wahlau's online hut

as some of you knew, we moved in to a new house since May. things are almost settled down now, and we are taking our own sweet time (actually only me:P) to get little things done up.

One of the very crucial thing we need to consider is the phone and internet connection. First i thought of getting cable Internet - we have got cable TV included in the house rent, so why not? It turned out that we only have satellite TV, hence no high speed cable Internet possible. Next i looked at different options, and finally decided on Alice DSL. Simple reason - i can have DSL with flat rate, without the Telekom phone line. There are some reasons why choosing something without a phone line. We don't really call using the landline, so it is kind of stupid to pay 60€ for installation, then monthly 16€ just to be able to have DSL. without the line, i basically can save 5-10Euro per month. 

With this motivation Alice turned out to be a good choice. nice 4MB line with flatrate cost 30Euro per month, and i am allowed to cancel my subscription one month before hand. That is flexibility. No installation fee is require at this time, so i save further money. Now we are with its service for almost a month, and i am pretty happy with the provided service. We don't really use it that much, since we are in our offices most of the time.

now this leaves us another question: how about phone line? we basically only need it for long distance call. I already have an account with gizmo, so i thought i can live with it to call home. So that was how the idea with VoIP at home started. I also have a skype account, but i choose something that follows the SIP protocol. Reason - i would love to use a hardware VoIP phone with it, and gizmo plus others support that. Yes i know skype phone exists, but i think i am ok with a SIP phone.

so that is how i ended up with this baby - the Targa DIP 450 dual mode phone. It supports both analogue phone line and VoIP. as soon as Internet service started, i have configured it to test, and it works pretty well :) i used to get complaints from parents saying gizmo was unclear on the Nokia 770/N800, but with the hardware phone it was no problem. I assume it has something to do with the CPU power. At the same time now i have also applied for a sipgate account, which gave me a local landline number too. using it on the Targa phone was a breeze, so now i can even get called at a germany local number with no cost. you hear me right, no cost. 

I will continue to use such setup until we need a better solution. VoIP via broadband is a nice solution that you can also consider, as long as you have the possibility to have Internet broadband without needing a landline subscription. I know some places have such offers already... once the bills can be worked out, you can also make such move.

next, coming up i will write about the targa phone. stay tuned.