Voice over IP telephones

[bajdas]

During the Christmas period I converted the home telephone to a VOIP (Voice over IP) connection.

The result thus far is a reduction of 50% in the family voice call costs. The $0.10 untimed national call cost, no flagfall costs and per second mobile call charging are great.

I was able to buy a second-hand router/modem which gave us the ability to use the existing cordless telephone handsets we were already using to receive and make calls. So no changes for the family other than a different sounding dial-tone.

We have kept the Telstra PSTN line connection ($30 permonth) because my research indicated some people had experienced issues with the 3G connections (Naked ADSL). Also, I believe Naked ADSL is a slower computer connection than our existing ADSL.

The PSTN line connection gives us a second incoming telephone line for free and is a fallback if the VOIP fails.

Has anyone else had experience or comments regards VOIP ?

[lummox]

VOIP is a great thing when properly sorted. I have not heard of naked dsl being any different to regular dsl, as it is still working at the same frequency just without the underlying pstn service, but I could be wrong I've been out of the industry for a couple years.
There is a couple of catches for home users:
1) If you have a monitored alarm system you can not send modem signals through an adsl router
2) If your dsl link goes down( and lets face it computer networks go down alot more often than POTS phone networks), you lose your ADSL link and phone. You will have to call your ISP from a mobile or some other service to log a fault ticket.
So keeping your underlying pstn service is a smart thing to do, the ISP's node phones are getting better all the time, I have heard of quality of service (QoS) issues and consistent drop outs, but know of others that beside the differing tones cant pick a quality difference
Skype is good for home video/voice calls and the price is right $0  , for skype to skype calls. They also offer really cheap skype to Land line services worldwide
A 50% reduction in call costs sounds pretty good to me

[OldOne]

VOIP is becoming very popular in my case a 80% reduction as local are now 10c down from 30c on big T home line budget plan (saving 9$ per month then all STD calls untimed at 10c Aust wide. All my outgoing call are via VOIP using a ATA which feeds the whole house and the normal phone line is for incoming only with fall back if I loose power or the ADSL line.

Re Skype  it is now being used by some SES units for conference calls and zero cost calls between units in the plans are for all SES units to have VOIP setup via their ADSL modem via a SES VOIP server which includes conference calls at no cost across the whole state.   Things are moving slowly but cost savings are happening.

Arno.