What way should I go for VOIP in home?

mfield

I have a 1mb Irish Broadband connection which thankfully works very well (touches wood) and I want to setup voip in the house. We have a phone line for incoming and outgoing calls at the moment and I wanted to know what was the best route to go to setup voip. Any help is greatly appreciated.

nilhg

mfield it is hard to give advice not knowing what equipment you have already and what expectations you would have from your new VOIP service, ie will it be a second line for international calls or kids to use or are you hoping to ditch Eircom altogether?

How confident would you be configuring a device yourself or would you prefer to buy something setup with your details and ready to plug and play?

Foxwood

You can get started by setting up an account with voipstunt.com, and putting €11.60 into the account (€10 plus German VAT). You can use a headset microphone to make outbound calls from your PC, and you can even get it set with a Dublin number for inbound calls, but you probably need to get something like this to really take advantage of the inbound calls. (The Budgetone will allow you to make and receive calls even while your computer is turned off).

If you don't currently have a router (you'll need to share your internet connection between your PC and your VoIP phone), then rather than getting a VoIP phone, you can get a router that supports VoIP, and allows you to plug your ordinary phones into it.

You're going to have to spend a little money before you can cancel the phone line. (And then keep your fingers crossed that your wireless connection doesn't wither away).

mfield

nilhg wrote:

mfield it is hard to give advice not knowing what equipment you have already and what expectations you would have from your new VOIP service, ie will it be a second line for international calls or kids to use or are you hoping to ditch Eircom altogether?

How confident would you be configuring a device yourself or would you prefer to buy something setup with your details and ready to plug and play?

At the moment I have no equipment, just my 1mb Irish BB conection and a standard wireless router. I would have no problem whatsoever setting up the system myself. I was reading about Bluface, and I am of the impression that if I get this and keep my line for incoming calls this should do the business, would I be right or is there better companies?

nilhg

Since you have a router already something like a PAP2 ata or an IP phone like the one above will get you up and running.
I have a setup like that with Blueface whom I find great the Eircom line for incoming (and DSL) and VOIP for most of the calls out. I have two teenage daughters so two lines are very handy and the total spend on calls would not pay for the line rental on a second Eircom line.

Foxwood

mfield wrote:

At the moment I have no equipment, just my 1mb Irish BB conection and a standard wireless router. I would have no problem whatsoever setting up the system myself. I was reading about Bluface, and I am of the impression that if I get this and keep my line for incoming calls this should do the business, would I be right or is there better companies?

The Budgetone will work nicely, if you need the second phone somewhere close to your router (you'll need to plug it into the router). It's about the cheapest way to get a "real phone" for VoIP - but you can get started with a simple headset for €15, and a "softphone" on your computer.

The voipstunt.com account I mentioned above will give you 5 hours a week of free calls to landine numbers in most of Europe and the US.

Blaster99

Blueface has a line tester utility. There's a link to it from their forum somewhere. Run that and see how good your IBB line really is before spending any money on VoIP. Packet loss kills VoIP and IBB are the undisputed kings of packet loss.

nilhg

A quick and easy VOIP connection suitability tester can be found here, its not as comprehensive as Blueface's but much handier to use. Dont download anything just run the java applet.

bhickey

Another useful test site is http://www.testyourvoip.com/