Vonage / Xten X-Pro Softphone on Mac

Comments

Possibly Related

Vonage Softphone on MacA little over a year after converting my main phoneline to Vonage, I’m still a big fan.  I like the price, I like the service, and I like not having to deal with my wireline telco. The only problem is, it’s hard to take with you—you could unhook the ATA (analog telephone adapter—the thing you plug into your network and plug your telephone into) and drag it along if you’re going to have hardwired Ethernet (and multiple IP device support, and a spare phone) available, but that doesn’t buy you anything if you’re just living on getting to the occasional wireless connection.  Of course, there’s always cellphones, but the voice quality is seriously lacking compared to a good VOIP connection....


Still a Vonage fanIn Bad call, Adam Kelsey points to a discussion on Inlumenent about using Vonage as an alternative to the local telco, and mentions his concerns about the reliability of VOIP services. I’ve been using Vonage since February.  As they don’t have 911 service yet, and I’ve got a teenager who could be home alone without a cellphone, I’m only using them as a replacement for my previous POTS second line.  Were it not for this issue, I’d replace my first line in a heartbeat.  It’s $10 a month cheaper than my Verizon line, even before considering that US and Canada calls are free. As someone who worked a fair amount with VOIP a few years ago, I have to say...


An Open Letter to VonageDear Vonage; I’ve been a happy customer and ardent supporter for several years now.  I’ve convinced a number of peers, co-workers, friends and relatives to dump their ILECs and move over to you.  I’ve even helped them debug their network problems so that they could have a great experience. Imagine my chagrin when I started seeing Vonage ads running in these damn TribalFusion Pop-Unders that are cropping up like cockroaches the last week or two.  This code is designed specifically to defeat the fact that I go out of my way to run browsers that do NOT let normal pop-ups and pop-unders fire.  There is no excuse for using this except to specifically tell me to shove my choice of...


When Bad WEP Happens to Good MacsI ran into a weird situation the other day with a Mac laptop (running OS X Panther) that couldn’t get on a local WEP-protected wireless network.  It would appear to see the network fine, with full signal strength, but would never get an address via DHCP, and (of course) you couldn’t go anywhere or do anything. As I mentioned, the wi-fi network was WEP protected, so it should have asked for a “password” (the WEP key) when the network was selected.  Since it didn’t, the implication is that it was already entered, and added to the keychain. But what if it was wrong? Theoretically, you shouldn’t be able to enter a bad WEP key—if you enter the key incorrectly, OS...


OS X Online Backup (Connection & Test)I'm assuming that you've gathered the materials indicated in Part 1 -- specifically, that you've got an account set up with Talanov or a similar service, and have an FTP program that supports Secure FTP (SFTP) handy. Our rsync transfers will be made over the Secure Shell protocol known as SSH. This insures that all of your data is transmitted in an encrypted fashion. We could log into SSH with the username and password provided by our backup vendor (and we will while setting this up), but this would be a little annoying if we had to do it every time we backed up, so instead, we're going to exchange encryption keys that will allow our Mac to automatically identify...