Spaeth; excellent comments. There's a lot about voip that people don't understand, and when there's a problem, it can be difficult to discern where that problem is. I noticed when VoipO was first starting up and I was Alpha testing with them, we had a certain problem. After a lot of experimenting, I found that the problem only existed when I called a certain state. The problem got narrowed down to one of the partner providers passing the packets. So that too is a good experiment to try. Do you get the no ringing with ALL calls, or only certain people/places you call. Not saying that a customer should have to know how to do any of this. They shouldn't. But voip is still a novelty/niche market. It's not something my 80 year old parents are going to buy. Matter of fact; probably 98% of the 2000 people who work with/for me have traditional phone service. Of the other 2% there's those with "Digital Voice". (Cable company's version of voip, but only in town. They hand off to the Ma'Bell). Besides me, maybe 2-3 others have "True Voip".

Another part of Voip that most people don't understand is that to make a voip phone call, it takes 2 separate parts. You have the SIP (Session Initiation protocol) Which is the part that initiates the call. It usually goes through the voip provider. (I am not 100% if VoipO is doing it this way, but most do). You connect to VoipO via the internet, they send your request through their network of leased lines to the destination you are trying to call. The SIP initiates the handshake. Your request is usually then handed through Ma'Bell (PTSN) because most calls are to a land line or cellular. Once the initiation has been established, the 2nd part kicks in. That's the RTP. (Real-time Transport Protocol). That's the part where your actual voice packets in the conversation is attached to. The UDP protocol. That traffic however doesn't follow the SIP. It normally doesn't go from you to VoipO and back out. Once the SIP has the initiation established, the RTP takes a direct route (As direct as the internet can be considering they use LCR for traffic) to the handoff gateway at the PTSN. Then your voice is converted back to analog and on to the final phone.

The problem of not hearing the other end ring in your phone is not uncommon. Unfortunately, the cause is also uncommon. You'll find that some are in the Router, having SIP ALG and SPI turned on. Some routers it's a problem; some it isn't. Some, the voip adapter actually needed a firmware upgrade. Some had port problems with the customer and the server. (They changed the server in the voip adapter config and it fixed it). Some had problems in the proxy settings using a domain name and it got corrected by putting in the actual IP address. (DNS Issue). Bottom line, there can be numerous reasons for this problem. But if it's any consolation, a simple google search will show that this problem has been reported by customers of just about every voip provider on the planet. It sucks when it happens to us personally; but the problem isn't personal.