OT: replacing landline with VOIP

[Adrian]

Non starter here. We have no signal on any of the mobile networks.

[tony sayer]

I though you lived on the mainland of England;?....

Somewhere;?.....

[78lp]

There is no powered street cabinet here, the phone line goes back to the town exchange and it has backup batteries and full motor generator as well.

[Dave Liquorice]

We have poor mobile signals, to be able to hold a call without excessive Donald Duck, short drop outs or the call dropping you have to be at one of thr right windows, upstairs on the right side of the house. I have an NFC tag that I swipe when arriving home to set a divert from my mobile to the landline, more often than not I have to swipe a couple of times as the phone is "Not registered on network"... When the phone connects to the cars Bluetooth it turns the divert off, there is also an NFC tag leftover from the old car that didn't have Bluetooth.

The other rather major snag with relying on mobiles is that very few cell base stations have any power back up, if the local cell looses power, there is no service. Depending on the power distribution you may still have power but even if you don't you may still need to call the emergency services. Fallen over in the dark?

A POTS line works independantly of mains power at the exchange or your property (you do have a wired phone connected don't you...).

Also it's not unknown for network operators to take weeks or even months to repair a cell that is broken but doesn't carry much traffic.

[Dave Liquorice]

BT Openreach FTTC boxes have backup batteries but I don't know how long they hold the service up.

Nearest cable service is 20+ miles away, know SFA about that, no need to know.

[Dave Liquorice]

Which can be anywhere on the globe where you have a suitable 'net connection... A VOIP number can simultaneously "ring" phones(*) in say the US, the UK and OZ and which ever answers first gets the call. This can cause confusion on the part of the caller: Where are you? Samarkand. Eh, I called your 01234 xxxxxx number...

(*)In very broad definition of "phone". Could be an IP phone and POTS phone behind an ATA or an app running on a mobile with data connection.

[dennis]

There is no requirement to have standby power on the DSL racks even if they are in the exchange building. The chances of them being backed up is nil unless you have a VIP on them.

[Dave Liquorice]

Yes the POTS will work. I wouldn't be so sure that the DSLAM (aka ADSL) service provided at the exchange will also be backed up by the exchange battery/genset. There is only an obligation to provide/maintain voice telephony, everything else is an "extra".

[dennis]

Are you sure that the backup isn't just for the POTS card as in 21cn?

[David]

Similar situation - we have had the same land line number since 1984 so it is well known to distant and infrequent contacts.

It is attractive to save on the VM line rental and also be able to access the phone number from anywhere in the UK (or the world, for that matter).

However the main use of the land line seems to be cold calling (must find time to implement the call screener on a Raspberry Pi) so being able to receive calls offering me solar panels anywhere in the world is probably not top of my list.

Any pointers to software for an Android phone which can handle SIP calls over a data connection and is not tied to a mobile provider? When we go abroad for a while outside any roaming agreement we buy a local PAYG SIM and it would be good to be able to use the home number if we wanted.

Not that this is a major requirement - our regular contacts know to use email or Skype messaging and we have never called into the answering machine to pick up messages. In fact I have never bothered to learn how to.

One use that has just occurred - it would be good when travelling to have a single number for contact when booking hotels etc. which is not tied to a local mobile network. Prime example for a SIP number, of course. Would it be good to use the home number, or better to have a "burner" which can be ditched after the holiday? Probably don't want marketing calls from Lanzarote on the home phone.

Will watch this thread with interest.

Cheers

Dave R

[78lp]

Mine is.

[Roger Mills]

His subsequent post confirms that that is indeed the case.

But don't Virginmedia also supply ADSL over copper in un-cabled areas?

[Dave Liquorice]

Zoiper?

Have that on my phone, mainly because I actually got it to work! VOIP provider is Sipgate (joined before they dropped porting of numbers to "retail" accounts). B-) The delay was pretty high though, double that of a normal mobile call.

Not normally enabled as it hammers battery life. It seems there is quite a bit of regular "chatter" between a SIP client and server.

[Dave Liquorice]

Not sure sure. But the cabinets just installed around here are probaly not 21CN as there isn't even a date for 21CN on SamKnows for the local POTS exchange. AIUI the fibres for the FTTC broadband are home runs to Hexham 40 km away.

[Michael Chare]

I don't think Voipfone like duplicate registrations. A&A and Sipgate appear not to mind.

[Graham.]

Yes they do, but I don't think VM operate as WLR suppliers of POTS over Openreach lines, so I assumed he was on cable.

[Brian-Gaff]

If you read some parts of the offcom web site they suggest it is suupposed to be fine. Its only an alias in much the same way some emal servers have multiple names. However one or two thing I did not like about Voip, which is why I stayed with virgin land lines. Firstly, I use a voice recognition device to get a phone number and dial it in audio down the land line microphone. Most Voip systems seem to scramble this, and you seemingly get poor results. The other issue is delay and quality variations. The line quality is often much like that of these far eastern call centrres, ie sounding a bit like an old transistor radio with duff batteries, and lacking in any presence at all, and the delay is long enough for the person on the other end to think the line was dead or a dodgy caller, and of course no caller line ID so the other end monitoring for known people would ignore the calls. Brian

[andrew]

I think they sold all their ADSL customers to Talktalk some months ago.

[tony sayer]

In article , Brian-Gaff scribeth thus

Dunno what type of VoIP line you were on Brian but here the VoIP is every bit as good as a landline!.

[Roger Mills]

Fairy Nuff. Frying pans and fires spring to mind!