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As some of you will know, I recently moved house (contact me by other means if you want my new address). I didn't actually realise at the time of buying the house that it had (the potential for) FTTP1, but for the first time that opened up the possibility of dropping the old copper phone line and replacing it with VoIP. Why? Because paying £15/month or more for a phone line which we use very little is a waste of money, so at least investigating a VoIP solution seemed like a good idea2.
In terms of an ISP, I've been very happy with Zen for almost 15 years now, so there seemed little point changing there. They're probably not the cheapest in the market, but they're not far off and they're technically very competent. By signing up for an FTTP contract with them, they also gave me a FRITZ!Box 7530 for "free" which seems to be a reasonable piece of kit and a definite upgrade on my aged Netgear box.
Once the (very helpful) Openreach engineer had done his job and got things to the state where there was connectivity to the fibre modem, first task was to set up the FRITZ!Box. This was nice and easy - plug the Ethernet cable from the fibre modem into the LAN1 port on the router (this was about the only non-obvious thing). Once you've done that, connect to the FRITZ!Box's wireless (SSID and password on the bottom of the router) and then browse to http://fritz.box/ (note HTTP not HTTPS) and log in with the admin password (also on the bottom of the router). Then browse to Internet / Account Information, and put in your Zen login details. You should now have Internet. Hooray! (I now spent a bit of time reconfiguring the wireless network, but none of that was critical or hard).
The choice of VoIP provider was somewhat trickier as I've never had one before, and almost all the advertising out there seems to be targeted at businesses rather than consumers (for understandable reasons, most consumers still need a bundled phone line one way or another). After some browsing, I found Port 5060 who both looked reasonably competent and didn't require a long-term contract. Order was not entirely intuitive - while their pricing page says £3/month, clicking on the "Order Now" button presents you with a £5 one-time fee. It is £3/month for their basic "one number" service, but this wasn't entirely obvious to me at this stage. In any case, I ordered and the account was activated about 12 hours later.
You can then log into Port 5060's technical portal with a different username/password from the billing side of things, and a different-but-very-similar URL. If any of the Port 5060 people happen to read this, single sign-on and everything on one domain would be nice please :-). The next steps were not particularly obvious:
So in summary:
Notes:
In terms of an ISP, I've been very happy with Zen for almost 15 years now, so there seemed little point changing there. They're probably not the cheapest in the market, but they're not far off and they're technically very competent. By signing up for an FTTP contract with them, they also gave me a FRITZ!Box 7530 for "free" which seems to be a reasonable piece of kit and a definite upgrade on my aged Netgear box.
Once the (very helpful) Openreach engineer had done his job and got things to the state where there was connectivity to the fibre modem, first task was to set up the FRITZ!Box. This was nice and easy - plug the Ethernet cable from the fibre modem into the LAN1 port on the router (this was about the only non-obvious thing). Once you've done that, connect to the FRITZ!Box's wireless (SSID and password on the bottom of the router) and then browse to http://fritz.box/ (note HTTP not HTTPS) and log in with the admin password (also on the bottom of the router). Then browse to Internet / Account Information, and put in your Zen login details. You should now have Internet. Hooray! (I now spent a bit of time reconfiguring the wireless network, but none of that was critical or hard).
The choice of VoIP provider was somewhat trickier as I've never had one before, and almost all the advertising out there seems to be targeted at businesses rather than consumers (for understandable reasons, most consumers still need a bundled phone line one way or another). After some browsing, I found Port 5060 who both looked reasonably competent and didn't require a long-term contract. Order was not entirely intuitive - while their pricing page says £3/month, clicking on the "Order Now" button presents you with a £5 one-time fee. It is £3/month for their basic "one number" service, but this wasn't entirely obvious to me at this stage. In any case, I ordered and the account was activated about 12 hours later.
You can then log into Port 5060's technical portal with a different username/password from the billing side of things, and a different-but-very-similar URL. If any of the Port 5060 people happen to read this, single sign-on and everything on one domain would be nice please :-). The next steps were not particularly obvious:
- Click on "Manage Numbers" then "Purchase Number". You can now select a number from any UK geographical code or a range of non-geographical ones. I was boring and went for the geographical code where my house actually is. This step costs £1/month for those keeping track.
- Now go to "Manage Extensions" and "Add Extension". Create the extension, associate it with the number you just chose and get yet another username and password (which is fair enough in this case, it's effectively a user on your account). When you've created the extension, click on the username in the table (UX? What UX? If you have to put a big hint on your page telling people where to find things, you probably need to change your UX...) and note the SIP proxy.
- Now go back to the FRITZ!Box and go to "Telephony" / "Telephone Numbers", "New telephone number". Set "Telephone number for registration" to the full number from Port 5060, "Internal telephone number" to the local part of the number (not sure how crucial this is), the username and password to those you got in Step 2 above, and both the registrar and proxy server to the SIP proxy you got above. I haven't set the STUN server - I suspect I don't need this because I have a static IP address.
- You can now plug your regular analog phone into the "FON1" port on the FRITZ!Box (they helpfully supply a BT connector to RJ11 adapter with the router) and should be able to make and receive calls "as normal".
So in summary:
- Openreach were very good at getting the fibre installed.
- Zen remain excellent.
- The FRITZ!Box seems pretty good so far - everything Just Works(tm).
- Port 5060 seem technically competent but the UX leaves a lot to be desired.
Notes:
- FTTP is Fibre (Internet) to the Premise or in generic terms, fast broadband. However, if you didn't know that already this post is likely to be a bit geeky for you.
- We did consider the idea of not having a "landline" at all and just using our mobiles, but as our new house has solid stone walls approximately the thickness of those in a nuclear bunker, mobile reception in large parts of the house is dodgy at best.
