Anyone use VOIP at home for domestic use ?

So are broadband has just entered the 20thC – we now have > 10MB – wahooo

but it is an over the air solution – not via cable or copper, & the provider does not offer a phone package.

options:

1) pay for a landline only

£18 or so – that’s too much for a little used system

2) just go with the mobiles

we have very poor reception with all providers so is unreliable & dependant on the weather, which window we lean out of & whether the grass is short or long.

3) go with a VOIP solution

Voip is the obvious answer, you can get voip handsets too, which would save the hassle of being tied to the computer.. which provider is the question.. It’s not something I’ve looked into for some years though so I can’t really help with suggestions.

can’t remember last time I used landline.must be months as we noticed it was unplugged a month or so ago. if I could get rid of i would.

Sticking with just mobiles is the obvious answer but with poor reception then that’s not good.  A friend has some router thingies (Vodafone I think) that routes all mobile calls through the internet and he says theyre great – really good ‘reception’.

Otherwise VoIP.

You could also try (legal) mobile signal boosters such as the Vodafone SureSignal at about £70.

You plug them into a power point near your router and run a network cable to it from your router. You register it to you and register the mobiles that are allowed to use it. It then routes the mobile calls through your broadband. As yours is ota you might want to check if anyone has had any latency issues using SureSignal or VOIP products.

I think most of the major carriers have an equivalent booster.

A friend has some router thingies (Vodafone I think) that routes all mobile calls through the internet and he says theyre great – really good ‘reception’.

O2 do WiFi calling (though oddly the network settings to support this don’t allow call forwarding to work) but I thought most networks did boosters which do the above.

Can I ask how it works if it’s not wired and not 4G?

EE also do WiFi calling on certain handset’s, I’ve got a sony xz1 compact and it works fine

I’ve just realised actually, doh!  something I use all the time at the Mrs House where I’ve got no reception, I’m on 3mobile and they have a free voip app called “three in touch” I just open the app and everything gets routed through the router.

@ratherbeing…… It’s a microwave point to point, see http://waveinternet.co.uk/how-it-works/

24 hours in and no complaints so far.

I’ll check out the Vodafone sure signal,looking more like  £100 but better than paying crazy prices for the landline .

Seen one voip deal that appears to be just a few £s a month

SureSignal showing at £69 on the Vodafone shop at the moment. If the signal is crap, maybe worth giving Vodafone a ring and see if you can some discount?

Wi-fi calling I have found to absolutely shite.

VOIP would be Ok.

Vodafone gave may a Suresignal for free as I had no coverage at home despite them claiming I had 3G, that didn’t appear for a few years after, took a little persuading but they did send one. Not sure I still have it as I’ve changed providers since, I’ll have a rummage and post back here if I do.

First off I’d be ringing my mobile provider, telling them the service in your own home is rubbish and asking what they’re going to do about it before you change providers.

Skype?

What if you have a power cut?

Try not to open the fridge or freezer to keep the cold in.

VOIP is okay, you need 256Mb per line (up and down) to run it as a rule of thumb. It doesn’t use a lot of data.

Theres some really cheap deals online, but if it goes down don’t expect much in the way of support.

Wi-Fi calling would be my first choice.

power cut…

we’ll

* panic

* huddle by the fire

* light the candles

* go to bed & ….

* we’ll lean out of a window & use the mobiles

* look on a map to see where the phone box is

* go the phone box

* go back to bed & …

* failing all that – go for a bike ride

We use VOIP for a landline. Sound quality is no different to the old copper line as far as I can tell. We do have 100/20Mb speeds though.

Anyway, ours uses our old phone (some Panasonic cordless thing), no need for a special VOIP phone. It plugs into the back of the router rather than into the wall. Still needs power for the base unit though.

Google have just started offering free calling using the Google Home. You can just ask it to ring a telephone contact and then chat via the speaker. I’ve only used it a couple of times, but it seems to work OK.

For all the “who needs a landline”, I wish most of my friends/family would use one as the quality over mobile and sorry to say, many VOIP (especially Skype) options is frankly shite.

Breakup, glitches, quality drops as bitrate goes down. VOIP and Skype have terrible delay or echo.

And does my head in with work conference calls, especially again when they insist on using Skype. Can’t understand a thing.

Also a long call at home with mobile stuck to head I really do notice the heat. I could do speakerphone, but that’s another irritation. Like people on speakerphone calling radio shows and all the time they have to be asked to pick up the phone as it’s just really annoying with break ups and barely audible.

Anyway, at home I use the landline to call people and I try to get them to call my landline. I do however have VOIP for my business number just to get a different number but I let that run to answerphone, as there’s never anything important people call my business number for anyway.

We’ve used VOIP for years here in oz as before upgrades to partial fibre and VDSL they’d already worked out that ADSL2+ was much better when it wasn’t competing with traditional phone traffic. With a service set up so it has priority over other data we’ve never had a problem, and it’s much better than Skype et al seem to manage.

We also have cellular over WiFi and again I’ve never encountered any issues. But in our case the telco has enabled it as WiFi calling from our phones, rather than a mini cellular network off a box plugged into the router.

I use Vonage for Voip. They seem good and we were able to use our existing phones