@Cathryn: Yes I find that problem normally resolves itself. You should be able to get a refund for the time that it was down also. If you are using one of the expensive Closer packages and it was down for several days it may be worthwhile phoning Telkom and insisting on a pro rata refund. In my case they have always given a refund. Actually I would be quite happy if the voice line was out of action for long periods of time as I very rarely use Telkom's voice services and I would gladly accept a R110 refund every month.
Regarding 12Voip and Voipstunt bandwidth it depends on how you plan to use it. If you just use the website to route the call to two landlines then it doesn't use any bandwidth at all. This callback type method usually gives the best quality - normally as good if not better than a normal call. With this method you don't have to set up anything - if you can type in two telephone numbers on a website and answer a ringing Telkom phone then you are ready to go.
Each of the Betamax services offers different rates and a different set of free countries. Be warned that some of the very good rates do change from time to time which seems to annoy a lot of people but overall this a really good value for money offer. First try out the free services and then decide whether or not you wish to proceed. The free service works the same as the commercial service apart from a few country exclusions and a time limit - the voice quality should be the same as the commercial service. To get your feet wet go to
www.webcalldirect.com and try to make a free call to one of the listed countries directly from the webpage via your Telkom phone. If you like the service then
www.12voip.com might be the best choice if you plan to use the service to call SA landline or cell numbers. Just do a Google search for Betamax phone services if you want to look at the entire family of companies.
If you want to use it via their softphone from a PC then I think that it would use ~ 64 kbits/second (see below) ~ 8 kBytes/second i.e. ~0.5 Megabytes/minute or 30Megabytes/hour. The 20 hours of calls that I make per month use around 600Meg which probably costs an extra R25 or so per month.
"I bought a Sipura SPA-2002 Voip adapter yesterday. It works well with my Voipstunt account.
One of my concern is the bandwidth requirement for conversation.
The FAQ of Sipura said:
Bandwidth usage depends on the audio codec being used. For best voice quality
and FAX, the audio codec should be G711 (by default)
The estimated bandwidth requirement is shown below for 1 channel usage
G711 ~ 64Kbps (can be 90Kbps with overhead), G729 ~ 24Kbps, G723 ~ 17Kbps"
What if they disconnect it completely while working on it?!!?
