New to VoIP advice

RomfordNavy

Looking at moving landline over to VoIP; I know I can get an ATA and use the existing wiring but as it looks like I have some old Cat-5 already in place seems like a better idea to go fully VoIP.

Can anyone suggestwhere to start looking for a couple of VoIP wired phones, which manufacturers to consider.  One will need to be speaker phone and answerphone.  Also would be good to have option of having two incomming lines but I presume all VoIP phones do that.

DullGreyGuy

What style of phone do you want?

We use gigaset cordless phones at home where a base station is connected to the internet via ethernet and the phones look just like normal domestic cordless phones. The capabilities is defined by the base station you go for, ours supports 4 external calls simultaneously, those 4 are shared by however many handsets you have

For wired phones I've used Snom, Cisco and Polycom but these were very much office desk type phones not really what you'd have in a domestic setting (much bigger things with 8 buttons to be pre-programmed, link to address book etc).  

RomfordNavy

DullGreyGuy said:

What style of phone do you want?

We use gigaset cordless phones at home where a base station is connected to the internet via ethernet and the phones look just like normal domestic cordless phones. The capabilities is defined by the base station you go for, ours supports 4 external calls simultaneously, those 4 are shared by however many handsets you have

For wired phones I've used Snom, Cisco and Polycom but these were very much office desk type phones not really what you'd have in a domestic setting (much bigger things with 8 buttons to be pre-programmed, link to address book etc).  

Not too concerned about what the phones look like but no pont in having lots of facilities which will not be used.  Wired rather than wireless, just need answerphone incorporated and speaker.  Notice some now use POE but as neither the fibre-optic router nor my network hub are POE that is best avoided.

DullGreyGuy

Most the ones that support PoE also can be run from a power adaptor but the power adapter may be an additional purchase to factor in. 

Normally with VOIP you're provider not hardware does the voicemail and so you aren't locked into getting to the phone to listen to it but can pick it up via your smartphone or homephone or anywhere else. 

littleboo

Have a look at Yealink

RomfordNavy

This might sound like a silly question but does anyone make a primary VoIP phone which can then have a couple of normal two wire auxiliary phones connected to it?

RomfordNavy

Still trying to understand how this would work:

Lets say I have two incomming VoIP lines, both with different rings, and three internal phones.  Could potentially all three phones be making different ring tones or is that configured centrally on the SIP trunk somehow?

littleboo

If you have a phone that supports multiple accounts, then you typically can configure the ringing behaviour per account. So if you have multiple phones, you would probably configure them the same. Your provider would need to allow 3 endpoint registrations to the same account.

EnPointe

RomfordNavy said:

Still trying to understand how this would work:

Lets say I have two incomming VoIP lines, both with different rings, and three internal phones.  Could potentially all three phones be making different ring tones or is that configured centrally on the SIP trunk somehow?

whbat is your use case and why do you  consider that not continuing  with the current phone service  but connected to the phone port on your router rather than  the  POTS NTE   wouldn't be adequate ? 

do you  have a particualr  reason to want or need multiple seperate telephone numbers  - which going full VOIP  via a SIP provider  offeres  the opportunity to do so ?

wanting   each of the lines on each sperate phone  is  entirely possible to  configure if  you pick the correct phones , there are various SIP terminals both wired desk phones and  cordless style that can have 2, 4, 5, 6, or  more 'lines' often across  multiple providers  

RomfordNavy

EnPointe said:

whbat is your use case and why do you  consider that not continuing  with the current phone service  but connected to the phone port on your router rather than  the  POTS NTE   wouldn't be adequate ? 

do you  have a particualr  reason to want or need multiple seperate telephone numbers  - which going full VOIP  via a SIP provider  offeres  the opportunity to do so ?

wanting   each of the lines on each sperate phone  is  entirely possible to  configure if  you pick the correct phones , there are various SIP terminals both wired desk phones and  cordless style that can have 2, 4, 5, 6, or  more 'lines' often across  multiple providers  

Have moved away from ADSL to fibre broadband but my telecoms provider will not allow to continue with existing phone service without their ADSL!

Have two phone numbers in use, would like to keep both.

Do not need both on seperate phones, if I can get phones which allow two lines that would work.

EnPointe

RomfordNavy said:

EnPointe said:

whbat is your use case and why do you  consider that not continuing  with the current phone service  but connected to the phone port on your router rather than  the  POTS NTE   wouldn't be adequate ? 

do you  have a particualr  reason to want or need multiple seperate telephone numbers  - which going full VOIP  via a SIP provider  offeres  the opportunity to do so ?

wanting   each of the lines on each sperate phone  is  entirely possible to  configure if  you pick the correct phones , there are various SIP terminals both wired desk phones and  cordless style that can have 2, 4, 5, 6, or  more 'lines' often across  multiple providers  

Have moved away from ADSL to fibre broadband but my telecoms provider will not allow to continue with existing phone service without their ADSL!

Have two phone numbers in use, would like to keep both.

Do not need both on seperate phones, if I can get phones which allow two lines that would work.

assuming you can port the existig numbers to the  new provider    a  'pure' Voip   / SIP service  seems a sensible  solution to that use case 

what does the fibre  provider say aobut telphony ? 

 the ADSL prpvider is correct in that   new  POTs lines are  now   effectively  not allowed , so you;d needot retain  their ADSL service  to keep a voice service on their connection