Nokia E Series And Voip

[Stu]

I have a Nokia E61 which is sect-band (800/900/1800/1900/2100mhz) plus it has built in wifi and VOIP. I signed up for a free service from truphone.com which is free until the end of the year and then appears to be a straight PAYG.

Truphone is a voip service with NAT pentration specifically designed for the Nokia E series. The E series has a great VOIP module in terms of sound, but it sucks when it comes to NAT friendliness. It doesn't support STUN or ICE. Truphone, however, has great penetration and is highly recommended. Gizmo Project also has apparently tweaked its NAT for this phone.

Truphone's US number have free calling to the US and Canada until the end of the year, plus a free inbound Washington State DID. Their European plan gives out an IOM mobile number and free outbound calling to a number of European landlines. Truphone also supports ENUM permitting you to direct dial most other VOIP numbers. Lastly, it supports straight sip dialing (e.g. 12125551212@myasteriskserver.dydns.org). Truphone also accepts straight inbound sipcalls.

I tried extensively to connect directly to my asterisks box and could not. For those of you who know me, you might appreciate some of the extra issues I face. You will not, however, get browny points or a star on your head explaining this situation in search engine friendly terms. Suffice to say that with very little modification, however, truphone deals with these various interferences that certain petrol rich boards have caused. It also did so without a costly tax on my processor's power which is a tiny OMAP processor.

Anyway, I just spent a number of days on a wired campus and in a fully wired hotel. Using this device, almost all of my time, my calls were completely free. Using a conditional call forward the moment I stepped out of range, the calls forwarded to a cheap route to my Liechtenstein SIM. Looking at my statistics, I spoke for roughly 600 minutes. 530 of those minutes were completely free to me. The remainder I paid $US0.10 a minute. My callers only paid the cost of calling a standard US or UK landline. I also tried the connection over GPRS and the quality was acceptable, but not great since that involved a SIM swap, I did not attempt many calls.

My first experience with mobile VOIP was highly positive. While my situation cried out for this style of connection, I believe that mobile voip might prove to be a very valuable addition to our tool kits. Nokia's new line of mobiles has a great VOIP clinet and the phones do not feel like bricks when they are in your pants pocket. This is particularly true for those of us who have ASterisks boxes.


Stu