state of VOIP and Eircom

cherrio

Hey guys,

know this has been brought up a few times in the past. But was wondering what is the current state of VOIP with Eircoms BB?

Basically I want to have a proper VOIP solution (an actual phone + phone bumber, ala: http://www.nikotel.de/en/ ). But is it going to be laggy? (This is for making calls from Ireland to US)

MarVeL

I was talking to some people from VoIP Ireland about this recently. They have just started providing a residential service in Ireland at €130 installation cost and after that you pay for your calls. The downside is that they are still waiting for clearance from (surprise surprise) ComReg for phone numbers to be assigned to these phones, so you can make calls out but calls in are impossible from non VoIP users.

Of course then it is their phone bill and not yours

iwb

I have been using a Cisco softphone connected over VPN to North America for over a year. Although it isn't the same as what you want to do, it should give you an indication as to what to expect from the DSL segment.
I seldom have any problems with it and most people on the other end don't notice any difference over the pstn.
A few things I have found to be problematic though. First, at times the bandwidth is probably too heavily contended, as the call goes very bad. I assume this will get worse as more people use their DSL connections more heavily. Second, the 128k uplink gets swamped if I try to send an email when talking on the phone. The guys at the other end lose me completely.
I also use Skype and have tried other peer to peer solutions in the past. They work very well in general. I even tried Sydney last year and it was more than passable.

IDM

I use Skype for PC2PC calls to the states. Really good sound quality assuming you keep your up-stream load-free. (Uses about 5.5 kbps)

I use a company called Net2Phone to call landlines in the states. That works nicely as well. Only $0.02 american to the states. Pretty cheap to other countries as well.