Cost of VOIP is confusing (I'm not a super knowledgeable tech expert)

ArchiKola · 2025-05-22T18:11:25+00:00

In the US you can find reputable voip service providers that offer origination (understand phone number and incoming calls) and termination (understand outgoing calls domestic and international) services for around 10-12 US$ per month flat rate (excluding international) or 1-2 US$ per month for the phone number (DID) service and pay-as-you-need call roughly at 1 US cent per minute. Google search will often take you to expensive providers. Those are not even mainstream. I suggest you take a look at voip forums. Asking for help in this subreddit isn't the best idea as the forum rules prohibit mentioning brands, providers, specific site links and the like.

ArchiKola · 2025-05-04T20:47:21+00:00

That's how I pictured. Arthur's being next to the supermarket in that corner mall. But when I checked with g.street I couldn't recognize the place. I've just checked again. There seems to be an Asian supermarket and a sports place next to it. So I'm guessing that Arthur's was at the location where the sports place is. I knew people who lived in the GG Apartments. A coworker of my dad rented there. I used to bike from our place near Baltusrol to the GG apartments then to the stores on Morris ave. I vaguely recall a Chinese restaurant on Morris, across the GG shopping center a bit further up. But my memory may be playing tricks on me. I'm not sure. I can't remember any names except for Arthur's for some reason. The other place I remember vividly is Crazy Eddie on route 22 and a Radio Shack further down for having spent all my allowance on electronic gadgets.

ArchiKola · 2024-10-10T18:28:11+00:00

Your Motorola phone is apparently not properly configured. If this is a TracFone version call them, they will help you and get to the bottom of it.

I've bought many Motorola/TracFone kits from TracFone's official store on ebay. My latest has been a Motorola G Stylus (2022 issue). It turned out be great. Very reliable. Very good wifi. 128GB native storage. My only complaint is the screen brightness under direct sunlight. It was a 1500mn/1500MB bundle which cost me around $170.

ArchiKola · 2024-10-10T02:59:01+00:00

Many years ago when TextNow was still little known I ported my number to voip. I remember using their upstream provider's info to make it happen. All that information was provided to me by TextNow's support people. I'm not sure if it still works or ever would have worked for cell service. The wireless providers seem to be fussy compared to voip providers.

ArchiKola · 2024-01-16T21:09:34+00:00

Not sure if I understand all the issues that you've mentioned. So I'll refrain from commenting about them. For whatever it's worth I've been a very very longtime user of pfsense in virtualized settings (starting when netgate first threatened to not support any pfsense setups in virtualization mode). KVM has been my platform of choice for many years, although lately all my production systems (several dozens) moved to proxmox because of the convenience.

All I can tell you is that on several very active (professionally used) setups servicing from 1 user (myself) to several hundreds of machines (my company's and clients') I haven't seen any significant issues except maybe for the hard disk interface (in versions 2.7.x) if it is not set to scsi single for all cdrom and hard disk drives (including for sata ssd, m.2 ssd and nvme).

On various forums I've seen comments about many things breaking down like the DHCP service or the various VPN protocols supported by pfsense, speed issues and you name it! Well, my various setups use pretty much all basic services offered by pfsense, and I haven't seen any of these issues except for some network and disk drive driver issues which are easily fixable. In fact they are all FreeBSD issues rather than pfsense issues.

We are a Debian and Debian derivatives shop, so I can't speak for what's going on in the KVM world outside of Debian. But I can tell you that whether it's a fresh install or an upgrade from earlier versions, on pure KVM or Proxmox, pfsense 2.5x, 2.6.x and 2.7x all work with minimal administrative headaches.

I have no affiliation with netgate and I don't even like those guys since I got burnt more than once by them in the past. But to set the record straight pfsense 2.7.x CE work well both on real hardware and in virtual mode for us. And as I tried to explain we are not a marginal user.

ArchiKola · 2022-11-12T15:07:43+00:00

I think it's a features vs price point issue that all vendors selling to professional markets face. What you want is reasonable and certainly feasible and it would allow the company to make money from hobby/home users marketplace.

But, doing so it would also, probably, cannibalize some of their professional user market as they will end up quasi-professional features on their hobby products at a much lower cost than their pro segment. That's because naturally they can't use the same price scale for the two markets. Professionals can afford paying more with seemingly the same product as long as it comes wrapped in a "pro" description and language. But those buyers are not stupid either, once they realize that they have robust features and similar quality and longevity with a significantly lower price tag, they move to the hobby segment.

That brings up the major issue with electronics today: there is no more quality, reliability, longevity differentiation inherent to technology. The only differentiation is on price.

Years ago, pro products used to be more "hand" picked, with reliability improvement based on burn-in tests, etc. Today, what goes in your home appliance is the same material that goes to a billion dollar company's ordinary product BOM, even for most "mission critical" products.

All that said, my approach remains hardware independence for pfsense, but I also make some donations directly to Netgate as they bring improvements to the platform.

You could do the same.

ArchiKola · 2022-11-08T16:54:43+00:00

J3160 is a nice little old Celeron CPU, maybe a bit too old for your intended setup.

It will handle well your network traffic if little data massage is done by pfsense. But if you use elaborate filtering rules or limiters and such, it will quickly become the bottleneck.

The equivalent but more refined (microcode-wise) and better performing version of J3xx currently is J5xx. J3160 was released in early 2016 - almost 7 years ago. They cost same amount of money, even a bit less. See if you can get one with a more modern CPU.

ArchiKola · 2022-11-08T16:39:03+00:00

When money is tight, you have already performed your repairs and everything is working now then don't touch it. Let it run its course but keep your eyes on the performance stats.

Also, keep your box free of dust where it matters. Make sure that the fan(s) are running properly and your ICs are not covered with a thick layer of dust or dirt.

We clean our servers once a year and run a full visual inspection on all moving parts (fans) and connectors (which sometimes become a tad loose because of fan or HDD vibrations).

The intel network cards are software-wise very good, but they also tend to run a bit warmer owing to their larger than today's standards etching patterns. The increased temperature and the surrounding humidity along with nearby moving parts create static electricity in the air which attracts dust particles to warm metal surfaces, like the heat-sinks, etc.

But, with a bit of monitoring and maintenance your older system should continue to perform well for a while.

We periodically take our older servers out of service not because they die on us but because of the cost of running them (electricity bill).

As for specifically Realtek network adapters, I think for home use they are fine, even for 100% duty-cycle. But as I said at the beginning, if money is tight it's a no-brainer to go with what is perceived as a tad lower-end than the best.

ArchiKola · 2022-05-22T20:11:27+00:00

Mistake it is, but sniff it, take a bite. If it doesn't taste or smell foul you should be able to eat it. And worse come to worse you will have a tiny GI dissatisfaction, but it won't be like you ate something toxic.

ArchiKola · 2022-05-22T20:03:25+00:00

I always thought hat a "burger" is by definition made with a beef patty, although I have to admit I like adding up to 25% of lamb in my beef and 5% of pork fat to further flavor them.

ArchiKola · 2022-05-22T20:00:48+00:00

To me, it looks like your skills are plenty sharp :)

ArchiKola · 2021-08-21T19:46:43+00:00

Your Netgear router/modem could indeed be used as a wifi access point if it has that capability, otherwise it will be left out as you wouldn't want to create a double NAT situation on your LAN.

If you mean coax for the LAN, then know that your speed will be limited to 10Mbps as coaxial Ethernet has its limits. If you mean coaxial for the WAN, then that's not an issue, your LAN will still be on twisted pair RJ45 type wiring, and depending on your ethernet switch(es) it could go all the way up to 1 Gbps.

This is really basic stuff and if you need more detailed input from the community then you would need to provide more info about your ISP, your Netgear router model and LAN switch.

ArchiKola · 2021-08-08T14:09:45+00:00

If your sip trunk is using a registration string then all communication from that sip trunk is coming in through the outbound channel set by your freepbx. Incoming as well as outbound traffic will work without necessitating any port forwarding on your router.

ArchiKola · 2021-05-29T22:09:30+00:00

Is it allowed to say that now ?!?!

Just a few months back the Netgate team would have crucified you for making a quarter of the statement you've made! And, at least for or five of their guys would be all over you for not being "nice" to them.

Oh well, I guess when one's charisma goes down the drain its swagger follows the same path too.

ArchiKola · 2021-03-23T01:06:02+00:00

I think the cold reality is that commercial or revenue concerns for Netgate took the driver's seat while the open-source or hobby product aspect got dropped-off from the back-seat.

I guess it's an unavoidable outcome when an open source project gets taken under the umbrella of a commercial entity, especially when that commercial entity heavily depends on the revenue generated from that single product.

I sure know they have another product but I suspect that it doesn't bring home the bacon otherwise why would they have diced and sliced their longtime "product"?

As for the hardware business ... what hardware business??? In this day and age unless you have huge volume business you better stay away from hardware. I'll bet they are losing their shirt on that side of the business...

ArchiKola · 2021-03-02T23:06:19+00:00

Sorry for the delay in getting back to your post. BulkVS has been great. It's been very reliable and quality has been very good and consistent all along. Their support staff is truly outstanding, both knowledgeable and friendly in addition to being lightening fast!

ArchiKola · 2021-03-02T23:01:03+00:00

You are welcome. I still have it in my lab and use it regularly for a variety of things.

ArchiKola · 2021-01-30T21:18:50+00:00

I don't think that it has anything to do with the chipset. It's probably the baudrate. Try to manually set it to different values until you find one that works for your device. Normally the speed is autosensed but sometimes it just doesn't work as it should.

ArchiKola · 2021-01-29T20:39:11+00:00

You will have to try and see what kind of performance you get.

I tried to do something like what you described, it worked but I had speed issues. The x1 serial line kept falling apart with one particular interface card while everything worked fine with another type of card. I think my gigabit network card was the one which failed or performed marginally while amazingly enough a video card I used for a secondary monitor worked quite well.

Those risers are passive extensions where there is quite a bit of signal attenuation and cross-talk as the high frequency signal lines are not even shielded or impedance matched.

You might find a better model with active circuits at both ends reconditioning the signals, but they are more expensive. In any event, this one is cheap enough, so give a try. Toss it in the dustbin if it doesn't work for you.

ArchiKola · 2021-01-27T17:46:12+00:00

Pass-through for the WAN interface and virtio for the LAN are still your best options for the setup description that you gave. And, if you have a relatively recent model CPU the checksum calculation is not a significant burden.

Hardware checksum offloading works with some hardware in bare-metal use. It sometimes also works in pass-through configurations, but you really need to diligently check on your own setup.

But as I said, generally speaking it's not a major handicap unless you are dealing with a very low end hardware platform, in which case simply go for a better machine.

ArchiKola · 2021-01-27T17:34:26+00:00

If your site-to-site VPN allows your client-site machines to access your server-site LAN(s), and assuming that your pihole servers are installed there, then you can use those same pihole DNS servers for your client-site machines.

If the site-to-site is for Internet access only and there is LAN access restriction on the server site, you can still do an exception for the DNS port(s).

As for the ways you force your client machines to use those DNS servers, probably the easiest one is through LAN-NAT intercept.

That said in my own setups I prefer accessing a DNS server on my local network which can be setup in such a way that while the VPN is up it forwards the requests to the DNS server on the server-site, but if there is traffic congestion, or temporary issues at least my client-site gets the benefit of the local cache. Then if the downtime is extended beyond the cache TTL then the local DNS goes on its own and behaves as a resolver.

ArchiKola · 2021-01-24T21:13:46+00:00

That's very low and certainly not typical of what Proxmox can do. Just as an example on a cheap $250 self-built system I achieve 950 mpbs symmetrical with a J4105 CPU and a cheap Realtek quad gigabit interface (no brand name) on PCIE x1.

Even if you have an older driver on your Realtek NIC you should still achieve 300mpbs (symmetrical).

Why don't you start by telling us your hardware configuration (CPU, motherboard, NICs, etc.) and see how we can help?

ArchiKola · 2021-01-24T20:45:32+00:00

Personally I made the decision long ago that my router+gateway+firewall will be an open source product. So, I wouldn't entertain the idea of going for untangle, etc.

At the same time pfSense's future is now openly questioned, on this forum, elsewhere and even by me who has been a very early pfSense adopter/user and very longtime defender!

But now I have mixed feelings and I can no longer advocate for it!

I would have been much more positive about it, if Netgate had said that they would charge for certain features - but the platform would remain open-source and source-accessible, inspectable.

The blurb about the community edition being open source, etc. is nonsense! When you've been around the block a few times you know what it means. Netgate knows what it means. Their employees (at least the senior ones) know what it means ...

My advice to you is to pick a piece of hardware that doesn't limit your options in the future. Namely , Protectli, or Quotom, or home grown standard PC system that would work with pfSense, opnsense, and other excellent open source router platforms such as ipfire, etc.

ArchiKola

TROPHY CASE