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Bell finally showed up at 3pm and wired up my second pair in about 30 minutes. Boy, did the tech really not want to talk to me at all. Thanks Bell, for wasting an entire day of my time. I figured I wouldn’t have to be around, and the tech only knocked on the door to give me the “workorder completed” paperwork.

An hour or two later (I was making dinner at the same time), I wired up the new pair into the basement, installed a jack on it, and had my TekSavvy 3Mb DSL service up and running. Sweeeet. 3Mb service seems pretty darn stable already. I faxed in my cancellation to TFNet today. They gave me solid years of service though, I’ve got no complaints about them.

Then it was time to activate my Vonage retail kit, which I picked up at Best Buy. This is that little PAP2 phone adapter thing. Well… I had an issue. The signup website told me that my device was not configured for Canadian service, and to call Vonage to get it fixed. Great. So I called, and spoke to many people in India for a while. At first, I couldn’t find anyone who would believe me: they took me for some kind of ‘merican idiot I guess and made me check and re-check the device address I was typing in, etc. I almost went nuts from it. Also twice they transfered me to a Vonage USA representative even though everytime I started with “Hi, I’m calling from Canada…”

My fourth time trying to get some help, I got it right off the bat. Turns out someone screwed up at some warehouse somewhere, and put a bunch of phone adapters that were programmed for the US into Canadian-marked boxes. So they took my details and a few hours later called back to say I could activate it in Canada now. Great. So now it’s active! But I have to wait 15 days for Vonage to transfer my number from Bell to my VoIP. But that’s fine, it will give me a chance to finish the rest of this project, which is:

• finish phone wiring so that security system is routed through VoIP, with proper line interruption, and then test it out
• configure my Linux server back into a router, and my wireless router into a “dumb” bridge
• setup QoS on the Linux box using WonderShaper, to make sure that VoIP traffic gets priority over other stuff.