Technology for Mortals

Last Sunday I had a hell of a time getting my Lingo VoIP phone service to work properly.  Certain phone numbers I was calling wouldn’t transmit audio while I could hear sounds coming in.  I had this problem before and it went away after I toggled the codec settings from G.729 to G.711 and rebooted the ATA (Analog Telephony Adapter) that came from Lingo which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the stability of the “solution”.  This time no amount of toggling or reboots of the ATA or my home router which sits in front of the ATA would work.

So I call Lingo tech support and got through in a short amount of time to a human on the other line.  After talking a little bit, the tech tells me that I have to set the ATA behind a “DMZ” port behind my home router which makes the ports a little less restrictive.  But in order to do this, I had to plug a laptop in to the LAN port of the ATA and connect to 192.168.0.1 to configure the WAN port of the ATA to be a static IP address of something I use on my LAN behind my router.  Only then would I be able to set that static IP as the DMZ address on my home router.  For someone like me this is more of a hassle since I do understand this stuff but if that last few sentences confuse the hell out of you, I can’t blame you.

So after I do all this, it STILL doesn’t work.  The tech then tells me to shut down the ATA while he reconfigures the ATA settings to use phone port 2.  So I reattach my phone to port 2 and then boot up the ATA after waiting for a minute and the system STILL doesn’t work and my mom still can’t hear a word I say when I call her.  Other phone numbers worked by the local area codes and the area codes nearby refused to work.  But after a few minutes, the service mysteriously started working again.  So much like the codec toggling trick, this “solution” makes no sense and I have no idea how permanent or reliable the “fix” is.

If that wasn’t enough, the Lingo service promises free calling to Europe.  But when my wife tried to call me while I was in Brussels, the first dozen or so attempts failed.  When it finally got through to me, the sound quality sounded absolutely awful compared to the toll call I made to her.

Lastly, I have to consider all the outages I’ve had with the crazy power outages I’ve had here in Silicon Valley and the housing complex I’m at plus the 2-day DSL outage I had and it’s been frustrating not using traditional powered analog phone service.

So does this mean I’m giving up Lingo?  Not yet, the price of $22/month for flat rate calling to the Americas and Europe along with the portability of the ATA box still makes it compelling.  But the lack of reliability, complexity, problems, and some quality issues certainly puts a damper on my enthusiasm for the service.