Anyone using Sipgate?

[tentimes]

Hi,

I recently opened a SIpgate account which basically gives me a free local number for receiving calls. In the first 2 days I have had a two hour outtage though and wondered if anyone else i using their broadband for SIP and what their mileage was with providers?

Also, does anyone know how many lines are practical with an ADSL connection with an upstream of about 90k/sec?

Thanks,

TT

[Pepp77]

SIP in the UK uses one of two codecs G.711 A-Law and G.729. G.711 is a 64kbps bit rate codec and G.729 is a 8kbps bitrate, you then need to add on overheads and so a typical G.729 call uses about 35kbps and a typical G.711 call uses about 85kbps of bandwidth.

Realistically on a decent DSL connection you can run 5-8 x G.711 calls with no issues and 15 ish G.729 calls.

When we sell SIP we limit it to 5 G.711 calls and 10 G.729 calls to allow for fluctuations in bandwidth or less than optimum upload speeds.

[DoubleTop]

we used SIP and our own Asterisk server and a pretty poor connection managed with 16 phone lines as we could tunnel and QOS the sip traffic.

Since Skype has improved massively now, that's all I use. I've four incoming numbers, the one downer is that I never know which one I'm answering and I would on an asterisk system :(

DT.

[tentimes]

Thanks for the info. I'm currently using an old mobile phone (nokia e65) for my one SIP number but I was hoping to get another couple of numbers, which sounds like it's easily doable. I've ordered a SIP adapter to stick the other 2 on landlines.

Setting up a new business from home you see, so trying to keep the costs down. Vistaprint's free offers, Linode, Gmail, SIP, Open source software etc are making this startup a lot cheaper than the last business I ran about 15 years ago - how times change!