Genii Weblog
Odd issue with new house in the days of VOIP
Sun 12 Feb 2006, 06:02 PM
Tweetby Ben Langhinrichs
As many of you know, we are buying a new house. We have been through inspections, and everything looks great. The owners wanted to meet us and walk us through various systems, and while that is a bit awkward, we went ahead and met them. Very pleasant people, but an odd issue came up. The husband happened to mention that they use VOIP for their phone service, so there are no real land lines connected to the phones.
Now, he is willing to hook them back up, and so it probably won't make any difference, but it would never have occurred to me, or to our inspector,. that the phones might not really be phones in the usual sense. We could have moved in only to find no phone service. It just seems odd to think about.
And no, for those who want to try and talk me into VOIP. I have not been that impressed with the fidelity or reliability among those friends who have VOIP now, and regular phone service is dirt cheap. I remember when long distance meant expensive, but I talk to people all over the world and my phone bill is never close to large these days. No, I want my good, solid infrastructure for now. VOIP's day will come, but it is still in the future for me.
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What has been said:
433.1. Wild Bill (02/13/2006 11:43 PM)
What do to is get some of these olympus dual-circuit cordless phones. They do Skype as well as landline.. Simple enough for even my missus to use..
Or get Andrew to set up an Asterix phone exchange ?
---* Bill
433.2. Rock (02/14/2006 06:55 AM)
If I were to build my house now, I would seriously have to consider whether I would add tradtional POTS lines into the home. When building a house the contractor charges you so much/drop, and that could be money saved. I don't use my POTS lines now, and I don't foresee me using them in the future. The only reason I would add POTS lines to new home construction would be to make the house more desireable on a resale (for luddites like you ;) ).
As far as VOIP I find that my quality has overall gone up the last few months - although I do still get the occasional crappy connection.
--Rock
433.3. Joe Litton (02/16/2006 08:37 AM)
We moved into our new house one year ago. The interior is wired w/ standard phone jacks, but we have never had the local carrier hook up to our house. We have a couple of Vonage numbers (one for fax), and so I run a line from the Vonage box to a POTS line (RJ11 plug), and then use a mix of 'standard' and wireless phones throughout the house (with no outside POTS connection, the internal house jacks all allow standard phones to use Vonage.
AND we do have an ADT-monitored alarm - tested and verified (some folks try to say that ADT and other services do not work w/ VOIP).
As far as quality of calls, we've now had Vonage for about 2 years and the only time that I thought the Vonage connection was screwy ...it turned out my phone battery was shot. So no complaints! The quality of the VOIP connection is mainly a function of the quality of one's broadband connection. Ours is very good.