VOIP : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

Advantages

• The main advantage is cheap or free long distance to North America and parts of Europe.
• Sometimes you can get rid of your land lines, and save on that too.
• The people who make best use of this are snowbirds or people who travel a lot. Your phone number follows you no matter where you roam. You can use your existing number or get a number with any area code you please. This can save you on cell phone roaming charges, or being charged for a line to a residence you are not currently using.
• Though you must get your Internet access from a local company, you can get your VOIP phone service from any company. Further you can plug into the Internet anywhere in the world, and your number follows you. You just take your combined router/VOIP box with you, or your VOIP software in your laptop.
• VOIP phones often come bundled with features such as call-waiting, caller-id and electronic answering machine.
• Since the Internet has no long distance charges, in theory VOIP long distance could be free, but in practice it will not be free, just cheap. Check out long distance charges to find the true economics of a candidate plan.

Gotchas

• You have to buy a gateway box. It is effectively a small computer that does analog to digital conversion and relays the packets out over the Internet. This additional startup cost will eat into your expected savings. It plugs into your Internet router, just like an additional computer.
• Your VOIP phones no longer plug into the wall. They must plug into one of two jacks on the gateway, one jack for each of two numbers, e.g. phone and fax. This means if you want extension phones in other rooms, you can’t use the in-wall wiring. You must string your own wires to hook the phones into the jack via a splitter.
• The VOIP phones don’t work at all if your Internet service is down or if your gateway has no power. This means they won’t work in a power outage the way land line phones do. In such an emergency, 911 or your burglar alarm phone would stop working. Further, you can’t report the outage.
• VOIP phones are incompatible with directly wired apartment intercoms.
• If you drop your land line voice phone service, the phone company will charge you more for ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line technology) service. If you also drop ADSL service from the phone company, and replace it with third party land line ADSL service, they will still charge you for a dry line (a raw copper line without any phone company services using it). This means your expected savings will be eaten up. Only if you get your Internet service from cable, you could drop your land line, and not have to pay the phone company anything. So your savings are badly eroded.
• When the phone is operating, it is using your LAN, chewing up some of its capacity thus slowing it down. However, a voice connection is less than 63K a second. What is more of a concern is your computer activities bogging down your VOIP connection leading to breaking up.
• If you need two lines, you will need two gateways and two sets of phones.
• If you use pure software VOIP, e.g. Skype, then the computer has to make the ring. It may not be loud enough to notice.
• If the computer is powered off, it can’t take incoming calls, or ring, or make your phone ring. I am not sure what happens if the computer is merely hibernating.

Intercom

If you live in an apartment, chances are your telephone rings when someone comes to the door. (Very old apartments may have a separate intercom.) This can be handled by a box at the apartment door phoning you via the phone company. In this case, your VOIP phone will ring. You would miss the call if your computer is not powered on. My apartment has a Viscount Enterphone 2000 which works a different way. It works even if you have no phone service at all. It uses a direct wire to your set of phone jacks. You need to plug a standard phone into one of the wall jacks to take calls from the front door. Your VOIP phone will not ring, unless you had some special hardware on your computer to attach to your wall jack wiring. (I don’t know if such hardware even exists.) Visit the website of the manufacturer of your entry system to find out about compatibility.

The Comwave people sometimes use a miniature router that gives you only one Ethernet outlet for computers, or a 4-port router. You can plug a single phone into the router, or plug the router into a wall outlet, where it powers all the phones.