Community Fibre and voip (Gigaset N300A) compatibilty

Justy checking: Will using a gigaset N300 for VOIP work with Community Fibre CGNAT ?

If not then are there any other low cost options ?

Edited by CheapSkate (Tue 30-Jan-24 16:35:54)

VoIP over CGNAT is always a challenge, regardless of the equipment.

Are you considering Community Fibre's phone service or a third party VoIP offering?
If you are going to use their own service, then ask them to confirm that it works with your kit.

If you are going to use a different VoIP provider, then you may have a struggle getting it to work. Do CF hand out public IPv4 addresses or do they support IPv6?

You don't say which VoIP provider, and I suspect that may be relevant. Possibly the network is too, depending on how consistent its address assignment algorithms are (I don't know anything about CF). I use an HT801 ATA through NAT and CGNAT @ Swish Fibre to Voipfone and it all works fine. But there's no shortage of horror stories from people who can't get it to work properly.

Voipfone don't seem to care whether I'm using NAT or not. They don't appear to use STUN. I've tried with and without SIP ALG enabled in my router (TP-Link), and it makes no difference (that I can see), so I don't think they're using SIP SDP either to figure out my address. Other providers may do things differently and be more sensitive.

It would be a third party provider for VOIP

I'm looking for a low cost option for keeping my landline phone mainly for receiving calls

Existing: - :Vodafone 80/20 with landline £34/month

Considering: Community Fibre: 1 Gbps £25/month (£27/month after the initial contract term of 24 months)
+ VOIP 3rd party phone service

Mobile is used for making calls.
- I'm often missing calls at home because I can't get to the *mobile quickly enough

*(are there such things as "Mobile Extensions"?)

(edited for spelling)

Edited by CheapSkate (Wed 31-Jan-24 12:06:15)

In reply to a post by CheapSkate:

I'm looking for a low cost option for keeping my landline phone mainly for receiving calls

What volume of incoming calls do you expect to receive? If it's low, then you might be better off using a forwarding service that redirects calls to your mobile phone.

https://numberpeople.co.uk/call-forwarding-rates-bun...

Calls cost 7p per minute PAYG, or you can buy 20 mins for £1 or 200 mins for £5.

Alternatively, you can pay £1 per month for SIP:
https://numberpeople.co.uk/voip-sip/

(Note: I haven't used this company. I'm with Sipgate Basic, but that's no longer offered to new customers)

In reply to a post by CheapSkate:

*(are there such things as "Mobile Extensions"?)

Yes, you can have multiple devices register to the same SIP account. Incoming calls will ring on all of them, first one to pick up gets it. Some VOIP providers let you have multiple registrations at no extra charge; some of them require you to pay for each concurrent registering device.

If you are mainly interested in incoming calls, I would recommend Andrews&Arnold who charge £1.44 per month to host a landline number. The pros and cons of Numberpeople are being discussed here https://www.ispreview.co.uk/talk/threads/free-voip-j... so no need to repeat here.

With regards to the technical issues, some people report that they have no problems behind CGNAT, others just can't get it to work at all. You could always sign up to A&A and get a number assigned (£1.20 one off plus £1.44 per month). Then you set everything up and test it for a while. Once you are happy, you get your current landline number ported to A&A and give the other number back to them. If you can't get it to work, just cancel. It is a monthly rolling contract, so you can get out at short notice.

I moved from POTS to VoIP with A&A just over a year ago and did exactly that to test before porting the landline number and getting it deactivated for good. not looking back (and savings lots of money)! BTW, my VoIP runs over 4G but with public IPv4 address (no CGNAT)