I've just had the hard sell from India (I suspect) from a company called VONAGE who want to send me a free device to plug into my BT broadband modem so that I can effectively get unlimited free phone calls to UK and something like 30 other countries. Free isn't totally correct as the charge is =A37.95 a month.
I ducked out for the moment by saying I only had a bank card instead of a Visa type card which they wanted.
Anybody had any experience of this? What made me even more hesitant about following this up is that there is both vanage.co.uk and vonage.co.uk doing the same thing !!
I've just had the hard sell from India (I suspect) from a company called VONAGE who want to send me a free device to plug into my BT broadband modem so that I can effectively get unlimited free phone calls to UK and something like 30 other countries. Free isn't totally correct as the charge is =A37.95 a month.
I ducked out for the moment by saying I only had a bank card instead of a Visa type card which they wanted.
Anybody had any experience of this? What made me even more hesitant about following this up is that there is both vanage.co.uk and vonage.co.uk doing the same thing !!
Vonage is only one of a number of companies providing VoIP in the UK. If you're interested in VoIP, educate yourself about it before going for the first (unsolicited) offer. The newsgroup uk.telecom.voip might be a good starting place.
I used to use a voip router and Sipgate (£0 per month, cost only). That worked as I had a cable modem so I could cut off the BT line and save on the rental charge. The quality isn't really as good as a normal phone, but good enough for the amount I was saving. If you have an adsl line and are forced to hve BT then I cannot see a great advantage for most people.
If one has relatives overseas, then the advantages are huge. I use Skype to talk to relatives in the USA, which even though I have to use "Skye Out" to talk to the them (the final hop is over the PSTN), is 90% cheaper than using BT all the way. My phone bill has fallen about 75%.
And you're still paying your BT bill of £10.50 a month and your broadband providers monthly fee on-top of that. (in general, yes, there are combined tariffs from various operators!)
With BT option 1, you can make an off-peak UK call for 5p for up to an hour, so for £7.95, you can have nearly 160 hours of calls via BT alone... (providing you hang up after an hour & re-dial!)
Just say no. Rather than make excuses. If you say no, then they'll get the message.
Then you need to go and register your number with the TPS to stop these annoying sales calls :)
Vonage seem to be really pushing it right now. Not sure why...
Anyway, in the UK there are many VoIP operators to choose from, Vonage just being one. Call rates and monthly charges vary hugely - with some you can even get totally free calls to UK numbers for example, and others charge the same as BT... (Although most are usually cheaper)
My suggestion (and I sell VoIP myself), is that if you're an ordinary home user , then unless you're making a huge number of calls to a particular destination, or you're particularly technically minded, then it's probably not worth the hassle right now.
Vonage (and a few others) makes life easier by selling you a pre-configured box, but it's locked into their system and there's a monthly fee on top of that... Others are more open and don't charge a monthly fee, but operate a top-up scheme similar to PAYG mobile phone calls.
Your "VoIP Experience" will vary depending on many factors - the usual one being the quality of your broadband service. I only deal with businesses, so can usually persuade them to spend a few pounds more on a good quality broadband service, but I've then seen people working from home on £9.99 combined deals where the ISP or their network infrastructure just isn't up to carrying VoIP. (How many times have you tried to download a web page and it's been slow or stalled? Think of this in a live voice conversation!)
If you're interested in VoIP, then there are a few ways to go - One is Skype. This is a proprietary service and closed where you can only call other Skype users. There is in & out 'bridges' to the PSTN though, but these cost money.
The other way is to use one of the myriad of VoIP services, then you can connect via a multitude of ways... Either with a "soft phone" on your PC
- where you have a program running that emulates a phone with a headset connected to your audio ports, or a USB audio device... Or you can get a separate VoIP desk phone (100's to choose from) - this looks just like a real phone (it is a real phone!), but has an Ethernet socket on the back - you'd typically plug this into your broadband router - lastly there are devices called ATAs - analogue telephone adapters - these have both Ethernet and phone sockets - you typically wire them in-line with your existing BT phone socket and home phones, then also connect them to your broadband router via Ethernet. Using the phone, you can dial codes to switch between your BT line or the VoIP account...
Anyway there you go. You'll get more advice from uk.telephony.voip (and a lot of old whingers too ;-)
Many thanks, Gordon - an excellent reply which I hope will help others too. I will now do some homework and see whether it is worth our while going down this route.
I don't know if it is a good test but I watched a BBC Iplayer programme this morning and it was perfect; might be worth doing the same this evening and see if the feed is just as consistent as we are somewhat distant from the exchange.
Sorry about the double original posting - don't know what happened there.
If you want to fiddle with stuff (Which I'm not convinced works for the majority of home users though), then there are oprators which will give you free calls to the US and other locations, but I've seen people spend more time looking up the various tarifs, etc. and buying bits of hardware than they might have spent in just picking up the phone and calling in the first place!
Have a look at this page:
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pick one :)
Oddly enough, me neither. It's weird that they're pushing it hard though. All it takes is one person on your home system using some p2p software or gaming to seriously disrupt VoIP calls unless you've taken steps to protect yourself with QoS on routers (or giving the little blighters a clip round their ear!!!)
That's somewhat different as the streaming players will read from the network as fast as they can and keep data in memory for playback at the proper speed. That way they can cope with brief network issues seamlessly. You can't do that with real-time voice!
Rob, as said above, you'll still be paying your BT rental, plus your Broadband ISP's charges, so in my opinion from an economic point of view VoIP only makes sense if it is going to help you save. We use it because we have aging family members in Europe whom we need to call regularly and speak to for fairly long periods. It would cost us so much more if we did that via the phone. So for us VoIP is good value.
I use PlanetTalk. You can choose to have it setup so you either have to pre-dial a code before making a call, or, as in my case, have all my calls through them, and only pre-dial a code if you still want to go through BT (who are more expensive for any calls possible).
Calls to the US are 2p/minute last time I look, and the quality is as good as from a BT line. Much better deal than Skype where the quality is sometimes very poor (not an issue when calling other Skype for free, but annoying when paying for a call).
BT will often give you this along with the modem with many of their BB tarrifs...
Not of this particular deal, but systems like it are quite popular among some classes of user, and there are loads of ways of doing it.
To get decent results you really need to be using an ISP that always prioritises VoIP traffic over their network, and you need a bandwidth reservation capable router that can preallocate and protect a small amount of bandwidth from other users on the network.
I have setup a private VoIP network across the extended family, which spans countries (original aim was to reduce international call costs). For that, you don't need to subscribe to any external service, but you will need to be rather technically savvy to set it up.
I don't believe this is the case. You need an ISP that has adequately provisioned their network, peering, and incoming BT central links. But you want that anyway, and then you don't need any bandwidth management. That probably means steering away from the bargin basement ISPs -- I continue to be amazed that people who pick out the rock bottom prices are surpised when they get a crap service.
I haven't bothered with any bandwidth management or low bitrate codecs, and call quality is always perfect, even if I deliberaely engineer something like an ftp transfer in parallel.
Perhaps I ought to have weighted those requirements ;-) Yup, the ISP choice is by far the more important bit - so keep away from anything Tiscali!
It only really becomes a problem if you can hammer the available bandwidth - not always easy these days - so in many cases you will get acceptable results on an ordinary router. You may not fare so well with a house full of teenage file sharers and game players.
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