I recently made some changes to phone and Internet service at home. Since AT&T U-Verse does not require a regular phone line like my DSL did, I chose to move our phone number over to ViaTalk VoIP. I signed up for the ViaTalk’s service about two weeks ago, while they were having a “buy one year, get the second year free” promotion. The total cost for 2 years of service came out to about $240, with shipping and equipment and everything else.

The service itself is excellent, except for a problem I have with the way the Linksys PAP2 adapter is set up. The Linksys adapter they sent me hooked up to my network without any problems — however, for some reason it set itself up with DMZ access, which forwarded all incoming traffic to the Linksys unit. This means that anyone accessing http://myipaddress was able to view the configuration of my PAP2, including my full name and phone number. This is, in my opinion, a big security issue since so many sites log your IP address.

Fixing this was not a big deal, though. I simply disabled DMZ for the PAP2, assigned it an IP address, and forwarded a few ports to the unit. Call quality was not affected by this — as a matter of fact, call quality is spectacular even when I’m maxing out my connection by downloading off of usenet, or uploading to one of my servers via FTP.

Another small headache is that I’m still working on making Houston’s 311 service work with ViaTalk, but this should be a pretty simple fix. I just need to get some pointers on the configuration of the PAP2. A few changes to the dial plan should make 311 work just fine.

The last concern I had about VoIP was 911 service and overall reliability. ViaTalk offers E-911 service, so that all 911 calls are routed through to the proper call center. After setting up my 911 address in the control panel on ViaTalk’s site, I did a test call to 911 and verified that it does reach the Houston Emergency Center, which handles dispatching of Houston Police, Fire, and EMS. Reliability should be just fine, too. If the power goes out the VoIP adapter and my cordless phone are both hooked up to a battery backup system, which should be able to keep them going until utility power is restored.

I highly recommend ViaTalk for phone service. The savings are spectacular when compared to traditional telco service – 2 years of ViaTalk service cost $240 whereas 2 years of AT&T POTS service would have run us about $950. Woot for ViaTalk.