At the Internet Telephone Expo in San Diego, I had a chance to talk with Lesley Kirchman from Actiontec about the VoSky Exchange solution. The VoSKY Exchange essentially lets you turn Skype lines into PBX trunks in the business environment. It's been very popular and well received.

Actiontec was also showing the VoSKY Chatterbox speakerphone for Skype and the VoSKY Call Center at the Expo. The good folks from Actiontec offered me the chance to test all these different solutions. Because I've torn down my Asterisk system, I don't currently have a VoIP PBX in my home office/lab. To be honest, I don't really need that kind of horsepower and it was taking a computer I often use for other things. I declined the full blown VoSKY Exchange from that reason, but did take them up on both the Chatterbox and the VoSKY Call Center.

You can read my write-up of the VoSKY Chatterbox speakerphone here. I wasn't terribly impressed, but it makes for a great promotional and giveaway item for Actiontec. I suspect desktop users might like it better than I. Given that I'm a laptop user with plenty of speaker and microphone options, the Chatterbox just didn't excite me.

The VoSKY Call Center...now that's a nice solution. First, just to give you a sense of size, here's the VoSKY Call Center Unit next to a teaspoon. It's a nice compact unit that could easily be included in a travel bag, although it's really an adjunct to your home office, and not something that I think would be a real useful travel tool for most. The travel value, in my view, would be for people who go out on temp assignments for an extended period of time and either have a hotel room or temporary office for a longer term trip. I think it would be a hassle for typical short business trips I've been on.




The point of the VoSKY Call Center is to allow you to make free calls over the Internet or using Skype any time, anywhere. With Call Center, you use your regular telephone to make long distance or international calls. The idea is to reduce costs. Features include the ability to make remote Skype calls from any regular phone, receive Internet calls on your regular phone, and set up a phone alert when a Skype contact goes online.

The package comes with:

• Actiontec VoSKY Call Center
• USB cable
• Telephone cable (RJ-11)
• Quick Start Guide booklet
  
• Installation CD-ROM (user manual PDF is on CD

They aren't lit in my photo, but you can see there are three LEDs on the front pane.

Regular Call
The Regular Call light illuminates when Call Center is in regular (analog) phone mode, blinks rapidly when an incoming regular call comes in, and blinks steadily when a regular call is on hold.
Internet Call
The Internet Call light illuminates when Call Center is in Internet phone mode, blinks rapidly when an incoming Internet call comes in, and blinks steadily when an Internet call is on hold.
Ready
The Ready light illuminates when Call Center is correctly connected to the computer and ready to answer calls.

The rear panel of Call Center contains three ports: USB, Line, and Phone.

USB Port
The USB port is used to connect a computer to Call Center via USB cable.
Line Port
The Line port is used to connect Call Center to a wall phone line outlet or modem via phone cable.
Phone Port
The Phone port is used to connect Call Center to a telephone via phone cable.

NOTE: Here, I'll explain that I tried not only plugging the line port into my PSTN phone line. I also tried plugging it in to my PhoneGnome, letting VoSKY use VoIP for its standard phone line. That's probably a bit geeky and creative, but it worked.

There are two modes of connecting the Call Center

Single-Line Connection
When Call Center is in Single-Line mode, it can be used to make or receive Internet (computer-to-computer) phone calls using Skype only. It cannot make regular calls to regular (land-line or mobile) telephones while in Single-Line mode. Also, features such as Remote Internet Calling, Call Forwarding, Call Return, and Computer Answering Machine will not be available.

Dual-Line Connection
When Call Center is set up in Dual-Line mode, it can make and receive both Internet (computer-to-computer) calls and regular (computer-to-land-line telephone or computer-to-mobile telephone) calls. Also, features such as Remote Internet Calling, Call Forwarding, Call Return, and Computer Answering Machine will be available. The standard setup assumes the computer is connected to a cable modem, but there are instructions for DSL also. I have both cable and DSL connections, but only used this on my cable network

Once everything's all cabled up and the software installed  it was ready to roll. The way the Call Center works is you Assign a Speed-Dial Number in Skype to the people you want to be able to easily call. But there's also Call Center software to install and set up on your PC.

If you want all the gory details on how to set everything up and all the different ways the VoSKY Call Center can work, go over to their website at VoSKY.com and dig around to your heart's content. There's all sorts of information there.

You have to leave the Call Center software running on your PC at this point, to fully leverage Skype and your Internet connection. For me, this was the gotcha.

In short, here's what this thing can do.

You can use a standard telephone plugged in to the VoSKY Exchange to access Skype Speed Dial contacts easily. You can set it up so you dial into your Call Center via the PSTN, then access the features remotely to trigger a Skype call from your office or cell phone.

You can set up phone activation when your Skype contacts come online. You can even park on their ID and as soon as they come online, the call sets up for you.

Overall, what I found was that everything works very well, and as advertised. I didn't encounter anything that didn't work. I didn't have any problems with the hardware or software or figuring things out.

For me there were two issues to contend with -

First, you need to leave things running on your desktop. If I owned a desktop, that could work. But I'm on the run a lot and a laptop user. Since there's no desktop system in my home office to leave this running and connected, I had to work in ways I wouldn't normally to test it. Works great, but doesn't fit my nomadic work style sans desktop.

Secondly, I just don't have enough use for Skype to make long-term use of the VoSKY Call Center. I'm a pretty casual Skype user, with the largest historical usage being to use it to record podcast calls. Sure I've got SkypeIn and SkypeOut and everything else, but my predominant telephone usage is really my cell phone. I'm a mobile person. I'd guess as many as 95% of my phone conversations are on my cell phone.

Overall, it worked well, and I'm impressed.  It's a solid design and nice implementation. It's not a great  fit for my nomadic work style, but it fits great with a number of people I know. I think it's also a great fit for people dealing with international long distance and trying to integrate Skype into the mix to reduce costs. That's also not a factor for me personally, but is for a lot of people.

Overall, I like the VoSKY Call Center and give it a big thumbs-up.


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