I'm motivated to cut our monthly expenses and this looks like a good place to start.
My wife has a small, part time business and has been using the same land line number for years. She won't give it up. We currently have it through Comcast and I'm reasonably sure that going VOIP will save us a good chunk of money. We never make long distance calls on it, it's mostly for inbound use. Basically, this phone only collects messages on the answering machine and then she calls people back. We have cell phones for everyday usage.
Is anybody currently using a VOIP set up that you would recommend?
We've got VOIP at work - some old Cisco PBX setup. We can definitely tell when the network connection gets poor or saturated as the voice quality goes to crap. Can't say I've noticed any improvement, and it sure messed up some of our equipment such as the fax machine and our conference speakerphone. We have very high phone volumes given our company size.
VOIP at home is working just fine, but of course it's much lower load.
What brand of VOIP are you using and what is the cost?
At home, it's the stuff baked into Charter internet access hooked into our normal phone system. Everything works normally.
The work setup is some obsolete Cisco PBX system. My phone has the part number 7960 on it.
Could you port the number to one of the cell phones as a second line and ditch it completely?
Using Google voice for the messages, you could get the message text sent to your phones, etc.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/217723/google_voice_number_porting_pros_and_cons.html
http://www.zdnet.com/article/just-because-you-can-port-your-number-to-google-voice-should-you/
These may be of interest. You can port a number to Google Voice and then use the Google Voice app if you have android.
VoIP sysadmin here. If you're not making long-distance calls or planning to save on cell phone usage, you'll save little to no money with VoIP, especially in a small operation. Without the savings and "economy of scale" VoIP could even cost you more than POTS.
For a small noob-run project I'd recommend an AsteriskNOW install and soft-phones on PCs, tablets, smartphones etc. VoIP desk phones cost clean into the 3-digits for each unit. Yeah, not so cheap now huh?
I was thinking more along the lines of Magic Jack or Vonage. They seem like they'd save me over my Comcast Triple play.
Magic Jack or Vonage are "toy" VoIP systems, but they can save you money on calls, especially long-distance. Magic Jack is my least favorite VoIP solution of all because it's the most toy-like (totally proprietary hardware & software) and the company has a sketchy history.
Had a Vonage box hooked up to the server at work once as temporary fix to a call routing problem, it worked OK for what it was.
Love my Ooma. Had it for 2+ years with nary a problem, and my phone bill is $3.85 a month (basically local taxes).
I've been running Ooma at home for ~6 months now. Not sure how I feel about it yet. On the upside, I pay ~$4/month in taxes (required) and that's it. I was paying over $100/month for an AT&T landline. That said, the voice quality isn't great. I am mostly convinced that is due to the terrible wifi access in the house though, and not the Ooma device itself. We have a very old house and the wireless router seems to struggle to broadcast very widely.
If you have good wifi, I think Ooma would work well. We ported our old number too.
bmw88rider wrote:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/217723/google_voice_number_porting_pros_and_cons.html
http://www.zdnet.com/article/just-because-you-can-port-your-number-to-google-voice-should-you/
These may be of interest. You can port a number to Google Voice and then use the Google Voice app if you have android.
You can use Google Voice with iOS as well.
dyintorace wrote:
I've been running Ooma at home for ~6 months now. Not sure how I feel about it yet. On the upside, I pay ~$4/month in taxes (required) and that's it. I was paying over $100/month for an AT&T landline. That said, the voice quality isn't great. I am mostly convinced that is due to the terrible wifi access in the house though, and not the Ooma device itself. We have a very old house and the wireless router seems to struggle to broadcast very widely.
If you have good wifi, I think Ooma would work well. We ported our old number too.
Could be. Mine is hard-wired to the network (I only use wifi for devices that move around). Our voice quality is very good, certainly as good as POTS ever was.
Before we ditched our land line all together we used Vonage at home for like 6 years. It worked well and with a little research you can hook it up so you can use all of the wall jacks in your house.
Another vote for Ooma. Pretty good value for $4/mo
Thanks guys. I'll check out ooma today.
Tom_Spangler wrote:
dyintorace wrote:
I've been running Ooma at home for ~6 months now. Not sure how I feel about it yet. On the upside, I pay ~$4/month in taxes (required) and that's it. I was paying over $100/month for an AT&T landline. That said, the voice quality isn't great. I am mostly convinced that is due to the terrible wifi access in the house though, and not the Ooma device itself. We have a very old house and the wireless router seems to struggle to broadcast very widely.
If you have good wifi, I think Ooma would work well. We ported our old number too.
Could be. Mine is hard-wired to the network (I only use wifi for devices that move around). Our voice quality is very good, certainly as good as POTS ever was.
Same setup here - Ooma box wired directly into the firewall box one hop down from the router. Call quality is very good, plus their pre-paid international rates are nothing to be sneezed at either. I'm very happy with the setup and it's paid for itself compared to Charter phone (which IIRC is VOIP as well) in less than a year.
VOIP does work over wifi, just not very well. The variable bandwidth you get from Wifi does funny things to VOIP codecs, even sophisticated ones. You're better off hardwiring the VOIP box into the network and use a DECT handset instead.
BTW, jimbob_racing, if you're interested in an Ooma box, ping me - I have a referral code for the box for $99.99 with free shipping that expires on the 31st. Yes, I do get a referral fee, but you'd save at least $30 on the box...
T.J.
UltimaDork
1/29/16 9:36 a.m.
Tom_Spangler wrote:
Love my Ooma. Had it for 2+ years with nary a problem, and my phone bill is $3.85 a month (basically local taxes).
This. I have two lines through Ooma. One for our 'home' number and one for my work number. I strongly recommend this as well.
T.J.
UltimaDork
1/29/16 9:38 a.m.
I occasionally even send/receive faxes through my Ooma. (I think I sent 2 or 3 in 2 years, but they do work.)
iadr wrote:
Keith Tanner wrote:
We've got VOIP at work - some old Cisco PBX setup. We can definitely tell when the network connection gets poor or saturated as the voice quality goes to crap. Can't say I've noticed any improvement, and it sure messed up some of our equipment such as the fax machine and our conference speakerphone. We have very high phone volumes given our company size.
VOIP at home is working just fine, but of course it's much lower load.
I work for a small suburban car dealer, and we use BroadConnect. My experience generally correlates to Keith's. Plus a bunch of "programming" problems in the phones. Sound quality is a huge issue, couple that with people using bluetooth in their cars to make the calls, and we regularly give up on calls.
Our amateur IT experts (3 unrelated former sys-admins and home hobbyists coincidentally employed within our staff rolls, as opposed to BroadConnect's non English speaking techs) have said it doesn't have to be that way, but ... I've just about quit a couple times over it.
Plus our receptionist now has an excuse for just about everything she doesn't *cough cough* excel at.
Now my home system is decent- Shaw cable to a Uniden portable from Walmart. But we found a fax machine is unlikely to work on the line. Same thing we found at work, where we restored a couple land line to use for faxing.
Wow I don't know what's going on here. The VoIP system I'm running is damn near flawless, and it's nothing fancy - Polycom phones connecting to an Asterisk server. Everyone now has soft phones on their smartphones, which is handy around the office (you can forward your desk phone there) and saves tons of money when people are travelling. Our overseas offices use VoIP connected to the home office server, they get free calls back home and cheap local calls too.
If your Comcast voice is anything like my Comcast voice, you've already got VOIP. That said, you might save some money deleting voice from your Comcast bundle, but Comcast's pricing is very fluid, and I suspect it will cost you a "package discount" and you will end up very close to where you are now, but with lesser service.
Please don't let the above dissuade you. I hate Comcast passionately, and if they did not bribe government to maintain a monopoly, I would not choose to do business with them.
Our problems with VOIP come from our internet connection. Basically, the shop is out in the sticks and we have a microwave dish on the roof to talk to the internets. When it's working, it's great. But the first sign that we're having trouble with the internet connection is the phone voice quality going out. The codecs do a good job at dealing with lowering bandwidth, but at some point they just fail. The failure mode isn't the usual flanging or artifacts you hear on cellphones, it's more like a skipping CD.
I I was wondwondwondering what a turboturboturbo wouldldldldldld do for my Mimimimimimiata?
Basically incomprehensible. I know the problem isn't the phones but is with the network, but at least with our POTS system the phones stayed up when the network went down.
It's funny, when I worked for Nortel Networks in the late 90's the marketing buzzword was "webtone" - trying to bring telecom's reliability (99.99% uptime) to the web. And now it's gone the exact opposite direction...
Mike
Dork
1/29/16 6:12 p.m.
I am going to pile on and say Google Voice is probably the best option for OP. OP doesn't take calls, and really just needs a voice mail service. OP is motivated by savings.
I've ported a number in to Google Voice, and I've ported a number back out. Twice. It's not painful to do. It's free. It can be accessed by iOS app, Android app, mobile browser, or desktop browser. It's reliable. There are some nifty features, like call blocking, and the ability to create a widget that goes on a web site. You can also set up those other numbers, and have Google Voice place the outgoing calls in a way that doesn't expose the numbers of your other phones when you're calling people back.