Sipura SPA-3000 Review

First Impressions

The SPA-3000 is a small unit (which is made of plastic and very light) and is designed to provide VoIP (Voice over IP) capabilities by interfacing with a normal analogue telephone (or cordless) and a standard PSTN line.

In technical terms, this has both an FXS and an FXO interface - the FXS interface allows a normal telephone to be turned into an IP phone and the FXO interface provides connectivity to a PSTN line (or of course another voip adapter which is locked by the provider). These interfaces can be configured independantly using the onboard web interface where when you log in as an admin user and switch to advanced mode, there are hundreds of settings to configure every possible value or paramter possible on each port.

In the UK, the standard price for this unit seems to be around the £100 mark - the ebay seller I bought mine from also included a UK power supply, adapter to connect to a UK phone line and an adapter to connect a UK telephone to - as well as a voiptalk.org account with £1 credit which was configured and ready to use. Thanks to this pre-configuration by the seller, I was basically able to unpack the unit, connect it up and after changing the unit over to DHCP to work on my network I was able to very quickl

g VoIP calls from my normal telephone without interfeering too much with my existing setup.

The main down side to this unit is the documentation - there was none included in the box and although Sipura provide a users guide on their web site (http://sipura.com/support/index.htm), it is not clearly written or easy to understand - this and the extreme configurability (and therefore flexibility) of this device can make it a very difficult device to configure. Luckly, help is at hand in the form of a web site called Voxilla (http://www.voxilla.com).This web site provides a community forum with a dedicated "Sipura SPA Users Group" where new and advanced users alike can ask questions and have them answered by people who have already had such questions or faced similar problems. Also provided on the Voxilla web site are is a "wizard" for automatically configuring the SPA-3000. This wizard asks some simple questions about your setup (including allowing you to select from a list of known voip providers) and will then talk to the SPA-3000 across your network and upload the configuration.

Once setup and working, apart from allowing you to make voip calls, the SPA-3000 provides the following functions (as well as many others - most of which are outlined in the data sheet: http://sipura.com/Documents/SPA-3000.pdf):


A PSTN to VoIP gateway - this allows you to call in over your PSTN phone line and make a VoIP call (you can setup various authentication methods and dial plans to contol this so for example you can sign in with a certain pin number and only be able to dial certain numbers).

A VoIP to PSTN gateway - You can call in over VoIP and make a call over your PSTN phone line (again, you can setup the authenticaion and dial plans to restrict access and control what can be dialed).

"Power Cut Protection" - If the SPA-3000 looses either the power or it's network connection, it can be configured to directly connect the 2 interfaces together - so the phone will be effectivly directly connected to the phone line so you can still make calls over your your phone line during a power cut as if the device were not connected. If the power comes back on while a call is in progress, normal operation will not be resumed until the existing call has ended.

VoIP Calls - You can receive calls to your VoIP address (or number) on the same phone as you make and receive phone calls on your PSTN line.

Complex dial plans can be constructed - so for example, you might want calls to numbers like 999 or 112 (emergancy services), 1471 or 1571 (BT features), 100 or 150 (operator and customer services), 0800 numbers (free phone calls) and local calls to go out your PSTN phone line, national calls to go out one voip provider that charges better rates for those calls and international calls to go out of another voip provider with cheap international rates. You can also do things like prefix a local number with a dialing code so you can send local calls out of a voip provider without dialing the full number with dialing codes.

"Remote PSTN Line" - You can configure multiple Sipura units to allow you to access your PSTN line in a certain location while you are in a different building or even country with just an internet connection.

Asterisk - If you require more flexabilty or features, you can use the SPA-3000 as an FXS and FXO interface to the popular Asterisk open source PBX system. There are several sample configurations provided in the Voxilla forums as well as a configuration wizard for using the SPA-3000 with Asterisk (http://voxilla.com/spa3kasterisk.php)

Conclusion

The Sipura SPA-3000 is an affordable and versatile device with many features and good community support but is let down a bit by it's lack of good documentation and I'm therefore giving an overall score of 8/10.

Forum information: connecting the Sipura 3000 to your Asterisk box

Ian Chilton

Added:  Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Reviewer:  Ian Chilton
Score:
hits: 69168
Language: eng

  

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Posted by lschweiss on Jan 31, 2006 - 08:47 PM Your rating: Avoid version 3.0.x firmware. In an attempt to improved echo cancel on the FXO port audio quality has suffered. There are some telephone networks the SPA cannot cancel the echo on. Version 2.0.x are more successfull at cancelling echo, but have real problems with double speak (when both parties talk at the same time), which happens more frequently than most people realize. DTMF signals when using asterisk are a real problem. With dtmfmode=rfc2833 the SPA will only produce clicks, when dtmfmode=info it will make tones but they can all be run together. This becomes a problem if the user has a repeating digit. Definately not recommended as an Asterisk FXO port. It's not ready.

Posted by absentis on Jan 27, 2006 - 02:14 PM Your rating: The Sipura is great! If in doubt, try to make, say, ZyXel 2002 work behind the router. When you'll get mad, you'll undestand. But that's not all. Today I have been trying to setup 10 gateway on Sipura 3000. Well.. it works! In spite of the common opinion that Sipura 3000 allows one voip provider to register for inbound calls and 4 more voip provides for dial-out through the 4 additional gateways, that's not the only way sipura 3000 can work. If 4 additional gateways are not sufficient for you, what you should just add some more lines to your dial plan, something like that: <#05:00>xx.<:@sip1.voipbuster.com;usr=" userid ";pwd="pass";nat=yes> <#06:00>xx.<:@sip1.sipdiscount.com;usr=" userid ";pwd="pass"> <#07:>1xxxx.<:@sip.stanaphone.com;usr=08123456;pwd=1234567;nat="yes"> <#08:000>xx.<:@sip.voipstunt.com;usr="userid";pwd="pass";nat=yes> It won't work with every provider and sometimes you have to change "usr" to "uid" So, you can have virtually as many gateways as you wish. You are limited by the length of "Line1" only (2047). Quite enough for ~20-30 providers. But configured that way the plan seems to be too complicated to edit... Until you help yourself with the small program of mine, written within an hour just to help me with the settings. Look at http://absentis.front.ru/voip/ By the way, (lookin' at previous poster), I'm not a programmer at all... What would it mean... Sorry for poor english.

Posted by SteveNutt on Jan 09, 2006 - 10:29 AM Your rating: You'd better be pretty damned technical if you are going to get one of these bad boys going. I'm an internet software developer with over twelve years of computing experience and it was way over my head. My SPA3000 now resides at the bottom of a basket with some old computer spares - well out of sight from my wife who is still giving me grief about the wasted £££'s. I reverted to Skype - stress free VoIP.

Posted by mjy78 on Mar 10, 2005 - 05:24 AM Your rating: I have to agree with Ian. This is one very nice little piece of hardware. I received my SPA-3000 yesterday and spent last night configuring it to work with my VoiP providers. I use three different VoiP providers, so the ability to define a dial plan that routes calls to those providers based on the format of the dialled number is very handy. I amazed at the call quality, this being my first experience with a hardware VoIP device. My wife works from home and she's been making calls all day. The SPA-3000 has now been running there since last night and she hasn't noticed the difference as yet (I still haven't plucked up the courage to tell her I spent $190 on a little grey piece of plastic). For a non-techo this device may still be a little complicated to manually configure, however a lot of the VoiP providers out there now provide automatic configuration for the SPA-3000 anyway. And in my case, I love the wide range of configuration options. There are so many settings for this box that it is going to take me a while to get through them all.