After doing some more research on the capabilities of the Sipura ATA adaptors and the HandyTone range, I found that both now offer the capability to connect to standard PSTN lines as well as the VoIP connection, meaning you can buy one of these adaptors, plug it in between your phone and your phone line, and plug the adaptor into your router, and you’ve got one phone that can do both PSTN calls as well as VoIP calls.

The HandyTone 486 had the concept of a ‘lifeline’ PSTN connection, which would only activate if the 486 did not have power, so that you could still make normal PSTN calls. Revision 2 of the HandyTone though has introduced the feature that prefixing the number you want to call with “*00″ will cause the adaptor to route the call over the PSTN network, in place of the VoIP network. The phone will of course ring on an incoming call on either of the two lines.

The newly introduced Sipura 3000 also has the same capability described above that the HandyTone 486 has, with an additional twist - it has a built-in gateway which converts calls to or from your PSTN line to a VoIP channel! This means that phone calls coming in via your PSTN network can now be routed either to X-Lite or Asterisk. Whee! Of course, it works the other way around too - make a call from X-Lite or Asterisk, and have it go out through your PSTN line! Another interesting feature of the Sipura 3000 is that you can call into your adaptor by calling your normal PSTN number, authenticate yourself with a PIN, and then route your call over your VoIP connection.

I’ve been told that the next version/revision of the HandyTone would also introduce some features which the Sipura 3000 now has.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 24th, 2005 at 15:01 and is filed under SIP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.