When we first moved to the US, I wanted to try and do the telecoms and
Internet stuff as cheaply as possible, while still trying to be
technologically "fun" as well.
I elected to get the cheapest home phone line (local calls only) I could get
with AT&T (then SBC) (which is still remarkably expensive) so that I
could get DSL (which, while three times faster than what I'd had previously
in Australia, was still not that fast). (I went for DSL over cable because
I'd heard horror stories about Comcast's reliability, and also they weren't
cool with running servers or inbound services, Sonic is, and is a great ISP). I chose Vonage for US long-distance, I think
because I'd heard of them previously, and was interested in trying out VoIP.
We initially used Vonage for calling Australia as well, until I played
around with Engin, and then deployed
Asterisk.
Anyway, I've been a loyal Vonage customer for exactly three years. The truth
is, we hardly make any US long distance calls. We've got friends in Phoenix
(hi Craig and Sarah!) that we call infrequently. I guess there might be the
odd cell phone that isn't considered a local call, but we tend to use our
cell phones more than the home phone anyway... So we were a very cheap
$14.99 a month for Vonage.
So when I called T-Mobile to purchase a SIM card for the Android Dev Phone
1 I'd been recently given, the opportunity to have their T-Mobile
@Home in place of Vonage, for an extra $9.99 on top of what I was paying
for the cell phone line seemed like worthwhile cost saving. I have no
attachment to the incoming number for the Vonage line, we give out the
AT&T land line number to people as our "primary" home number.
Later that day, Vonage announced they were increasing their monthly fee from
$14.99 to $17.99, which made the decision seem all the more prodigious.
I did a spot of research while I was waiting for the @Home box to ship to
me, and it turns out that they have a wireless router and non-wireless
router option. They hadn't specified what I was getting at order time, and I
was hoping I'd get the non-wireless router, since I already had an access
point I was perfectly happy with it. As luck would have it, I received the
wireless router model (a Linksys
WRTU54G-TM). I'd mentally prepared myself to be receiving just another
Linksys
RTP300, like what Vonage used, and so I was quite surprised by the
differences in technology used.
It's been a while since I tried to do any reverse-engineering of the Vonage
ATA, but I think from memory, it was essentially that: an ATA. It talked SIP
back to Vonage. My DSL provider gave me a few static IP addresses, so when I
got it, I just allocated one for Vonage, and did a static NAT through my
firewall to for it, and everything just worked.
It was fairly apparent that the WRTU54G-TM was nothing at all like this
(given it was also an access point). It takes a GSM SIM card (up to two in
fact), which I presume has all of the provisioning information on it. I was
initially worried that I was going to need to completely rejig my network to
accommodate it. I guess the SIM card approach means there's no customer
specific provisioning that presumably otherwise needs to be done to the
device itself, and they can just ship vanilla devices. I presume the Vonage
RTP300 had some sort of customer-specific configuration, because I never had
to do anything.
I briefly toyed with the idea of running two access points, and having a
"guest" wireless network, but I am interested in reducing heat and power
consumption in my linen cupboard, so I decided to try and just swap over to
using the WRTU54G-TM as my access point, retiring my Linksys
WAP54G.
So that's exactly what I sat down to do last night. Sometimes in their
efforts to make these things "simple", they end up making things more
complicated. What I wanted to do was just plug the "Internet" side of the
device into my internal network, have it get an IP address with DHCP, and
then let me get on with configuring it. The "advanced" setup instructions
talked about the box having a default IP address of 192.168.0.1 ("or try
192.168.24.1 if that doesn't work"). I figured the DHCP IP address would
override that, so I was trying to hit the IP address I could see the unit
had picked up from my DHCP server.
No response from the HTTP server. I could see it replying to ARP requests,
and I could see what appeared to be an IPsec NAT-T connection. After some
fiddling around, I twigged that I was trying to manage it over the
Internet port, and any device worth its salt was going to be very
hardened out of the box on what it expected to be the raw Internet-facing
side, so I plugged my laptop directly into one of the four Ethernet ports
that it also had, and then I could hit the 192.168.0.1 IP address and access
the management interface.
It never occurred to me prior to fighting with getting the WRTU54G-TM
configured, that the RTP300 might have been more than a black box, as I'd
never tried plugging anything into the "inside" ports on it, mainly because
I'd never intended to use it as a router or a switch.
Out of the box, the WRTU54G-TM was configured to be a router, which I didn't
need, and it was configured to be a DHCP server for 192.168.0.0/24, which I
definitely didn't want. An interesting side-effect of putting it into
bridging mode was the MAC address changed (to the one that was printed on
the unit, which was not how out of the box it presented itself). I have no
need or intention of plugging anything into the "inside" Ethernet ports on
the WRTU54G-TM, as I have a separate switch for that, and indeed I run my
wireless network on a different interface of my firewall to my wired
network. Fortunately I was able to enable the management interface via the
"Internet" interface.
The added benefit of the device doing NAT-T is I don't need to allocate an
IP address to it for the VoIP stuff it work, it all just works fine without
it, so I've freed up an IP address, removed two devices from my linen
cupboard, added one new one, and saved some money. Woot!
Next, just because I can, I'm going to try and break into the RTP300 and see
if I can reconfigure it as a general purpose ATA to talk to Asterisk. There's
evidence it's possible. It's otherwise of no further use to me. Even if
I get it working with Asterisk, it's not of a lot of use to me. Maybe I can
send it to a family member, and they can call us over the Internet for free
instead of for the cost of a call to Brisbane...
