My personal 6 reasons why I choose to ditch the landline for a VOIP phone!
1. No line rental charges
2. Cheaper call charges
3. 30 day contract or pay as you go terms
4. FREE incoming calls
5. No setup charges
6. UK local number supplied FREE
You may all be thinking another SKYPE story, actually no!
I was a little sceptical at first but after doing some research I found it was fairly easy and cheap to use any existing phone or mobile on the a VOIP service. There are many different companies offering very similar packages however it all depends what you want and how you want to achieve the savings. Some offer you a FREE number, others charge you, some charge you to receive calls, they all ideally would want you to sign up to a monthly rolling contract either way, but you don't need to. A small proportion offer a 'pay as you go' service with still low call charges.
I wanted to be free from any monthly contract, which still turns out to be very competitive at £9.95 with inclusive calls to landline and mobiles and the benefit of FREE calls to other VOIP users on the same network! The Pay as you go service offers from 1p per minute call charges to UK land lines, with mobiles being slightly higher, however this is still cheaper overall than other providers out there.
Setting up was a breeze on the Andoid and iPhone with some simple settings added to the SIP part of the mobile and your ready to go. I also bought a cheap dedicated cisco phone off eBay and contacted it direct to the home network, it came with a dedicated admin interface, a little more tricky to setup but again very straightforward and easy to follow instructions from the VOIP providers website.
If you are already technically savoy then setting up any phone will be fairly easy with NO need for any apps of special software. However for those a little less technical there are plenty of free apps, software and detailed support available.
Thing is most people have a landline tied to the broadband service so you cannot simply separate them out and make a huge saving. Other providers that supply broadband only without a landline, this is the people can really make the huge savings.
Userlevel 2
What if I need to make a fax from the same landline number? 😏
Userlevel 2
That’s actually quite interesting, I didn’t realise you could send faxes over IP, would you like to mention the service you’re using? I have done a quick search on VoIP services a while back but I couldn’t find any good ones back then.
I use sipgate basic, however to use the fax feature you may need to look at a sipgate team account. Pricing obviously is key, you might find something cheaper elsewhere, however I use them purely because the web interface is well designed and easy to navigate with very straight forward help guides to setup up any device with fantastic unbiased support.
Userlevel 2
I’ve checked out many VOIP services but have conclude that they aren’t the cheaper vs Landline. Take Sky Talk, I can get Anytime international for £12/month and anytime standard for £8/month. If didn’t want to get a landline, I could resort a GSM based phone. And buy a carrier’s voice only plan and put that in the phone + maybe £5 for a Landline Number/month.
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