Voice over IP v Land Lines

I need an extra line for my room for my business and I am confused about all the options. I was thinking VO-IP might be a good altnerative but I am worried about the reliability and the costs of needing an 0845 number so people can dial me from a land line.

NTL do a landline for £12 a month so I am wondering if I should play it safe and get a traditional land line.

There are so many companies out there offering different products its a maze.

 

I have just been recomended this

http://www.vonage.co.uk/features.php?feature=phone_adapter

It seems pretty good.

 

Youve certainly confused me - what has an 0845 number got to do with voice over a network?

 

Well customers will have to be able to phone me from a landline . That is where an 0845 or 0161 number comes into it.

 

I use Skype but it's not 100% reliable. Depends a lot on the quality of the broadband connection at both ends, which varies along the day. Does not work well with people who don't have a DSL connection. Not ideal for business, OK to talk to friends once in a while.

 

I thought I would get a skype-in line. its only £20 a year I think. Can you get a proper landline number though, or is it a weird one?

 

I think you need to talk with BexTech at digital spy but I understand this is what he basically does.

Buy a Linksys PAP 2 ATA -analogue telephone adaptor for between £20 and £40,the more expensive ones are unlocked and the phone sockets are American types so you may require adaptors.

Register with www.sipgate.co.uk where you will given a free local tel. number (not all areas) and you can receive free incoming calls - outgoing ones are charged for so don't use this unless to another sipgate user.

Register with www.sipdiscount.com where you can phone UK landlines for free by just pressing a button on your existing handset.

http://www.voipcheap.co.uk offer free calls to most of Europe,Australia, NZ,Taiwan,US and the UK and they give you a +44 international number but unfortunately you can't use an ATA.

You can get free calls from the US at http://phone.ipkall.com/ipphone/ so if your US number is called it is received at your sipgate number.

I don't think any of the above can be used to phone the Emergency Services.

 

SkypeOut's new pricing from January 2nd 2006.

http://support.skype.com/?_a=announcements&_m=details&_i=21

 

Thanks all. Hopefully by tonight I would have choosen my telecommunications company.

Not being able to dial 999 is not a problem as we have a landline and several mobiles .

 

I would have thought that a 2nd land line through your exisiting provider would be best - you'd probably get a decent deal as a 2nd line. You're going to want a 100% reliable service if you want your customers to communicate with you through it, so for me this would exclude anything unproven in the long term, and anything that gives you an unconventional number. Voice over IP maybe the future but it's still in its infancy as a mass user means of comms (despite having been rattling around in development for a few years now). I'd go with a tried and tested for a business line, even if it costs a bit more, it's too important to risk anything else (no comms probably means no work?!).

 

Well most communications will be done face to face or via email but the initial contact will probably be via phone. I need to phone BT to find out how much they charge for a second line.

NTL do free installation but have a very poor customer service record. With VIOP I can have either an 0161 or an 0845 number so thats not really an issue.

Edit BT charge £75 for installation so they can get lost, I don't want to give custom to them anyway as they wrote my mum for a stroppy letter for using 1899.com.

Its all so confusing I have spoken to a few people who run businesses and use VIOP and they all say its reliable, remember I am not talking about Skype here.

However by defination it cannot be as reliable as POT, if my router failed for example so does my phone.

Maybe NTL is the best way forward.

 

amazingtrade,

If you need assurances about voip's realiability why don't you ask BexTech,as far as I'm aware he's been problem free for over a year and recipients of his calls believe it's a landline.

http://forum.digitalspy.co.uk/board/forumdisplay.php?f=132

 

I have been reading a lot of his threads, other people who have told me the same thing as well. I know a person via another forum who runs an ink cartridge company and he uses VIOP and has had no problems.

I won't be trading for another couple of weeks yet so I might as well sign up and give it a try. I know VIOP is nothing new, I was first introduced to it in 2002 but I think its only now it has become cheap and reliable enough to be a good alternative.

I will just a soft phone for now and then buy an ATA adaptor. As far as I am aware though the cheap adaptors seem to be locked to Vonage don't they? Vonage is not really ideal becuase of the costs.

 

Actually I think you're in for a shock if that's what you think. VoIP is far from in it's infancy. It's been implimented by pretty much most major Telecommunications companies in at least part of their networks. Some networks by some fairly big names are almost completely VoIP these days. No new Telcos in Europe are still implementing legacy, (ie TDM), only networks. They are all either going full VoIP or using switches which allow convergence of both technologies.

VoIP isn't the future, it's the now.

As for quality, well VoIP will never match traditional fixed network telephony, but then it doesn't need to these days. You can blame the success of the mobile phone for that. Everybody is used to, (and accepts), mobile network quality, (ie poor speech quality, long connection delays, disconnections etc), as the norm these days. So that makes it far easier for them to accept the only slightly poorer quality of a VoIP call.

As with most things in todays modern world quality has been replaced with convenience and low cost.

GTM

 

I have signed up with Sipgate but I am having problems with a USB phone I bought but I can take that back.

I think the only way I can live with VIOP is with an ATA adaptor but the £20 ones only work with Vonage don't they?

 

Please read post # 9 in this thread,maybe you can use Vonage ATA's with sipgate etc ? I wouldn't presume to give you advice on something I haven't tried.

Before you waste any cash/time why don't you ask BexTech at digital spy ?

http://forum.digitalspy.co.uk/board/showthread.php?t=300265

 

I saw somthing about that, isn't it supposed to be extremely difficult to get working with Sipgate?

 

I haven't tried sipgate with a Vonage ATA 2 so it is impossibe for me to say.

One thing of interest is that I've seen lots of used Fritz Box Fons (ATA and combined router) on German ebay for between £35 and £45 and I'm sure some of these can be configured for VOIP use,please don't ask me which ones because I haven't tried one.

 

I just had a quick look on the web and you're absolutely right......!
I used to work for Marconi (a few years ago) and was vaguely involved with ethernet over SDH, which I suppose is pretty much the opposite of voip. But, I was never really that taken by comms technology and changed directions when I got made redundant when Marconi collapsed. Clearly I haven't kept up with recent developments.