Can the WiFi phone F1000 be used with primary account?

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 23, 2007 Posts: 4

hello all!
right, i have a Vonage box the standard cheap one they send you with the £7.99 one.

this is being used as my current house phone number.
i've recently been looking into Wifi phones, and figured that this would be a good option as i'm currently going between New York and London.
Would it be possible for my london line to be used on my future F1000 in New York, however, without having to shell out yet another £7.99 for another line?

well actually i'm very confused! would someone please help! =P

also, is there anyway the same can be applied to the F3000?

Many thanks.

Tom.

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 23, 2007 Posts: 4

anyone at all...

Posts: 328 · Vonage Forum Evangelist Joined: Dec 13, 2005 Posts: 328

You can use a Vonage branded F1000 as a primary Vonage device in place of your ATA. On the other hand, as far as I know, the only way to get a Vonage branded F1000 is directly from Vonage (they do not sell them retail) and from what I have seen posted in this forum, Vonage will only sell you an F1000 with an account.

The "generic" F1000G (not Vonage branded and not locked to Vonage) will only work with a Vonage soft phone account, since Vonage will not give you the SIP credentials to put into the phone from anything other than a soft phone account (this is a ad on to your standard account - I am not sure of the UK price - in the USA it is $10/month with a 500 minute liit before they start charging).

The same goes for the F3000. There is no Vonag branded F3000 so you can only use a soft phone account in the unlocked version.

As an alternative to these - if you want a "semi-free" soft phone account, you can sign up with voicestick, stanaphone, sipgate, or any of a large number of other Voip services and have your Vonage account simultaneously ring the PSTN number of the "Free" account (they all give free incoming calls). For outgoing calls, you would pay per minute - but the rates are the same or even a bit lower than Vonage rates (all pre-pay). One positive thing about the F3000 used this way is that if one of the services has a problem, you can quickly switch to another since the phone holds 3 separate accounts.

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 23, 2007 Posts: 4

thanks howiewifi. the softphone accounts are £2.99 a month over here i think, i'm not sure what advantages that they will bring.

i called up thier customer service (150) off my Vonage phone and they said that i'd have to purchase another number, although, i could reroute my normal number to my Wifi phone and switch it back and forth with ease according to them. (well according to their customer service, although the guy who answered did sound a bit clueless!)

Thanks very much for your feedback! I'm considering getting the F3000 and as I already have a sipgate account, i suppose i could use that on the outgoing calls. Is it easy to top up?

although, I had an issue with the sipgate softphone, for some reason, sound was travelling through to the other person however, for some reaosn, i couldn't hear them, no sound at all was comming through into my laptop. I found this very very strange, so don't know how to resolve that issue.
i'll just have to sort it out when i have more time.

thanks again for the help howie! =)

Tom.

Posts: 328 · Vonage Forum Evangelist Joined: Dec 13, 2005 Posts: 328

SIPgate is easy to set up on the F3000 and works well. For outgoing calls, their rates are OK - though I would say that I gave them £10 once (their minimum) and still have money left more than a year later. For incoming calls, since I registered from the USA, SIPgate considers my number a "premium" number rather than a PSTN number, so I would not sim-ring it from Vonage since I would need to pay for any calls to it (on the Vonage side). If you have a geographis SIPgate number, then Vonage would likely consider that PSTN and it could sim-ring free (don't take my word for that - either call customer service or, better yet, risk a few pence and call your SIPgate number from Vonage - then see if they charge you for the call).

As far as the SIPgate soft phone goes - I would recommend just downloading X-Like from Xten (now calls Counterbeam, I believe) and set that up. That works OK for me as well.