Roaming with your SIP

Roaming with your SIP

We are aware of the very comprehensive charges made by mobile phone companies when we Roam with our Phone outside our resident country, and we read much of how we can take our SIPphone or ATA with us as we travel abroad. Is it that simple? I did have one experience in trying this out. On a second visit to a project in Ireland (I reside in the UK) knowing my hotel room had broadband access, I took my HT486 ATA and DECT phone with me.

The LAN connector in the room looked a rather odd one, and I guess this was so that you had to hire a patch cable for 2 euros (like their motorway tolls 1.8 Euros no change given for 2). The patch cable allows the RJ45 to connect to the strange one in the wall. I normally run static IP at home, so I set the ATA for DHCP via the DECT phone. Plugged in and to my amazement it registered with Sipgate no problem.

I can not imagine it’s going to be this simple for everyone. I can imagine hotels have to provide as much of a restriction free broadband access as possible, so may be it may work for everyone most times. Was I fortunate? The use of the Sipgate account at 1.19pence a minute for calls back to the UK and to Irish numbers, compared to my roaming charge of 35pence a minute was no contest of course. The use of the ATA for 2 days in this instance saved over £40 pounds. Almost the cost of the ATA.

Have any members of the forum any experiences of Roaming with your SIP and what problems did you encounter. Would you share them with us?

Phil

Reply from Colin on Jun 16, 2005 - 06:55 AM

Philco :

Have any members of the forum any experiences of Roaming with your SIP and what problems did you encounter.

Not yet, but I have an IAX2-capable ATA on its way. In theory, I should be able to use it as a remote extension off my Asterisk box, which is behind NAT, without all the mucking around one must do (so I've read; never tried it) when using SIP and both ends are behind NAT.


Colin

Reply from tjardick on Jun 16, 2005 - 10:14 AM

Hi Philco,

2 things to take into a here.

1. The hotel access, if they just provide free access of their internet connection to every hotel guest then with just a simple DHCP setup you can probably dial out of the hotel (providing that not every room tries to do it at the same time as i assume hotel's will not have infinit bandwidth).

It could be though that they have a register/pay for access system, in which case you will need to go the softphone route (x-lite) as these systems usually force you to go to a webpage where you need to sign-in before you get your access. The problem with an ATA is that it doesn't have a browser to login...

2. You need to make sure that your provider supports a voice proxy, for example we here at voipuser.org don't offer a Voice proxy so that is why we need people to forward their ports in the firewall, something which is probably not very easy to do in an hotel setup where you don't control the firewall.

But as 90% of the commercial providers have this support i think you should be just fine as long as you have full access to anything you plug into the socket...

regards,

Tj

Reply from dean on Jun 16, 2005 - 01:53 PM

Quote:

I can imagine hotels have to provide as much of a restriction free broadband access as possible, so may be it may work for everyone most times. Was I fortunate?

Most hotel networks will be firewalled. Many of them will use full-cone NAT. Fortunately, as Tj states, most commercial providers do have audio proxying so it won't matter, but you might not, for example, be able to connect to VoIP User from a hotel, as I seem to recall one member had trouble doing.

This is where Skype can be very handy, as that will break through most things.

When I was in New York at the weekend, we had CAT V in the hotel room provided for free. I think it will become the norm. However, hotels make a fortune from people using the in-room telephone to make calls. As they begin to lose that revenue, it wouldn't surprise me to see them throttle back freely provided internet access to rates useable for data only.

You could easily build a router to allow a data burst every other second for example......... that would break anything voice or video related, including skype.

Dean

Reply from Philco on Jun 16, 2005 - 07:37 PM

Ok on New York Dean. Well my daughter is out there at the moment and as you say the hotel phone charges are pretty grim. Thats why I've set up an ipkall number in Washington, which means she can call using local rates there. She tells me there is internet in the room, but even if I knew this before she went out, I wouldnt want to burden her with attempting to get an ATA going in her room.


ipkall.com sounds fine though. Mind you is almost as cheap me calling her via sipgate.


As I mentioned, in my brief experience of simply plugging in an ATA in Ireland, it worked. I have to say that the hotel would have charged a premium if my download had been high and sustained. As it was, my calls were spread over a few hours and I reckon the hire of the bit of wire was some small kick back for them.


Doesnt look like anyone else so far has Roamed..


Phil

Reply from Colin on Jun 16, 2005 - 11:28 PM

Philco :

ipkall.com sounds fine though. Mind you is almost as cheap me calling her via sipgate.

Maybe a toll-free US number would be the go? Free for her to call, and US2¢/min for you.

Reply from Philco on Jun 17, 2005 - 07:09 AM

Hi Colin. Thansk for that, I seem to think I've seen a posting on the forum somewhere refering to a provider that gives free numbers and $0.02 US per minute. I'll have a search later.

Phil

Reply from Colin on Jun 17, 2005 - 08:49 AM

NuFone.

Reply from kkjelev on Jun 21, 2005 - 06:00 PM

Hi guys ,

If somebody of the SIP-gurus here is ready to filed-test the SIP roaming
into a hotel area, please do not hesitate to drop me a private mesage.
Currently I work as a hotel IT systems manager in Tunisia -
a good choice to combine a holiday with some VoIP mastering this summer.

Regards to all

Reply from Philco on Jun 22, 2005 - 07:36 PM

I guess theres an offer we cant refuse..

Have you tried it kkjeliv. Is your system able to provide the VOIP facility to guests in general.

Not sure it will help the revenue from phone calls..


Phil

Reply from kkjelev on Jun 24, 2005 - 01:58 PM

Hi !

@ Philco
I tested VoIP using some software applications to dial internationally, since in Tunisia the monopoly of the local telecom keeps the prices too high. Still not used VoIP as a hotel facility, just for personal needs and testing. Here gets the idea - I need more experienced people in VoIP to
continue testing and implementation of some solutions.
If you a really interested in visiting me, please inform me in advance - I would be happy to guide you how to reach me.

Reply from Colin on Jun 30, 2005 - 11:16 AM

I've now been "roaming with my IAX" for the past few days, and it works quite well. I'm at my aunt's place on the (very wet) Gold Coast in Queensland, behind her NAT router on a Telstra BigPond cable connection, and my AG-168V ATA (using IAX firmware) is pointing at my Asterisk box (using DynDNS), which is behind another NAT router on my TPG ADSL connection back in Canberra, ACT. To conserve my aunt's upstream bandwidth, I've restricted the ATA to G.729 and GSM. Pings are just over 40ms. Double-hop calls (VoIP in and out) have a little bit of lag, understandably, but it's not that bad and still quite useable.

I didn't bring a handset with me, as I had one already here waiting for me. But it's corded; if I do this again, I think I'll pack a small cordless 'phone.


Colin

Reply from Philco on Jul 01, 2005 - 07:34 AM

Hi Colin. Nice to see a posting on the topic. I guess it 'just worked' did it, or did you have a bit of tweaking to do.

Were cruising again this year, so I'll be trying it on the ship keeping in touch with home and business (yes sad I know).

Looking forward to seeing your PM on the new ATA you were banned from looking at before your trip out.

Phil

Reply from Colin on Jul 01, 2005 - 09:06 AM

Philco :

I guess it 'just worked' did it, or did you have a bit of tweaking to do.

Yep, worked straight away, as I'd already changed the "service addr" from the private IP address of my Asterisk box to my DynDNS hostname. The only other settings required are "phone number" and "account", which I have set to the Asterisk extension number that I'm using, "pin" (extension password), and "iptype" set to dhcp so that it picks up an IP address from my aunt's router. Plus I've also restricted it to low-bandwidth codecs. All very simple and straight-forward.

Reply from Philco on Jul 01, 2005 - 06:32 PM

Well thats what I wanted to hear, that my own experience of using an ATA in an "unknown" environment wasnt a one off. I run static IP at home and all I did was set DHCP through the phone keypad and away we went.

Phil

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