John Carter wrote, On 07/19/2010 09:08 PM:
So what I need is...
* A cordless voip phone or a way of tacking a standard cordless to,
umm, something.
* Access to a cheap gateway from the IP to Christchurch local
telephone system
* Something with cheap calls to South Africa / US / UK (diasporas tend
to do that to you)
No. Your first requirement is decent stable reliable internet
connectivity. And DSL is not quite there.
The minimum I'd suggest is TCL cable, because it works far more
reliably. Though when they have an outage its generally a good one but
only once or twice a year.
Other connections are available, but cost a lot more. Commercially we
have some sites with fibre, and a separate vlan for voice.
You possibly already have a cordless phone - connect it to an ATA like
the linksys pap2t to make it a voip phone. They're something like
$100 and can do two analogue phones.
You can do what I do, and have your ATA log directly into 2talk over the
internet, or you could run an asterisk install at home and run an IAX
trunk to 2talk. trixbox is a turnkey asterisk distro, or there are
hardware ones - see www.nicegear.co.nz for some.
http://www.2talk.co.nz/
South Africa - 10c/minute
South African Mobile - 25c/minute (same as NZ mobiles)
UK 3c/minute
UK Mobile - 25c/minute (same as NZ mobiles)
USA 5c/minute
USA Mobile - not listed.
Full rate card is at http://www.2talk.co.nz/assets/lib/2talkrates.pdf
but its outdated - their mobile rate is now 24c/minute.
Note calls to the 3c/minute destinations come out of your 500 minute
monthly allocation on the 2talk500 plan. That's $15/mo and you can even
port your 03 number.
If you want faxing, use a 2talk fax to email number for incoming, and
tell anyone who wants you to send a fax that they're luddites. Fax over
voip is difficult.
After buying, trying and returning to the #...@$#! red shed under gaurantee
two TV's... and having similar problems with DSE TV's...
I'm very reluctant to waste money on a TV again...
Yet the Sprats want TV and a place to plug their game consoles into. Dang.
Now with netbooks being cheaper (and better quality) than many TV's...
what I need is...
* Some way of getting TV & game console inputs on to the display.
You could use some kind of USB capture device, but they tend to have
lag. So the player hits a key but the game has moved on 1/10 second and
they're too late. Best thing here is a good quality monitor with
composite-video inputs.
How about an LCD TV/Monitor, so you can switch over to another input for
the console?
Or something like those Composite to VGA adapters so they can use a
normal monitor.
http://www.cdlnz.com/productimages/pdfs/vc100.pdf is worth about $120
At home we have a mythtv backend in the garage running 24/7, a dedicated
frontend in the house which is connected via DVI->HDMI to a 32" LCD and
to a small stereo. There's a PS2 which connects to the composite-in on
the TV. This works nicely.
Hmm. There is an ADSL2+ to city block cabinet a 50m down the road....
Would it be worth replacing my DSE ADSL XH1175 router with an adsl2+ one
anyway?
ADSL is pretty dreadful. The limited upload means your digital
convergence is going to be mostly inbound.
If this DSE router gets ADSL2 speeds then there's not a lot more to be
gained. ADSL2+ is mostly an advertising phrase, and generally only
improves on ADSL2 performance at and above the 5000+ foot mark.
We use cisco routers but for sheer throughput the DSL technology is the
limiting factor.
Another thing to consider is a good firewall. Don't just run iptables
on your server. I use and like pfsense ( http://www.pfsense.org/ ) and
there's bound to be a good aftermarket firmware for your WRT.
Food for thought. Please let us know how it goes.
--
Craig Falconer
