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 Review by Davesworld 
UPDATED: 158 days ago
member for 2.3 years, 129 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Everett,Snohomish,WA
 $24 per month (12 month contract)
 about 2 days
 "Easy to set up, had very little trouble over two years."
 "Abrupt price increase. Outdated firmware as far as current DST. Less selection for home plans than before."
 "Painless and great quality on a high quality internet connection."
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(ratings match consensus)
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My Other Reviews ·ooma
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One nuisance with a workaround is that the firmware for the BPG510 ATA has not been updated since 2005 and the time zone data is hopelessly out of date. Since I live on the West Coast, my workaround is to simply turn DST off and use Arizona during the Summer when we are actually GMT -7 and then in November switch back to Pacific Standard Time which is GMT -8.
I noticed that their Business firmware update for their BPA410 ATA adds iLBC codec capability but the Residential firmware for the same device is not nearly as new nor adds that codec. As of now, Residential uses the g.729 codec for voice and g.711 for fax. It's unclear whether their residential devices can use any of the Fax codecs such as T.38.
I switched to ooma and am in the process of porting my number over. I like the fact that ooma uses the iLBC codec with a g.711 option by dialing *99 first as well. I also like the fact that ooma uses SIP over VPN although some less than neutral isp's may be able to recognize VOIP by traffic patterns anyway.
Original 2007 Post:
This was almost too easy for me to set up. My fears were quickly put to rest once I saw how the system works. I was afraid that I'd need to put the Packet8 adapter on it's own subnet in a DMZ but in reality, as long as the ports are open and no, they don't need to be forwarded, it'll work fine from the local subnet. If your computers can access the internet, so can the phone bridge and you're good to go. Incoming calls have been trouble free.
I recently got dry loop Verizon dsl in the west (DHCP) region and decided it was time to get a voip line. I considered many of them including Vonage and even Net2Phone. I run IPCop as my firewall/router with my RED (Wan) connection as a DHCP client to a bridged DSL modem and simply plugged the wan port of the Packet8 into my switch on the local lan and picked up my handset and followed the instructions to enter the activation code. I then went to the website to fine tune the features and my limitation in call quality is actually governed by my 7 year old 2.4ghz cordless phone system, Packet8 sounds as good as my POTS ever did but I have a low latency internet connection, a good router (IPCop and a CPU that never is used beyond 20% at full load) and 99% QOS on my connection as measured by one test I used.
On a side note, there are a LOT of 2.4ghz wifi base stations in my community and my phone does have a few electronic noises as I move about my townhome, I have a DECT 1.9ghz unit coming that has three handsets and no built in answering machine. 2.4 is too crowded still and 5.8 doesn't appeal to me either.
Next, I will set up traffic shaping to give the port ranges of this voip system to have priority so I can use the internet as heavy as I want to without affecting the voip quality. Using iftop in a terminal while i was on the phone, it looks like the codec used here uses about 24kbs in both directions while on a call. The udp port to the packet8 proxy uses a very negligible amount of bandwidth.
To sum up, I think people should check their qos at »myspeed.visualware.com before they consider voip. In fact, VOIP quality is often used as a tool to judge network quality on metro wifi projects such as Seattlewireless here in the Puget Sound region. I know that Joe and Jane sixpack aren't going to know any different and if the voip is not very satisfactory, they will blame the VOIP provider first instead of any network issues that may exist.
Followup comments: | Forums » comments on review of Packet8 |
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