It's seems that some here still believe VOIP is not aot a good alternative to having a POTS line.
I've run a consulting biz, and my home phone service, for 5 years on pure VOIP. I have 59s reliability, and, in general is costs much less than the "bundled" services provided by broadband companies. During that 5 year period, I've gone through various ISPs, with various last-mile technologies. I'm currently in Nelson, and get my broadband via WiValley. Despite the growing pains of this infant ISP (meaning there are some outages), if the network is up, my phone service is up. Though this lowers my reliability, I still contend it's 59s because of backups to cell, etc. (BTW, On my 5.7 GHz 1/.5 service, I can run three simultaneous calls without issue). I have a hosted PBX for $35/month, trunk to a GREAT inexpensive gateway provider (voip.ms) using IAX2, and typically spend between $5-$10 a month on DIDs and actual phone calls. (This is North America wide, includes some toll-free DIDs and International calls).I don't really need the PBX, however, I do alot of development/testing work on it. With an IAX ATA, such as the Digium IAXy or the cheap China knockoff, you can have a reliable IAX2 connection to a provider like voip.ms, and it will be rock solid If you are a business relying on incoming calls for direct sales, I'd go with a redundant broadband provider (like DSL/Cable) plus VOIP via a gateway provider. The cost of the redundancy will still be cheaper than Fairpoint charges for Business land line/long distance. (I will say, however, that the prices for traditional T1 trunks have been coming way down - -as they should be.) However, if it's FairPoint providing the last mile... it's not for me. YMMV, Gerry _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
