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Living a cheaper life without Telecom Italia

I cannot express my joy enough: I finally got rid of Telecom Italia!!!

It has been a long project but it went a lot smoother than I expected. I renewed  my ADSL contract with SiADSL last year and paid a one time fee of 99 euro to get a new line installed without Telecom Italia.

I spent a lot of time this autumn evaluating the various VoIP technologies. My main requirement was that I wanted a solution that did not require a PC that was always one. That ruled out most Skype based solutions as they integrate with the Skype client on a PC. This LinkSys cordless Skype phone was a possible compromise as it has a separate base station that I could connect to a server but leave the phone and docking station in a separate room.

After careful consideration I decided to go for a device that supports SIP:

• It is a standard protocol, and not a proprietary one like the one used by Skype that may change from one version to the next
  
• There are many VoIP providers that supports the standard
  
• There is a wide range of hardware, from the simple VoIP gateway I got to large SIP systems, that supports the standard

The next step was choosing the VoIP provider.
Gizmo/SIP Phone offers dial in numbers in the USA but not in Italy. I was about to go for SIP Phone anyway when a colleague, Mirco, pointed me to Skypho. I used it for several months using the X-Lite client software and the quality is as good or better than the other options; Skype, Gizmo, MSN, ...

But what really impressed me about Skypho is all the features they offer:

• a free dial in number
  
• free voice mail
  
• free fax to mail service
  
• it is cheaper than Skype

I did not get my VoIP gateway until a few weeks ago because of shipping problems (but more about that later on crap and crapability).

I cut the Telcom line in January and so far so good: I am a very happy Skypho client. Cool Or What?