How does OBITALK perform on satellite Internet?
regeone:
I have a cabin out in the woods beyond the reach of any terrestrial broadband Internet services. As a consequence, I have satellite Internet service with HughesNet. I also have a land-line phone service which is costly to maintain. I'd like to ditch the land line for VoIP service in order to save money.
HughesNet has its own service called HughesNet Voice. One of the raps I've heard against satellite phone service is the latency issue. Supposedly HughesNet's latest generation phone service has minimized that problem. However, service is $40/month, and I'd like to push the cost even lower, if it's possible.
My question, then, is whether OBITALK can be plugged into the HughesNet modem and, through Google Voice, offer me phone service on a par with HughesNet Voice. Or am I going to miss out on some technical wizardry that makes conversing by phone over satellite possible or bearable?
ProfTech:
I can't speak about Hughes but my son lives in the woods and has Exede. I set him up with an ATA using Callcentric and it isn't bad. There is a slight lag but I don't really even notice it much. The bigger problem might be "how much is my satellite internet actually down" because when it's not working you aren't going to have phone service. I worked with satellite for a few years and have heard all the horror stories about it going down in a rain or worse ice storm. And if the dish loads up with snow you might be in trouble too. But there are at least two or three good ATA's available for under $50 and you can set up a Callcentric account to test with for little of nothing and no contract.
regeone:
Sorry for my technical ignorance, but if I have the ATA box, do I still need the Obi?
Can you recommend a specific ATA?
Thanks!
TrapDoor:
Given the distance to a geostationary orbit, I see a minimum latency of 240 milliseconds round trip plus whatever is imposed by the satellite and groundstation as they handle the data. Add in the latency for ground-based VOIP. Any buffering of the data by Hughes will add latency. You will need a clear line-of-sight path to the direction of the satellite from your location. If their modem utilizes an external ATA, find out if it is proprietary. If not, I would expect an Obi to work. Jitter may be an issue.
But a suggestion - since you already have a landline, get a Hughes rep to call you through their service and see how it sounds or tell you of another customer in your area. Ask them to run a couple of ping tests and report the results. Get them to pick a busy time of day when the satellite is most likely to be heavily subscribed. One test is worth a thousand words.
Good luck.
ProfTech:
The Obi 200 is the least expensive of their "modern" ATA's. The Grandstream HT701 is another one, very similar. I haven't used the 701 so can't vouch for it but have used an older one and it worked Ok but lacked features. If you use the "Obitalk" web page to set up the 200 you shouldn't have much trouble getting a plain vanilla setup running. You can set up a Callcentric account for testing [outbound calling only] for $1.50 per month and a $2 or $3 setup fee. Once you're good with everything you can port your landline number to Callcentric for around $15 [one-time fee] and then your total service should run less than $10 per month if you don't use it much. If you have a cellphone that works out there they will forward your calls to the cellphone if the internet is down. *Warning* both ATA's require a connection to your network using the supplied ethernet cable. This means you must have a router or switch with an open port. Most modern home network setups include a Wi-Fi router that usually has 4 ports, but not all. *BTW* I don't have anything to do with Callcentric but did use them for about 2 years. I just think they are a good service and pretty easy to work with. They might be slightly more expensive than some of the others but they offer a lot of easy to use features, IMO.
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