Replacing phone line with VoIP (without needing an additional call plan)

ianfabris

For obvious reasons, my 80yo old mum has 80yo friends. Although we have trained her to use WhatsApp, it's no good when she is talking to her friends, who are all used to their landline phones, answer machines etc and aren't interested in fancy gadgets 
So when it comes to phone contract renewal times, she insists on a phone package with anytime calls associated with it. Traditional this comes with a tariff adding £10+ to the monthly cost.
But all phone lines are going VoIP now ... Instead of plugging your phone in the socket, you plug the same equipment into the back of the router ..... So why in these days of free calls on WhatsApp, FaceTime, TEAMS and Zoom, do we still have charges to make and receive calls on a home phone? And more importantly.... Is there a plug and play way, to get the same home phone experience, without the need for a call tariff?

Ayr_Rage

You will still need a call plan with VoIP.

The associated infrastructure still needs to be paid for and routers with integrated VoIP or the adapter required are a cost to the provider.

iniltous

It depends on what you call ‘free’ , WhatsApp, FaceTime etc don’t charge a monthly fee or ‘per minute’ but they are collecting data about you and selling it , and showing you things others have paid for ( like adverts for products and more sinister political manipulation  ) so they do have a cost , telephony  for customers needs to be paid for by someone , even if it’s VoIP , it does cost ISPs  to provide the service , that’s why getting standalone broadband is cheaper than combined telephony and broadband, what’s more if ( as in the past ) people had no choice to have telephony wether they wanted it or not , included in the price , they complained that they never made calls so why should they pay for it ,   they would rather have cheaper broadband by not having telephony included, it has to be offered , broadband only obviously needs to be cheaper than phone and broadband, the difference in price is the cost of providing the phone service .

Some traditional VoIP providers can be cheaper than taking telephony from the same company that provides your broadband, but it’s not ‘free’ , those  days of that are gone .

There was a company many years ago ( AFAIR ) that offered free telephony ( well no charge for the call you still paid line rental ) , you called them on a freephone number , they played a series of adverts to the caller before then connecting the call to the number you actually wanted , it wasn’t a successful business and disappeared pretty quickly, presumably people didn’t want to listen to 5 minutes of advertising to save a few pence .

Its over simplistic to think of telephony like social media applications, what’s more if these huge corporations like Meta , X , Google thought it worthwhile to manufacture a device that looked and operated like a regular phone , but was ‘free’ ( apart from snooping on your every move )  , they would have already done it , chances are there is legislation that makes snooping on telephone calls illegal ( call tapping ) whereas snooping on your internet use is allowed, that’s why one is free and the other isn’t .

littleboo

You can't compare a WhatsApp call, which can only be made to other WhatsApp users, offers no SLA and limited support, with a full PSTN replacement service. Different beasts, horses for courses. Incidentally, if you want the ability to call a phone number from Teams, you can have it, but its not free.

J_B

iniltous said:

It depends on what you call ‘free’ , WhatsApp, FaceTime etc don’t charge a monthly fee or ‘per minute’ but they are collecting data about you and selling it , and showing you things others have paid for ( like adverts for products and more sinister political manipulation  ) so they do have a cost .......

Although I partly agree with you - I've never had any advertising pressed on my by WhatsApp ... have I?

littleboo

The WhatsApp model is to give it free to personal users and then charge business to use it. If you get 3 billion people using it for free, businesses will  pay to have access to their customers via that platform. As its owned by Meta, they can afford to play the long game.

iniltous

Ever read the T&C’s for free to use applications  ? , as far as never having an advert ‘played’ on something seemingly ‘free’ , personally I think that is a little more honest and transparent way the ‘free’  thing is funded , rather  than data harvesting ( although admittedly these Big Tech companies can do both ) , the one this guaranteed in life is there is no such thing as a free lunch , anyone thinking these type things are supplied genuinely ‘for free’ , is in my opinion, very naive .

littleboo

"if the product is free, then you are the product"
Not exclusively true, but always worth considering.

matelodave

littleboo said:

"if the product is free, then you are the product"
Not exclusively true, but always worth considering.

you beat me to it