advertisers support this blog. Therefore I am not going to ask Google to remove their ad. Nonetheless, I thought it would be right to publish this disclaimer so that people don't get the wrong impression and start thinking I support the ODS. I don't care if other Czech political parties decide to advertise on this blog either, and I even find it somewhat amusing. Let's just hope that the extreme-right Worker's Party, WHICH I AM STRONGLY AGAINST, doesn't start buying Google ads on this site. If they do, I will definitely have to ask Google to remove them.