Hello Voice-Over IP
Today makes the celebrated day of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of this great continent so it seems fitting to go with the flow and switch our traditional phone service to the new revolution in telephony.
We’ve had voice-over-ip (or voice over networked computers) in our home for almost 2 years and feel pretty comfortable with the benefits, but also the down sides that it introduces, for example if my Internet provider goes down, so too does my phone system. But a Cell phone soon resolves that problem (for us to call out on anyway).
It’s going to take about 8 months to see a return on this investment (as the equipment charge was around $300 for the new internet provider), but after that time we’ll be saving about $40 a month.
I’m using an open source phone system called Trixbox which is an Asterisk solution provided by Digium. Asterisk is one of the leading providers for open source telephony solutions. Feel free to take a look at some of their features.
We also enlisted the help of Les to provide us with a traditional phone number that other people can call us on. For $4 a month (for upto 3,000 mins of incoming calls) and about 1.3 cents a minute for outgoing calls (including England) we should have a monthly phone bill of around $17 (if we use 1,000 minutes for outgoing calls).
I’ll let you know how it goes.
