[Liverpool] SIP Providers

[Simon Iremonger (lugs)]

> I want to setup a SIP phone at home instead of getting a BT line. I have
> a Cisco 7940g phone which has a SIP firmware image I can flash on. I
> want to to talk directly to the sip provider, no go through any
> intermediate hardware.(Sebastian, any reason why this wouldn't work?)
> My question is, what sip providers would people suggest?


AAISP SIP/IAX service works fine....
http://aa.net.uk/telecoms.html

Generally you do not pay for incoming calls, but you usually
  pay for an 'incoming number'.


The only trouble you might get with SIP is NAT.  If your phone
  cannot have a real-world IP address, you *may* have trouble
  with RTP-streams in one direction or the other (i.e. one
  person can hear the other but not vice-versa).  It CAN work
  depending on the NAT-device and stun-servers and all that,
  but NAT complicates matters.

If your Cisco can speak IAX and the provider supports this,
  this may be a better option that SIP protocol.


> I also want to configure the devices and test them before
> committing to anything, do providers let you do this?
You might be able to get a free SIP account with some provider,
  e.g.   http://www.freeworlddialup.com/   or something, which
  gives you a "SIP URI" but NOT a phone number...  You could
  use this to speak to somebody else on freeworlddialup (or
  some other SIP-uri-callable-person) maybe...  Avoiding
  needing to buy a PSTN phone number initially...

--Simon


p.s. A lurker, not actually in liverpool...