VOIP experiment followup

I wrote about my Blazing Things VOIP experiment. I’m going to declare the first round a failure. The softphone X-Lite worked okay, though the sound quality wasn’t great. The sound quality of the SIPPhone Call-In-One adapter was better. However, there were some problems with the setup:

• Most importantly, the Call-In-One would freeze up when a call would come in via my LibreTel phone number. Had I gotten my number from SIPPhone.com, this may not have happened. I’m not willing to expend the effort to find out.
• SIPPhone.com’s voice mail system doesn’t have configurable enough outgoing messages, so I didn’t want to use their system.
• When the Call-In-One was up and running, the phone would ring endlessly and never go to voice mail.

My next step is to return the Call-In-One and be done with the “dirt cheap” phase of my experiment. My inclination is to use Packet8, because they provide a complete service and seem, on the whole, more committed to a good user experience. SIPPhone and FWD may attract hobbyists, but Packet8 and Vonage are going after everyone with broadband.