How do VOIP Phones work?

Noelie

How do VOIP phones work? do you need a ATA adaptor for them to work? or do they plug into the back of a PC

I was thinking of just getting a ATA adaptor, this one, and plugging a standerd cordless phone into it, would there be any point in using a VOIP Phone in the ATA?

Blaster99

VoIP phones have all the SIP functionality built-in to them. In the case of an ATA + analogue phone, the ATA knows the SIP stuff and the analogue phone does the phone bit. If you have an ATA, you plug a normal phone into it. The advantage with a VoIP phone is that you can do the more advanced features like call forwarding, 3-way calling, automatic divert after x rings, voicemail indicator light, etc. VoIP phones have one or more ethernet ports. VoIP phones are mostly relevant in a business environment. I believe some or most ATA also support these more advanced features but you need to key in various magic key sequencies on the analogue phone to get them work, whereas on VoIP phones it's usually button and menu driven. You'll find that very few people use VoIP phones at home.

You can actually get a low-end VoIP phone for about €60 from Komplett. I would therefore guess that you can get an ATA for a lot less. Also as I mentioned somewhere else, I would recommend a setup that uses a router with built-in VoIP and Qos so the VoIP gets priority over anything else.