VOIP Phones

I have been using a VOIP telephone service now for a month or so, and have to report it's great! I bought a cheap (under 20 quid, plus the usual million quid postage...) router/firewall/analogue telephone adapter off ebay, and it allows me to plug the base station of my normal home cordless phone into it and make calls via the Internet, whilst still being able to make and receive calls from my landline. Using one of the many, many VOIP providers you can call UK and foreign landlines and mobiles extremely cheaply. I have been using Babble and they have a PAYG set up, min top-up £5.00, (which only expires after 3 months). For that you get 30 minutes free to most of UK, Europe, USA etc per day, then calls at 1p/min thereafter, or 10p/min for calls to mobiles. No contract, starter costs etc etc. You can buy an incoming phone number (why?) for about a tenner. Obviously you can also talk to other voip users for free for as long as you want, but we don't really use that facility.

Call quality is just fine, and service availability has been pretty good (a couple of periods when it failed for an hour or two, in the first month).

But overall, our phone costs have plummeted to almost zero. I am a convert.