So my parents got fiber to the home. It isn’t all that special, as they picked the cheapest (and slowest) plan they had. 10 down and 1 up for about 55 per month. It also comes with a VOIP phone number.
The ISP offered to sell them a router for like $150, but I said to hold off and I’ll look into a home made solution. From my understanding the ISP has installed (or will install) the fiber converter in their basement, which takes the fiber line and converts it to ethernet.
Ideally I would like to make a PFSense box. But my dad, who wants to spend a little money as possible, gave me this random router he found and said he’d like to try to make it work. It’s a Cradlepoint MBR95 . I played around with it for a bit, and figured it’ll get them by until a better, permanent solution can be made. I also got an EdgeRouter X to play around with, and might be able to use that too.
So I have absolutely no idea what to do about the VOIP phone. Is there essentially a plug and play solution that doesn’t require a server to be set up? Or do I have to do a full PFSense build with and asterisk server? What kind of phone should he get? Again, as cheap as possible, so ebay used is probably OK.
That’s called an ONT - optical network terminal , or just ONU - optical network unit, in case of an SFP module.
Sometimes ONT will have POTS lines for old school phones coming out of it.
Edgerouter-x has a “Smart Queue” feature that will help you have decent latency given such very limited 1Mbps upload.
Usually VoIP is implemented via SIP on a different VLAN, I suggest you ditch the landline phone service for purely mobile + Skype/GoogleVoice/… whatever as backup instead of landline.
It’s a relatively small, local ISP. They did a fiber build out because they got a fat government grant to do it.
Thanks for the info about fiber. I have had either slow DSL or cable all my life. Fiber is a completely new technology to me. Same for VOIP,
I had him get a Grandstream HT802. I think we will have to figure out the SIP info from the ISP, or maybe it’ll auto-provision or something. He’s going to the house next week when the ISP shows up to finish the install. They dug in the fiber last week, and they have to get the fiber inside and install the ONT or ONU (thanks again) in the basement. So he has the router, the VOIP to POTS converter, and a good old fashioned telephone to test everything.
So the fiber install went good, according to my dad. The “fiber box” as he called it has the VoIP stuff built in, and has two POTS connectors on it. So that was taken care of right from the start. No need for the Grandstream VoIP adapter. I have a (pretty poor quality) photo he sent me of the install if anyone’s interested.
The Cradlepoint router worked as soon as he plugged it in. I set it up generally before he took it, making the WiFi identical to his main house so his phone and laptop would just connect. Worked mint.
Everything seems to work. Now he wants to set up a webcam of some sort. I’m going to look into building a cheap pfsense box, and I’m not sure if I can do some sort of web-accessible video feed through it.