Telephone adapter for landline and Pfingo SIP calls

Voice over Internet Providers (VoIP) like Pfingo use a connection technology called SIP to make and receive calls. Normal fixed telephones at home, which in Singapore you connect directly to StarHub Digital Voice and SingTel Mio or SingTel phone jack sockets, do not support SIP unless you have bought a special IP cordless telephone model from Siemens (which Pfingo can sell you on their website store).

Instead I bought a telephone adapter from Linksys Cisco model SPA-3102 as I already had Philips cordless phones and did not want to throw those out. Configuring this SPA-3102 was quite a job and should only be done by a tech savvy geek! If you don't need to know any more, then do not bother to read on....

The SPA3102 connects to your broadband and your regular phone wall jack and allows your regular home phone to

a) receive and dial calls to one single SIP VoIP service provider, such as Pfingo. This allows us to call cheap IDD at home, and free calling back to home when travelling

b) receive and dial calls to the PSTN regular phone network (in my case StarHub Digital Voice). This allows us to make regular local calls with StarHub are free to both landlines and mobiles here.

c) receive a call from VoIP, either the same service provider in case a) or a different service provider, and pass that call directly to the PSTN . For when you are travelling abroad and want to dial a local number at home e.g.: free calls in Singpore from wherever

You can do more but I'll leave it there.

The SPA-3102 configuration is quite confusing. You'll need some time to make it work correctly. There is a thread here where I try to learn more about how to set this thing properly. The only magic setting I want to share is in the PSTN Line tab to set the SPA To PSTN Gain: to 3 (default is 0) Screen shot shown here. Without this I could not get reliable tone dialling to the PSTN through StarHub Digital Voice (in my case a Motorola cable modem SBV5120 Surfboard modem).

There are two downsides to using this product:

1) The restriction of one single service in case a) is a pain, but you can allocate speed dial numbers to other VoIP service providers if they support it which is trial and error. This works for me using Gizmo. I read the Siemens cordless IP phone supports 6 service providers but I don't know if they all can be active so that you can receive a call from any of the 6...

2) there are time delays when you dial a call to the fixed line, and ringing delays when you receive incoming calls. This isn't really a problem when you know this, but may worry other folks who use the phone

Finally one great feature is that if you turn the box off, it automatically connects your phone directly to the PSTN fixed line so if all fails you'll be back to normal phone service. Wife likes this!