Anyone here use VOIP?

[Rich Riddle]

We have a farm for a second home and are looking into inexpensive options for a phone. Do any of you use VOIP via your Internet connection? Someone had recommended Magicjack and I am just beginning to read up on things.

[Andy Giddings]

Have used VOIP at home for years. I work from home for a large corp and I use their VOIP system for all calls from my home (business and personal). Its as reliable as your internet service, so of course if your service is poor, your VOIP experience may reflect that.

Call quality is very good and very often far better than the land line we used to have. I also use the same VOIP service on my mobile phone so calls anywhere in the world over wifi are essentially free as they don't use my call plan. I have no experience with MagicJack. There are a lot of service providers out there so would shop around and read as many user reviews as possible before deciding.

[Bert Kemp]

MY cell uses Voip I use Republic Wireless which makes all my calls over the wifi in my house or anywhere that has wifi if no wifi is available then it works just like a regular cell phone, I pay $10 a month for unlimited Cell and text over cell towers and unlimited everything over wifi. doesn't get any cheaper thenthat

[Bill Neely]

We've had Basic Talk for about 2 years and have been nothing but pleased.

[William Adams]

Managed to avoid it for years, but the local phone company finally forced everyone off copper, and on to VOIP.

Annoyed at the change, mislike the change in the billing and seriously put-off by 911 service being dependent on electrical power or a charged battery.

If they’d offered a reasonably extravagantly priced option to keep copper, I would’ve.

[Edward Clarke]

I've used Vonage for years with my business. Two lines - one a voice line and the other optimized for fax. I have both lines plugged into a Panasonic KX-TD816 PBX here. Never a problem as long as your internet connection remains up (except for a minor flood that took out my adapter - it doesn't work under water). You buy the adapter and the service is about $25/month for home use.

[Sam Murdoch]

MagicJack has been in our house for at least 6 years - more I think. Been happy enough. Few glitches - mostly in the old days. Using MJ Plus now and so not tied into the computer being on. Love it. Customer service is OK in the event you need help. Can get on line to chat easier than get a call through and the help is actually helpful. Only done that twice in the entire time.

[roger wiegand]

Used VOIP at home and work now for years. The Verizon FIOS VOIP at home seems bulletproof and provides battery backup so you don't lose phones when the power goes out. I'm not sure they even offer copper wire POTS in our area any more.

[Rich Engelhardt]

Very happy Ooma user checking in!
We've had Ooma for two and a half years now.
We had all sorts of dropped calls and horrible connections with tons of static the first year.
Then our ancient cordless phone's battery died and we replaced it.
Our problems went away with the old phone.

I read up on it & it seems to be a common problem with older phones.

By older, I mean like 25 plus years old.

[Erik Loza]

All the land lines at SCM Group are VOIP. Not sure the carrier but no issues I have ever had in talking to folks there. As others have mentioned, if the internet goes down, so does your phone line. That has happened a few times.

Erik

[Steve Schlumpf]

We switched over to VOIP (bundled through Charter Cable) about 2 years ago and have been pleased with it for the most part because it is a LOT cheaper than landline ($30 vs $70). Audio is better and we are not paying extra for domestic long distance. Only problem with it is as others have already mentioned - lose cable or power and you are without a phone. Makes it tough to get a hold of the power company to report an outage!

[Gerry Grzadzinski]

Put your cable modem and phone on a UPS, and it should work in power outages.

Been using VOIP for over 10 years here.

[William Adams]

Yes, it works while on battery backup --- Verizon provided a built-in battery, and has replaced it once for free, so now, I need to replace it the next time. What is the environmental cost of every home in the U.S. having an additional battery in it, which needs to be replaced / recycled? I'd rather have copper which doesn't require on-going overview on my part.

Last time I was at the battery shop they soaked me for ~$5.00 to recycle all of our old alkalines (found out that the local Radio Shack at the mall, while they claimed to be accepting batteries for recycling were actually pitching them --- glad that location is gone, and don't miss the others so much 'cause of it).

[Pat Barry]

Lets say I kill my regular phone service and switch to VOIP. Do I / Can I still retain my old phone number if i want to?

[William Adams]

When Verizon switched us over, our phone # stayed the same --- there was just a brief window where they closed the account, discontinued the service, then reinstated it.

[Kev Williams]

Very happy Ooma user checking in!
We've had Ooma for two and a half years now.

Add me to the happy Ooma user list. As for glitches, I tried to 'not' prioritize the Ooma by putting it behind my network router, but it's like listening to fireworks sometimes. But once I put the Ooma in front of the router, the ONLY problem I've had in 2 years is a glitch they had in the caller ID.

I'm paying extra (a whole $10 a month) to have full Caller ID and a second phone line and number- it's cool because all phones ring regardless of which number is called, and the second line is always available for someone else to use, and can be answered if a second caller calls... Also, every incoming and outgoing call is logged, you can blacklist any numbers, etc...

The only other charge besides the $120 a year is $4 a month in taxes and fees... My old phone setup for 2 lines was $129 a MONTH.

The only thing I miss is the fax machine... :)

[Malcolm Schweizer]

I used Vonage for a very long time, and I loved it, except that my internet provider at the time wasn't up to par. I'm talking barely even saw 2mb up or down. Even with that I was able to hear fine, but people would sometimes say I sounded like I was talking under water. Now that I have REAL high-speed internet I wouldn't have a problem with using them again, but I have a work cell phone with unlimited international roaming, and so I use it now for my international calls, which was the main reason I was using VOIP.

At work we have Cisco VOIP with no issues, except when the power goes out (as it does often) we have no phones.

[Rich Riddle]

I am realizing there are different types of VOIP. Some seem expensive while others cost only a few dollars a month.

[Bill Neely]

Lets say I kill my regular phone service and switch to VOIP. Do I / Can I still retain my old phone number if i want to?

With Basic Talk we were able to keep our old phone number.

[Brian Elfert]

Annoyed at the change, mislike the change in the billing and seriously put-off by 911 service being dependent on electrical power or a charged battery.


Copper phone service requires electricity too. Central offices don't necessarily have the means to stay running for days in a major power outage. It is likely that phone companies will no longer spend the money they should to keep copper POTS lines running well since they no longer have the customer density they once did.

[William Adams]

Yeah, but it doesn’t need electricity at my home, nor everyone else’s.

[Peter Kelly]

If you're on T-Mobile, your handset will automatically route calls to VIOP once you're connected to a wifi network. http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/wifi-calling-wifi-extenders.html

No LTE or 3G signal required!

[Curt Harms]

Copper phone service requires electricity too. Central offices don't necessarily have the means to stay running for days in a major power outage. It is likely that phone companies will no longer spend the money they should to keep copper POTS lines running well since they no longer have the customer density they once did.

Verizon is certainly not diligent about maintaining their copper plant from many reports. There are some rather 'lively' threads at broadbandreports.com about Verizon and POTS. Verizon's position seems to be fiber or wireless or go away. The problem is that for the past few years they're also not expanding FiOS so people on copper without the option to go to fiber are kinda screwed. Time for local utility build-out and REAL competition?

[Kev Williams]

Ooma ported my phone number of 40 years over no problem...

As for electric, if we lose power or internet service, all calls end up going to the wife's Iphone. Calling out doesn't happen till the power or internet is back up, but-- we have cell phones!

FWIW I run my engraving business from our house, or I wouldn't bother with Ooma. Cell phones are great, but I have a Wilson booster just so they work in our house, and downstairs is iffy at best still...

[Brian Elfert]

FWIW I run my engraving business from our house, or I wouldn't bother with Ooma. Cell phones are great, but I have a Wilson booster just so they work in our house, and downstairs is iffy at best still...

If you have a iPhone 6 with updated IOS then you should likely be able to use WI-FI calling at home as long as you have WI-FI. This will probably work better than a booster as long as you have electricity and Internet.

I currently use WI-FI calling at home with Verizon because my phone barely works at home. I might switch carriers if the phone was not paid by work.

[Bradley Gray]

We use skype as a back up to our land line (no cell service here) but because we have satellite internet there is an annoying delay. I usually only use it to report the outage to Frontier. No way would I use it for biz calls.

[Matt Meiser]

I use the business version of Skype, formerly called Lync, and GotoMeetiing quite a bit for work. The sound quality of both is great, assuming good hardware (we all have headsets.) Since we went to Lync/Skype almost everyone has switched to that for inter-office calling and a number of our customers have as well for conferencing. We ditched land lines for home phone about 4 years ago. Its cheaper to give our daughter a hand-me-down iPhone than pay for a landline, and more reliable than what Frontier could provide as well. We since moved but never even considered going back to a land line. The old land line number was ported to my daughter's cell phone. My business land line number I started forwarding to my cell about the same time. Reviewing the calling logs, about the only calls I was getting were scams and political calls (pretty much the same thing!) Most legitimate calls were coming directly to my cell. I discontinued that number a year later, saving work over $60/mo.

Even in the last year of my dad's life when they called an ambulance a number of times, my parents were confident enough in the reliability of cell service to switch over to Charter VOIP service. Its not nearly as much of an issue as the old-timer phone company folks want you to believe in this day and age, assuming you have cell service or decent internet. The equipment on the provider's side is generally battery or generator backed and a cheap UPS can do the same for you for hours.

[mark mcfarlane]

~12 years of Vonage & ~5 years of OOMA. I currently have both (2 different homes in 2 different countries). Vonage has been extremely reliable, and gives me a US based phone number overseas. I don't use the OOMA phone much as I only visit that home a few weeks year, but it seems to work fine. The best thing: I got OOMA back when it was free. I am still grandfathered. I bought the hardware and until this hardware dies, I get free phone service. 0 fees or taxes. Nada. OOMA occasionally offers me a deal on new hardware, which includes the new required service fees/taxes.

[Tom Giles]

Vonage for 10+ years now. Costs are $9.99 + taxes = $12.35 a month. Comcast wants $30 a month for theirs. Got Vonage before Ooma was around. No problems with Vonage so far. Was going to cancel the land line but it's so cheap I keep it.