Can my LinkSys phone adapter be reconfigured for VOIPo?

[timburkart]

I purchased a Linksys phone adapter rather than rent/buy one from Vonage when I became their customer. Can my Linksys adapter be used by VOIPo?

[VOIPoTim]

We provide a free adapter (even ship it for free) so your best bet is to use our adapter since it'll be preconfigured and tested with/optimized for our service and all features that we offer.

We don't officially support the use of third-party devices since there are too many variables with them. Even a small difference in the firmware can make a world of difference. With that being said some users do use third-party devices. We provide SIP credentials (SIP Server, SIP User, and SIP Password) once your service is setup and our device is connected for the first time. If you can use those to configure an third-party device, you're welcome to try it but we just can't officially support it out provide any assistance with it.

[virtvir5]

Hmmm. You make it sound very mysterious. Is there someting beyond the normal Session Initiation Protocol (access point and subscriber authentication) that it would have to handle in addition to the VoIP protocol itself?

Just curious. Ignore if it's a 'trade secret' or something.

[VOIPoTim]

Originally Posted by virtvir5

Hmmm. You make it sound very mysterious. Is there someting beyond the normal Session Initiation Protocol (access point and subscriber authentication) that it would have to handle in addition to the VoIP protocol itself?

Just curious. Ignore if it's a 'trade secret' or something.

Nothing really proprietary. It's just based on what we see daily with customers and something that all others in the industry that I know agree on. One little change in a device firmware and major problems can come up. It sounds crazy, but it's just the reality of the industry. SIP hardware vendors don't standardize and there are huge changes put in minor firmware revisions all the time.

Just to do business with one of the top wholesalers (Level3), there's a 70+ page interop process that must be competed with things that need to be tested/tweaked before they'll activate your account because of the differences in SIP switches and SIP software because it fluctuates so much.

It would be a lot easier if everything that used SIP was standardized, but it's not.

So with our service, we provide a pre-configured adapter and control the software on it so that we know it will be 100% compatible with our service and customers won't experience any issues. When new firmware releases are available we thoroughly test them before pushing them out and if there are issues, we make adjustments on our end to accommodate changes to make sure they work. This allows us to deliver a seamless problem-free experience to customers.

[virtvir5]

Interesting. Sometimes my curiosity just gets the better of me. Thanks for the explanation.

Sounds like some kind of consensus standard is long past due. Having chaired some SCC, CSA, ULC and other such committees, I know the development process ain't much fun, but all the head butting might be worth the effort in the long run.