Try­ing to cre­ate a more se­ri­ous look­ing in­fra­struc­ture for my con­sult­ing busi­ness, I de­cid­ed I need­ed a non-­mo­bile phone num­ber, and a way to re­ceive Fax­es [1]. While I would use this as a sec­ondary busi­ness num­ber, it's just my home phone.

Since the costs for old-­fash­ioned phone ser­vice in Ar­genti­na are stupid [2] I start­ed in­ves­ti­gat­ing VoIP al­ter­na­tives.

On a sub­way tick­et, I found an ad for Metro­tel which is quite in­ter­est­ing.

First, there is the num­ber­s:

• No in­­stal­la­­tion fee

• $35 for 1000 min­utes

• Cheap­­er long dis­­­tance ser­vice

What they do is pro­vide you a sim­ple Handy­tone 486 box, and you plug it to your In­ter­net-­con­nect­ed LAN on one side, and a phone on the oth­er.

You can al­so plug in your land line and use the phone to call on ei­ther one, and an­oth­er eth­er­net de­vice (ex­am­ple, a com­put­er o switch). If you have on­ly one com­put­er, you just stack it on­to your ca­ble­mo­dem or what­ev­er.

Ab­so­lute­ly triv­ial in­stal­la­tion... un­less they ship you the wrong gad­get, as they did to me, send­ing me one that was dis­abled. But that's ok, they fixed it in a cou­ple of days.

I have three small is­sues:

You have to sign a 12-­month con­trac­t. How­ev­er, if you take the small­est plan, the 12-­month con­tract is cheap­er than the con­nec­tion fee for Tele­fóni­ca de Ar­genti­na! And you still get 1200 free min­utes in that year!

You must use the gad­get. While it's a sim­ple SIP de­vice, they won't give you the us­er and pass­word, so you can't use a soft­phone or a re­al VoIP phone with this ser­vice (un­less you hack it, but why both­er).

Be­cause of that, it's kin­da tricky that the ads say you can use this phone line "ev­ery­where". I mean, it's true... if you have broad­band in­ter­net con­nec­tions with eth­er­net con­nec­tions "ev­ery­where".

How­ev­er, if you do your due dil­li­gence and fig­ure out what you are get­ting in­to, it's a very nice ser­vice, which works well, and has great cost ad­van­tages over the tra­di­tion­al al­ter­na­tive.

It's spe­cial­ly great if you want to have a Buenos Aires phone num­ber and work from some­where else (for ex­am­ple, labour costs in oth­er prov­inces are usu­al­ly be­low 75% of those in Buenos Aires).