How does SIP work?
Reading about our low calling rates, advanced features and great benefits is all good, but knowing how easy our SIP platform works is just as important. Fact is, most people associate 'telephone calls over the internet' with a personal computer, speakers and a microphone.
This is where VoIPCloud differs...
You can use our SIP accounts with many different brands of hardware IP phones, ATA's and soft phones. In plain English, this means that you can easily convert your home phone into a VoIP phone, using an ATA, or you can completely replace your telephone at home, with a new hard phone. We also give every new customer an advanced free soft phone that works great on Windows.
A hardware IP phone, also referred to as a 'hard phone', is a self contained IP telephone.
It looks just like a conventional phone, but instead of a conventional phone jack, it has an Ethernet port through which it communicates directly with a VoIP server, VoIP gateway or another VoIP phone. Since a broadband hard phone communicates directly with a VoIP server, VoIP gateway or another VoIP phone it does not require any personal computer nor any software running on a personal computer to make or receive VoIP phone calls. It can be used independently, all that is required is an internet connection. While PC based software solutions are cheaper, a hard phone is the best solution for IP telephony.
The most common ATA (analog telephone adapter) is a device with at least one telephone jack (FXS port) used to connect a conventional telephone and an ethernet jack used to connect the adapter to the LAN. Using such an ATA it is possible to connect a conventional telephone to a remote VoIP server. The ATA communicates with the remote VoIP server using a VoIP protocol such as H.323, SIP, MGCP or IAX and encodes and decodes the voice signal using a voice codec such as ulaw, alaw, gsm, ILBC and others. Since ATAs communicate directly with a VoIP server, they do not require any software to be run on a personal computer, such as a softphone.
A soft phone is an IP telephone in software. It can be installed on a personal computer and function as an IP phone.
Soft phones require appropriate audio hardware to be present on the personal computer they run. This can either be a sound card with speakers or headphones and a microphone, or, alternatively a USB phone set. Soft phones are inferior to hard phones but cheaper to obtain, many are available as a free download.
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Please note the following regarding our SIP VoIP platform:
- Our SIP accounts can be used on many different VoIP phones, telephone adapters and software SIP clients.
- Your hardware device or software client must support either the g729a (preferred) or g711 voice codec in order to make calls.
- Your network or home firewall must understand SIP to open the dynamic UDP ports used by RTP or have DMZ facilities.
- The ideal packet size or codec rate, from our testing, is 20 - 40ms. If your device supports a custom value, please be sure to set this.
- Our platform supports SIP on port 5060 and RTP ports 30000 - 34999. If your device supports a custom value, please be sure to set these
