My new phonegnome...

[tphank]

One of the main reasons for getting the phonegnome is to cut on regional call rates (4x higher than long distance), and someone else in the house refuses to move with technology of VOIP. So I figure, this will maintain pots and benefit from voip rates, even called PG to get a handle if this would do what I wanted, and "seemless" is what I was told...not entirely true...

Here goes:
- hook up, very straight forward, wait 5 minutes, and it is configured...
- setup your "my.phonegnome.com" account, where all your features are show, painless
- purchase some sipphone minutes $10 (0.018 per minute...), easy
- Configure phonegnome to use sipphone, not too bad, google helped here as did other forum
- Phonegnome support forums? 39 registered users, mininal FAQ's. Reply time, slow...(ACTUALLY, more action and support found here!!!)
- Phonegnome email support, good, even late night answers...
- Documentation of features and *codes (call fwd, etc) very bad, found a list of codes for a similar box (kaboom.net) then emailed support to tell me which ones are supported, which they did, and I reposted on the phonegnome support forum....
- VOIP Options: Domestic calls and International call. No support for differentiating local, regional, instate, etc.... the PG Support forum indicated to one member that they will email them with a solution, I personally have not gotten anything back concerning my request...
- The telemarketer option, either forces everyone without callerid enabled to listen to some warning message and press 1 to complete the call... personally I have not had any telemarketer calls in a long time, so this feature will be unused.

If anyone else has any questions about "features" I can provide some information as it is available to users.


Moment of truth: Try placing a call, EVERY SINGLE CALL is prefaced by some voice telling me I "dialing by internet phone service" or "dialing by local phone service" (not exact words, but it pissed me off!) this is not seamless. PG Support calls it "call indication prompts" I was hoping to use the phonegnome without someone even knowing there was another gadget on the phone line!!! no such luck, and PG support does not even know if they will provide an option to turn off the call.

I think that if this feature is not available, I'm gonna return the PG and replace it with the 3000 and configure it as I want (PLEASE SOMEONE STOP ME IF THE 3000 also has these anoying voice prompts!!!!)
Good thing for their 30 trial period....
tphank

[mberlant]

The SPA-3000 is the same hardware, but has generic firmware (you get to configure the Line 1 Dial Plan by hand to do exactly as you wish). When you use a PhoneGnome all routing decisionmaking, as far as I know, is in the PhoneGnome service and is not in your PhoneGnome device. The "call indication prompts" come from their centralized service.

I would tend to concur with you that since you have specified the route each type of call should take you should not have to be reminded of your own decision with each and every call you place. If I had to redesign this "feature" I would change it to only make the announcement when it conflicts with a route that you have specified. A good example of this would be if PhoneGnome were sending a particular call via PSTN because SIPphone was unavailable.

[PhoneBoy]

Personally, I think the call prompts are a bonus, but each to their own.

FYI, I don't think a stock 3000 will do the "try VoIP, fail over to PSTN" the way PhoneGnome does it.

[DracoFelis]

Originally Posted by PhoneBoy

Personally, I think the call prompts are a bonus, but each to their own.

FYI, I don't think a stock 3000 will do the "try VoIP, fail over to PSTN" the way PhoneGnome does it.

You may be right. But the free SIP Broker service ( http://www.sipbroker.com ) does let an SPA-3000 fall back to the BYOD VoIP provider registered on "Line 1", after first transparently checking for a free ENUM route for the call. Not quite the same thing as falling back to the PSTN port, but in many cases fallback to a low cost VoIP provider would be preferred anyway. And you could always add additional dial plan entries to special case some numbers (for example, by changing your dial plan to always send: toll free, local, and 911 via the PTSN line). So it is possible to get almost that feature set (without the recording) via an SPA-3000 and "roll your own".

NOTE: As already mentioned in this forum, SIP Broker still has some technical issues to resolve, before they include PhoneGnome's ENUM root, in the list of ENUM numbers SIP Broker's automatic ENUM service checks. How quickly (or even if) those issues are resolved, will probably depend upon how busy the volunteers at SIP Broker are, along with how responsive PhoneGnome is to their technical questions (so far, PhoneGnome has been slow to answer tech questions from SIP Broker).

So for the present time, SIP Broker calling will not yet automatically detect PhoneGnome users, and route the call to the PhoneGnome. A SIP Broker user can "manually" direct a call to PhoneGnome's proxy (and thereby call a PhoneGnome user "for free"), but for the present time, that has to be done "manually" by the user, by starting that specific call with the prefix *746 (for example, dialing "*746 11111111" from SIP Broker, will reach a PhoneGnome recording). Other SIP Broker routing prefixes (for manually directing calls to a specific VoIP provider) can be found on this page: http://www.sipbroker.com/sipbroker/a...iderWhitePages .

[tphank]

Originally Posted by PhoneBoy

Personally, I think the call prompts are a bonus, but each to their own.

FYI, I don't think a stock 3000 will do the "try VoIP, fail over to PSTN" the way PhoneGnome does it.

For the PhoneGnome Are you referring to a Phonegnome VOIP call to another Phonegnome user only or does the fallback also work if the specified ITSP, (additional VOIP provided specified for your dialing plans) VOIP Call fails?

Also, anyone know if PG supports *69 Call Return?

[PhoneBoy]

On my PhoneGnome, I use VoicePulse. If for some reason VoicePulse is down when I try and make a call, it will fail over to the PSTN port to make the call. Way cool.

I have to believe *69 is supported since the SPA-3000 itself supports this functionality.