Music shops

Basement mall below Excelsior Hotel (beside Funan mall near city hall mrt) - load os guitar shops!

Pfingo local numbers in Singapore

Soon I may be leaving for the US for a work contract. Leaving Singapore will be sad! On the geeky side this means disconnecting the home phone number and suspending my mobile cell number (roaming charges are utterly ridiculous...). However we want to keep a local number in Singapore: enter Pfingo.

For 24sgd per year, or 1.40USD per month, the Pfingo Basic package gives you a local Singapore phone number connected through VoIP SIP. This means you can receive incoming calls to that number anywhere in the world. Deal!

I tested this with my LinkSys ATA 3102 and it works fine. Included for no extra charge are CallerID, and VoiceMail for when the ATA is down. Good job Pfingo!

The only Pfingo service missing is to forward the calls to another SIP account: the ATA only has one incoming SIP account. So this means juggling accounts, but luckily other VoIP SIP providers provide call forwarding.

Insurance in Singapore - check NTUC Income

As an expat when I first arrived I was provided with health insurance by my company. More recently as my jobs have changed and even periods of retrenchment have happened I have need portable health cover. There are plenty of friendly insurance agents in town, happy to sell you policies from big American and British insurance companies. Before you do this, you should check out the local company NTUC Income: at least price up their insurance (health, home, life, mortgage protection etc) before making a decision with a potentially more expensive overseas insurer...

Pennytel - lower IDD rates

We're trying Pennytel (www.pennytel.com) as our main VoIP SIP provider for IDD calls, instead of Pfingo because the Pennytel rates are darn cheap:

1. *untimed* calls are 10 Singapore cents (about 6 US cents) to USA, and landlines in Australia and UK. There is also a timed plan and the per minute rates are also low.

2. calls to India are charged at 2.4 Singapore cents per minute, 60% cheaper than Pfingo

3. timed calls are billed per second, not per minute as for most other voip providers I have stumbled across

4. no fixed subscription, and no expiry of credit

5. overseas registration is no problem providing you have a credit card that will be authenticated

Hopefully the IDD audio quality and call reliability with Pennytel are as good as Pfingo...

Buying geeky stuff!

Here's a quick list of places I use that sell good stuff at good prices. Things change in Singapore quite quickly.

1. batteries
- Mustafa for AA and AAA like Duracell (basement electronics section)
- Kim Chew, basement B1-46 of Sim Lim Tower for a wide selection

2. mobile phones
- price them up in Mustafa and Naranjan trading at 158 Racecourse Road. Last time I bought Naranjan was cheaper. No warranty though as these are often gray imports.

3. computer bits and pieces
- Video Pro in Sim Lim Square on 4th floor near the lifts has been a reliable place for me over four/five years. Other people have their own favourites such as Bell.
- South Asia computer centre in Funan on 3rd floor has good stuff and prices are quite competitive.
- Challenger upstairs in Funan is a last resort place for me. Usually more expensive.

4. electrical lighting
- back to Sim Lim Tower, to Sinter on 3rd floor, unit #03-05. Great selection for mains lighting bulbs and fittings

5. consumer electronics like iPods and cameras
- Parisilk in Holland Village are good folks, but probably they are not the cheapest. They always quote without gst so add 7% when pricing up. It should definitely be cheaper than Best Denki in the main shopping malls.


General advice: avoid ground floor of malls Orchard Road, Lucky Plaza and Sim Lim places. These are usually more expensive, and often have "dodgier" sales staff and I've had prices misquoted before. Always check your change carefully at these places: if you give a large note for a small purchase, count the 10sgd notes you get back carefully... I've been ripped off at least twice when I first moved here ;)

Wireless@SG - easier login using a Nokia mobile phone

Many things in Singapore are great. For the uber-geek the "Wireless@SG" service is truly great. It's a free wireless lan service covering shopping centres and coffee shops all over the city island, and will be live until at least 2013.
Wireless@SG website

When you use this service you have to type in a user name and a password in the browser. With a mobile phone that is a pain: when you want to check email, make a voip call, quickly surf, etc you have to type in username and password first...

However Pfingo offer a piece of software for Nokia phones called PfingoCONNECT which allows you to save the user name and password, so that all you have to do is one click a profile to login to Wireless@SG. Download it at the Pfingo website for your Nokia mobile phone. It saves a lot of mobile keypad twiddling to login. Nice.

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!