Everywhere you look, costs are rising; just look at housing, petrol, groceries and electricity. But there is one way you can save a significant amount of money on your phone bill – VoIP. VoIP (or Voice over Internet Protocol) uses the internet to make telephone calls instead of your telephone provider (Optus, Telstra etc). You can call any telephone number at all, landlines, mobile phones, here or overseas. All you require is a phone handset, a VoIP adapter and an internet connection.
Competition in the VoIP market is very strong at the moment and there are some companies doing some amazing deals. For example GoTalk is offering a $14.95 package which includes unlimited (subject to fair use policy) calls to all Australian landline phones and mobile phones. That’s it, your entire phone bill reduced to $14.95! Just about all the VoIP providers offer free calls between users on their own VoIP service. Many businesses are taking advantage of this last benefit, with free phone calls between all their branch offices. With most providers you also get your own phone number so people can ring you on your VoIP number. If you have kids who are on the phone all the time, you can even get VoIP adapters that take two telephone handsets and run two VoIP accounts, each with their own VoIP phone number, allowing your kids (and you) to all be making and receiving phone calls at the same time, without the expense of separate telephone line rentals.
So what do you need? A broadband connection of course (the faster the better, 512/128Kb minimum is recommended), a VoIP adapter or router, a normal telephone handset (cordless is ok) and a VoIP account with a service provider. Some Internet Providers are now also offering “Naked” ADSL – a broadband services which doesn’t require you to have a phone service (ie. no line rental).
And the catch? Using the internet to make calls obviously relies on the quality of the internet between you and who you are calling. If you are downloading large files or Windows updates while you are making a VoIP call, you may notice the quality of the call suffer. You can minimise this disruption by using a VoIP adapter or router that supports Quality of Service. Put simply, this feature prioritises VoIP data, as well as keeping a portion of your internet speed free for VoIP calls. It is pretty much essential for consistently high quality VoIP calls. For business users, it is essential to have a dedicated internet connection just for the VoIP phone calls.
If you want to know more, just drop me an email at
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or call on 0753093379 (my VoIP line!).
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