Megapath’s New Speed Test Plus Is a Valuable Free Tool for VoIP Users

Megapath's Speed Test Plus

Every serious VoIP user has at one time or another tested his or her downstream and upstream bandwidth to see if there's a problem. Sometimes (though rarely at today's typical broadband speeds), a bottleneck large enough to affect voice conversations is pinpointed through such a test. But several other internet connectivity factors can have an impact on VoIP quality. Megapath, one of the major independent internet service providers in the U.S., has updated its popular internet speed Speed … [Read more...]

How To: Use Google Voice and OBi for all your calls (free)

OBi110 inputs

Over the past few years, the VoIP do-it-yourself crowd has built — and shared with others — ingenious methods that give the trusty telephone greater power while driving down the price of its use. Most recently, some have focused much attention on getting Google Voice — and its free US and Canada calling and incoming telephone number (which Google has promised will continue to be free till 2012) — to work on any regular home phone. Until now, Google Voice on your phone … [Read more...]

A ‘Hotline’ of SPAs

One of the most popular help requests of owners of the SPA series Cisco/Linksys VoIP adapters is how to configure two of the devices in separate locations to create a virtual hotline. The idea is that when a phone connected to one of the devices is lifted off it's hook, a call is automatically made to the other SPA device, ringing the phone attached to it. The topic comes up regularly on the Voxilla Forum, and it did so again in the last few days. Senior forum author hwittenb, as ususal, … [Read more...]

Voxilla’s FreePBX in a Cloud, Step-By-Step

Create Security Group

Note: This post has been updated with a new FreePBX in a Cloud instance for Europe. Because of the interest in our series on VoIP and the open source Asterisk PBX using Amazon's convenient Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), yesterday (2009-02-23) Voxilla released a pre-built virtual machine EC2 image usingĀ FreePBX, the popular graphical front end administration tool for Asterisk. If you are interested in a stock installation of Asterisk on the Amazon cloud (either you prefer to manage your PBX … [Read more...]