How to replace your residential Bell phone line

Here you have an example of a possible replacement for your legacy analog phone line at home with a SIP based solution.

Step 1 – Find a SIP telephony provider and open an account.
Open an account with fongo.ca (formerly freephoneline.ca). They will give you for FREE a phone number in the rate center (region) of your choice.

Step 2 – Install application client for the SIP server on your PC
You download an application that installs on your Windows PC computer. The application communicates with the SIP server from Freephoneline via your Internet connection. At this point, you can make outbound calls to the local ( same rate center) phone number. Inbound calls to your new phone number are routed to the the FreePhoneline SIP server and then to the Freephone line application running on your PC. If the PC is not on, the inbound calls will be answered by the Freephone line voicemail and the result .wav file will be sent to the e-mail used for the account registration.

The next steps have associated costs :
Step 3 – Acquire and configure un ATA to register with the SIP server from SIP phone line.
If you want to use your existing phone sets instead of the PC, you need an ATA. The ATA will connect to your local Internet router on one side and to the analog phone base (formerly connected to the wall phone outlet) .
Examples of ATA ( Analog Terminal Adapter) are GRANDSTREAM HT701 ou Linksys SPA112 and their costs are around 60-70 $CAD

Step 4 – Acquire the SIP key for the ATA
This SIP key is in fact the username/password combination to be used by the ATA to register with the SIP server.
Cost: 80 $CAD

Step 5 – Port ( transfer) your residential phone number to FreePhone line
From the FreePhone line portal, initiate the transfer of the phone number. It will take 14 working days. Once the transfer is done, you start receiving phone calls directed to you residential phone number that will be directed by FreePhoneline SIP server to the ATA.
Cost : 25 $CAD

Starting with this moment, you no longer pay monthly fees for your phone line to Bell. And there is no recurrent monthly cost to Freephoneline. All you need is Internet connectivity fro your ATA.

Special considerations :
– With this set-up, there is no 911 call possible, unless you register for the service with Freephon line (fees extra).
– The ATA can be installed close to the older phone line entry to your home, this way the cabling for the RJ11 port will cover both the existing analog phone sets and the connectivity to the alarm system ( if required)

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