VoIP & ISP update

I made a couple of changes to my configuration, one for practical purposes, and the other I was more or less forced to make.

The first change was that instead of using Asterisk to handle my SIP phone, I connected the SIP phone directly to the Voicenetwork.ca service. I did this as there seemed to be some jitter and "sputtering" going through Asterisk, probably because I am trying to do too much on that one Linux system (Mythtv, torrents, DVD burning, file sharing, video server, dynamic DHCP client, and so on.) The good news is that this so far is working great. The sound quality is very good, even when my wife called her sister over in Asia (for 2 cents per minute) ... and this is with a $12 cdn USB phone connected to a slow computer running X-Lite softphone.

The other change is with my ISP.

Teksavvy have changed pricing for some of their high-speed connection services. I was using "unlimited" for $29 /mth, but they are going to up the price for that service by $10 starting next year. Their Premium service, which runs at the same speed, but uses improved routing and better "ping times", also goes for $29/mth, and still does. I went with unlimted originally as the premium package was limited to 100GB download per month. To make up for the raise in pricing for unlimited, they bumped the premium package up to a 200GB / mth download limit, with prepaid upgrades of $10 per 100GB if needed. Since I usually use just over the 100GM per month in most cases, the 200GB should do me just fine.

So all in all, things are looking good ... I may put together another PC I have sitting in my closet unused to run as a dedicated Asterisk server to see if that works without degrading sound quality and stability, but that's for later on.