Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

With no great surprise, I bought myself a D-Link DPH-540 WiFi VoIP phone. I picked it up from the post office today. And, when I got home from work...the first thing (well, almost....first I washed the sweat off of me, and then I made a required phone call to my parents....) I did was signup with BroadVoice.com.

It wasn't so much that this was a VoIP provider that would work with the D-Link, but in prior research I found that they were one of the few that offered Manhattan, KS local phone numbers. The fact that they have a BYOD plan was the icing.

Overall, the setup went pretty smoothly.

The first obstacle, was that it wouldn't register with my WiFi network and get an IP. That turned out to be my fault I had forgotten to add its MAC address to my WiFi AP, to allow it to connect.

The second obstacle was a little bit harder to solve. And, required use of some reading and other diagnostics. Broadvoice had given the name of its 'proxy_ip' as "proxy-nyc.broadvoice.com". Some investigation reveiled that it didn't exist. And, further investigation eventually led to the discovery that it should've been "proxy.nyc.broadvoice.com". Though it appears there are other proxies available, I wonder why this one. Guess its a question of whether network-wise if proxy.chi.broadvoice.com is closer or not than proxy.nyc.broadvoice.com. Wonder what other proxies they have, and whether they would matter as I roam with my phone.

The final problem seems to be with voicemail. I set up custom greetings, but so far it is greeting me with the system default one. I don't like it....though I suppose it would be obvious to a caller whether I'm busy or wasn't available to answer, without the default system greeting telling them this.

Next thing is to see how it works on the Campus WiFi network....which is largely the reason for a WiFi VoIP device. Wonder what the fate of my cellphone will be.

Actually, the next thing will be to find a case to wear the phone around....