VOIP a real alternative to landline?

[mrapoc]

Just been looking a bit into VOIP.

How do they fare as a replacement to a landline? Save £££??

Anyone had any experience with VOIP?

[kinmel]

Just been looking a bit into VOIP.

How do they fare as a replacement to a landline? Save £££??

Anyone had any experience with VOIP?

You still need to have and pay for the landline with VOIP and it does not offer great savings on call costs for most people, I used it for a while, but in the end I drifted back to traditional phone calls.

[JB]

Just been looking a bit into VOIP.

How do they fare as a replacement to a landline? Save £££??

Anyone had any experience with VOIP?

I use it extensively, but I do have a special need for it. I have one home in UK and one in Spain. By using VOIP I have a phone number (local number for my UK area) which will ring at either property. When people ring me they do not know which country I am in.

VOIP has advanced considerably in recent years and my experience is that call quality and reliability is very close to an actual landline. In terms of cost saving, it is possible you could save as much money by using one of the various call through services from your normal landline, depending on your calling pattern.

The Betamax group of companies (smslisto, smartvoip etc..) offer excellent value. You top up your account and receive 90 'free days' to many destinations. This means that all calls, under a total of 5 hours a week, are 'free' to certain destinations. As UK and Spanish landlines are included in their list it is an attractive proposition for me. After the 90 days expires, any further calls are charged but at a low rate of just over 1p per minute. Also most VOIP providers give you free calls if you are calling a number also on their network. Also, Siemens have a thing called gigaset.net. This means that if you purchase a Siemens VOIP phone and register (for free) with their service, you can call any other Siemens user for free.

There is a lot more to it to research if you decide to take the plunge, but there are two major things you need to be aware of:-

1) The ATA or VOIP phone you connect to your router needs (IMHO) to be fed from a UPS as does the router. It is not satisfactory (again IMHO) to lose your phone line if your electricity goes off.

2) You need to consider how you are going to make an emergency (999) call. Fine if you still retain your BT line but you need to investigate how you chosen VOIP provider handles these calls. Some are fine, others are not.

Hope that gives a short insight.

JB.

[MisterW]

I have a Siemens Gigaset Dual IP phone which allows me to make & receive both voip and landline calls from the same (DECT) handsets. My ISP ( not IDNET ) gives me 120 free voip minutes/month to UK landlines and I use those during the day and then use my landline (BT Evenings & Weekend package) to make calls at other times. This way I rarely make an actual chargeable call.
As 6jb says voip is also useful when not at home, although I don't have a second home I do spend some time in Portugal. Most towns there have free wifi and I can use my Nokia N95 to connect to my voip service and make calls back to the UK for free.