Using Hotspot
@comcast.net
|  Pros and Cons, and Answering Machines
We switched over to Hot Spot from Qwest a few weeks ago. Overall I give it a thumbs up.
Pros:
Price: If you already have TM cell service the price can't be beat. $50 for the router, $36 for line activation, and $10/mo for service.
Indoor wiring: After the phone company goes "dead" (usually 2-3 days after the number ports) AND after you disconnect telco at your phone box outside the house, connect the router phone jack to any jack in the house with any phone line. It works. If you don't disconnect the phone co line, you'll get a warble when you answer the phone.
Cons:
Uptime: It's hard to beat tel co on 99.999%. We've had one brief downtime in 1 month. It will go down if there is a power failure OR a cable outage (we use Comcast internet), but even during a 1 week powerfailure last year (Seattle) our cell phones continued to work.
TM and hot-spot: T-mobile has glomed this new feature onto their current offereings without really addressing it as a new line of service. So their website doesn't really gear anything to this new feature. To them, it's just another cellphone, just one that is stationary with unlimited minutes. Examples: The voicemail prompt callers get ask if you would like to page this person (????). There are no web-based features common to other VOIP offerings. It's "you get what you pay for" here.
Compatability with old phones and answering machines: If you're like us and like the stand-alone answering machine, it may not work. Our 10yo Lucent, and 3 new answering machines that I bought and returned didn't work. The problem, I believe, is that the WRTU54G router's "hangup signal" (0 voltage) is too short, so the answering machines don't realize the caller has hang up. So at the end of every message there is 10 seconds of wailing busy signal. A similar problem with the "flash" function on our Panasonic 5.8GHz phones was solved by an astute TM tech support by finding an obscure config on the phone to decrease the flash duration sensitivity from 300ms (standard) to 90ms.
Router and VOIP: the router firmware has essentially no VOIP configurations. The above hang-up problem could be fixed on other routers by changing the CPC duration (how long the voltage goes to zero). Cisco/Linksys basically took a popular router architechture and stuck VOIP on it. As of today they still haven't posted their firmware sourcecode as they are required to do under the Gnu GPL (since it's based on Linux). They say they're working on it. |
