2:07 AM Thursday, May 03, 2007 END OF JANUARY 2007 It was end of January 2007, and i found myself needing to upgrade my old handphone (battery problem), I went into one of the Singtel shop here and was amazed by the swam of people, it seems that everybody was signing up for the MIO plan or something, i was told that my waiting time will be 1 hour, but when i finished signing up and paying up, it was nearly 3 hours later.
Being the techie, i had a lot of questions, what is the brand of ADSL modem? what are the technical specification? will i be given the password to the ADSL router? what is the wireless specification, does it support WPA? It is kind of ironic, while this poor techie had so many questions, the middle-age chinese couple on my left was signing up a MIO plan with one additional mobile plan at special discount, bargaining over the counter whether they can have separate account for the handphone together with the MIO plan, and the beautiful Malay lady on my right is getting the MIO plan with a brand new Nokia E80 for her son to surf the Internet, her only problem was which Wi-fi phone to buy... ( I am always chatting up with strangers....)
What about the new wiring? what about the radiation of the new wireless device? apparently, nobody-else care. At $68 with 3Mbps broadband, a free-incoming mobile plan plus toll-free VOIP line, sign-up first, worry about the details later...but not me....
While i was queueing to be served, i managed to find out from the "temp" staff with the help of a back-office manager the following information:
1) What is the ADSL modem/router device? This is a 2-wire ADSL modem/router with 802.11g/b with WPA, comes with 4 switched ethernet port. The model number is 2700HGV-2. The additional feature of this device is that it supports VOIP. You can get more documentation from the 2-wire website, documentation link is here.
2) Do you need to re-wire your existing phone extension? It depends, but the fan-out point, once you cross over to VOIP, will be from the MIO box (aka the 2-wire 2700HGV-2 device)
3) What is the radiation rating of the MIO box? You would like to be very careful around microwave devices. The MIO box can emit 400mW around 2.4GHz, the menu settings allow you to divide this by 10 steps. ( when the actual box was delivered, it appears that IDA/SINGTEL reduce the ratings to only 240mW, i can only see 6 steps from the web configuration menu)
4) Do i get to keep the password of the MIO box? The answer is yes, and SINGTEL will not be responsible if you misconfigure the box.
I went out to get a new handphone, and i came home with the MIO plan.
3 Weeks Later It was three weeks later, i was running a 39.2C high fever when the engineer came to install the modem, i actually only requires him to setup the VOIP and to help me re-wire the fan-out point for me, to my surprise, he is an "outsourced" entity, and he does not have the punch tools to configure my switch box....he spent about 1 hour setting up the modem, according to him, it appears that the exchange was not stable or my MIO box was faulty, he went out to get another MIO box, but when he returns, it appears that there was nothing wrong with the existing box, and after declaring everything works, he asked me to sign something and promptly left.
There is a password that is required to setup the VOIP, i did not manage to copy it down, and the engineer told me that it will be sent to me by SINGTEL, i will look out for it.
The box does not have a password, so i promptly install one, and went back to sleep. You will need to leave the box on 24x7, otherwise, there will be no incoming VOIP....switching it off to secure it is not really a good idea....
The Next Day My fever have subsided, and i cannot wait to test out my MIO plan, everything seems to work fine, but i cannot dial-out anymore, the 1800 MIO hot line, is really hot, nobody picks up the call for more than 20 minutes, and i gave-up, i called the usual 1609 and ask them to transfer message to get help.
Another Two Days Later Still no out-going for VOIP, and still no reply from SINGTEL, i called 1609, they transferred me to the MIO's 1800 hot-line, but after 5 minutes, 1609 pick up my line and apologize for the hot line, say that they will transfer the request for me.
One week later Still no-reply from anybody from SINGTEL, and still no-outgoing from my VOIP line, i am feeling much better now and happened to have sometime at hand (after managing to catch back the lost days of work while having high fever), i started reading the PDF guide for the 2-wire device, i ran the basic diagnostic, which are fine, but it seems that the MIO box has alot of advance diagnostic features that are disabled? Incidentally, the MIO box does not come with any paper documenation, i followed the link on the web configuration to the 2-wire website. I started to yank out wires and re-connect them based on my understanding of the box features, it appears that the engineer had loop-back the voice signal onto my existing wiring to enable all my extension to work, but somehow, this interferes with the out-going call, once that was remove, my VOIP line can make out-going call, unfortunately, my other 2 additional extensions no longer work.
TODO
1) You must install the system password for the MIO box ASAP 2) If you don't need the wireless, it cannot be switch off, but you can power it down to level 1, and disable the SSID broadcast and it seems to be switched-off. 3) If someone out there have re-flashed the MIO box with the 2700HGV stock drivers from the 2-wire website, i will be interested to hear if the advance diagnostic features are back? please drop me an email at milton@spiralbridge.net 4) If you plan to re-flash the device, i think there are two more passwords in additions to the system password that is required, the VOIP password and the provider code, just becareful to get hold of these, otherwise, you may not be able to restore it back to working conditions. ( one more password is the broadband password but everybody should already have that one).....of course, if any accident happens during re-flashing, your MIO box is only good for paper weight...you are warned. 5) I will be interested to see if anyone out here has managed to loop back the voice signal onto the existing wiring and did not suffer a dial-out problem, in theory, assuming that the digital signal and the voice signal are on different channels. 6) Probably not critical, but the default firewall settings allows "remote management" to enter through the firewall, you may wish to disable that.
Two Weeks Later It appears that the problem with the VOIP line is related to filtering. The VOIP must be filtered before pushing the signal back into wiring system. It is so sensitive (could be my ten year old telephone's problem), it cannot be link directly to the normal telephone without some form of filtering, the phone not only sound funny, dialing out is a problem.
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