Intertex Surfinbird IX68 ADSL 2+ VOIP Wi-Fi gate review. Some products make VoIP easy.
Swedish company Intertex was a pioneer in SIP gateways. It foresaw the possibilities of VoIP over broadband as early as 1998, when it launched an ADSL gateway with built in SIP. Intertex' concern was to get SIP packets through a firewall securely, and nine years later, the IX68 SurfinBird still shows its firewall origins, but has evolved into what may be the most powerful small SIP solution on the market. The IX68 can be used in a similar way to products like the Fritz Box, registering with public SIP services and providing SIP clients on two standard telephone ports, to add Internet phone lines to a home or small office.
But this box can do a lot more. It includes its own SIP server - this can make the box into its own little SIP phone provider for the company. Employees can phone each other for free even from remote sites across the Internet, and cheap connectivity to the Internet is available by registering the SIP server to an Internet telephony service providers (ITSP). That's when things get interesting. Company employees with SIP phones could make international phone calls wherever they are on the road, routing through the Internet and this box's SIP server. To get the full benefits, there's a SIP switch software upgrade that includes all the PBX functions you would want: a dial-plan wizard to set up least-cost routing, routing incoming calls to extension numbers visible to the outside world. An office of up to fifty people could use one of these, Intertex says.
As well as the two conventional phone sockets, it can support multiple IP phones attached through switches on the Ethernet ports. It can also support mobile devices with SIP clients, such as Wi-Fi phones or dual-mode devices such as the Nokia E61. Intertex believes the hardware can support up to 30 simultaneous SIP calls. If you're not using all this, the unit's £200 + VAT price is overkill for three people in a SOHO office, but cheap for the full server functionality. The downloadable SIP switch costs ˆ500 - that would be the cheapes part of a full IP phone installation, as users would need to have desktop IP phones too. more>>>