PC phone home

Early in our time here, I wrote glowingly about the success of our overseas telephone solution – a VoIP (voice over Internet protcol) service from Primus Canada that consistently delivered crystal clear calls over the high-speed Internet connection in our Siracusa apartment. It’s time for an update. I’m still impressed by how well it works, but we did run into one little problem.

Because of a “known issue” with the Linksys phone adapter Primus provides – which plugs into the network router here to make the connection over the Internet to Primus’s switching centre back in Canada – some numbers dialed on the phone plugged into the adapter don’t register. I kept getting a recorded message saying I needed to dial a long distance code (i.e. the ‘1’ before the area code), when in fact I had dialed it.

This little glitch became so irritating I started relying more on Skype, which had no problem dialing numbers correctly from the same handset. Primus, however, eventually came up with an even better solution. It provided me with a softphone.

A softphone is a piece of software that runs on a headset-equipped PC, turning it into a phone. Skype is a softphone too. But the Primus softphone has a few advantages. It allows me to use the Primus Hosted PBX service I’m testing, which provides voice mail, call routing and four-digit dialing to other extensions in my virtual office system. It lets me import my Outlook contacts and dial by name. And it lets me record calls, which I do when interviewing, by simply clicking a button in the softphone interface.

Call quality has been almost as good as when using a regular phone plugged into the adapter. Occasionally, voices sound a bit machine-like or tin-cannish, but never to the point of unintelligibility. Recordings are perfect. With the adapter and a regular phone, I had to use a little digital recorder connected to the phone line, and then transfer the recording to the computer.

The real beauty of the softphone is that you can make or take calls anywhere you have a good Internet connection and it looks to the person at the other end as if you’re sitting in your office. (Well, almost anywhere. Some hotspots block VoIP calls.)