VOIP: Haven't made a 'phone call' for over a year
VOIP. It’s 4 letters your telephone company does not want you to find out about. Voice Over IP. In other words, telephone calls over the Internet. And not involving your telephone company.
The main reason I switched over was cost. For me it’s much cheaper to use VOIP than a traditional phone provider.
Initially it was only PC-to-PC (or Mac etc, but you know what I mean). Programs like Skype enabled free audio calls, but only to other Skype users and only if they were at their PC with Skype started and ready.
Then I moved to PC-to-standard-Telephone. In this case I signed up with a VOIP provider (mine is Pennytel) and used a free piece of software on the PC, called a softphone. This enabled me to use standard PC microphones and headphones/speakers to make calls to ‘normal’ phones (landlines, mobiles, international) without the recipient having to have a PC or anything special.
There were some hiccups: if you have a big download going on that download may choke your connection and the VOIP call gets badly distorted. Plus, sometimes, firewalls block certain connections and the calls rings at the other end, but goes dead (quiet) when the other person answers. But it’s fine now.
The final step was to use a current phone (hand set) and plug it into the Internet to use VOIP. Now as these phones came out years before VOIP, they have no idea what it is. So a ‘man in the middle’ box is used to convert the old analogue phone to use the Internet. These are called Analogue Telephone Adapters (ATAs). And yep, Pennytel etc sell them, preconfigured with your Pennytel account information.
It’s a tiny box. You plug your standard phone in to one socket and your Internet – from your Modem, Router, Switch etc – into the other (Ethernet) port. A bit of configuration later…and you can pick up the phone and just dial away. If you want you can even use it for inbound phone calls.
And the price for the calls? Well check out Pennytel for example. I’ve got one word to say to you, Kimmie: cheap.
