Advice On Cheapest Business Line Setup Please

barron_2

Hi,

Starting an office from home and getting confused with lines,packages.voip,etc,etc.

What i have at the moment is:

A residential line on TalkTalk Option 3 (with 2 months free line rental left)
and AOL gold broadband.


I know i need a new line to be run into the house.(for the office).
What i need ,i think,is a line that can handle ,cheap/free calls,broadband,fax and the possability of handling 2 phones eventually.

I have to have 2 lines because the business number will be differant to the home number.and a lot of calls will be made on it.

Sorry to have run on.
Hope someone can Help.

Thanks in anticipation.

Barron.

redux

You needn't add another wired line in. Using VoIP via the broadband would give you another number without needing to pay another line rental. Some VoIP providers will give you a free area code number; others charge about £2 a month for that or an 0560 or 0870 number is free - but I'd still go for the area code one as 0870 can be very unpopular and 0560 is so new that people would be confused.

You could get a fax-to-email number for incoming faxes, and use a modem in the PC to dial out to send faxes. There is a fax service available in Windows, but not usually installed - go to Add/remove programs, and then Windows components.

The minimum you need to add at the moment is a phone handset for the VoIP connection, and to decide which provider to use and which line will be which.

When the PC is off, some companies would provide an answerphone or call diversion, or for more flexibility to use the phone with the PC off you could add a router if you don't have one already and plug a phone in to some models or via an adapter.

The Finarea companies Voipbuster, Voipcheap, Voipstunt and Sipdiscount have very cheap (free at the moment) calls, while others have a wider range of services. You could look at Sipgate, Voipfone, voip.co.uk and others to get a few ideas of the different options available - perhaps Voipfone has the widest range

And some other threads here with much more detail ...

barron_2

Many Thanks Redux,

As we will be using the I/Net at the same time as talking ,would there be any loss of quality on line or slow down of pages loading?.

Sorry to come across as thick! but I'm not much of a techi.!

Cheers, Barron.

PS
Iv'e managed to read some of the other postings and its SLOWLY starting to make sense,i think!!?.
Cheers

redux

I don't know a lot more myself, but the VoIP should take priority through something called QoS (quality of service) which stops it being broken up by the other data. In theory there would be some effect on page loading speeds, but I don't think you would notice as neither process is actually continuous. On a 2MB/s connection, the voice is using about 10%.