Changing Voice Providers

It's well-documented fact that people don't like too much change in their lives. It's a natural instinct to be conservative in our lifestyles and when we do have to adopt some kind of change, we prefer the ones that don't cause too much shake-up to our habitual routines. So it was a bit of a shock to the system when I went ahead and changed my phone carrier, but I feel rather gratified in having taken the plunge.

A landline phone service shouldn't require rocket scientists to run properly, you'd think. Other companies seem to manage it, except the one I was with: for them the concept of having two people being able to talk to each other on a call was some alien or unfashionable concept to be discouraged at every opportunity. So after the final straw finally landing on my back, I ditched them completely and went for a VoIP phone system. I had some initial worries: what if I wasn't around to take a call? Would I be able to hear the other person clearly enough? Would I collapse in a heap of useless technophobia at the prospect of making calls via a computer?

Fortunately the hardest thing about it was deciding on which of the offered phone plans to try. I ended up deciding on a monthly contract to evaluate the service, with a view to extending this to a cheaper prepaid contract if I was happy, or giving myself the option of crawling back to a landline provider for reconnection. Being home for calls wasn't a problem. The voicemail downloaded anything I'd missed as soon as I connected and with the adapter they gave me, I was able to hook up a laptop to my VoIP account at work anyway.

Call quality turned out to be dependent on the local broadband connection. It was fine at home and at work, some public wifi spots did involve a bit of static, but with everyone using bandwidth that was hardly a surprise. I never had any calls where the caller and I couldn't understand each other, and what's more the softphone installation to use the VoIP service on the PC was really easy to use and configure.

Getting The Best Value From A Phone Plan

There are many great advantages to using voip systems in place of your regular phone providers. With everyone scrambling to make savings and economies on the household bills, it's a welcome relief to find a service that lets you make cheaper calls and even free calls using an existing broadband connection.

Voip is becoming increasingly popular, which means more people with voip-equipped PCs can make free calls to each other. To offset this and attract more people to their offers, voip providers sometimes offer monthly or yearly package fees that let you call landline phones for free as well. If you know that you make a lot of calls in a month, or have family members that use the phone a great deal, then free calls each month can be a sizeable saving. Other package options also include international call minutes as part of your subscription, however most overseas tariffs for voip providers are cheaper than regular phone companies.

Another great feature about Voip is its portability. The minimum requirement of voip is a program to install on your PC, turning your computer into a phone emulator or softphone according to the techie jargon. You can then use your laptop or netbook to make calls simply by logging in to your voip account and connecting to the number you need via the software - just as good as an email client. Using a headset or even a specialised voip phone handset, you will always be connected to your home or office number no matter how far you travel, all that's needed is a connection to broadband internet.

Although it has really taken off for small and medium-sized businesses, low cost voip systems for homes are becoming increasingly well catered for with phone plans with a home user in mind, tailoring the plan to suit your budget and amount of use. In addition to the benefit of low cost, there are all sorts of added extras that come as standard on voip plans, such as caller ID, call forwarding and call blocking that ordinarily you would have to pay extra for with a regular phone company, or else buy an expensive handset with the features built in.

Streamlining Your Business

It's a very attractive option to be saving money at the moment, especially if you have a small or home company that needs to keep its head above water in the current economic climate. If you can trim some budget costs this will put you in good shape for whatever turmoil the New Year has to offer, and be a good starting point to attack 2011 with confidence.

One of the areas in which you can make cost savings is by replacing your phone service. A lot of businesses simply use a landline system, but getting alterations such as more lines, or provision for special facilities can be expensive and call rates are certainly at the higher end of the cost market. If you have international customers and need to be on the phone to IT support teams or suppliers abroad, then with a traditional phone system you would expect to have to allocate a sizeable budget just for this activity alone.

By switching to a voip system you not only make considerable cost savings by getting free calls to other voip phones and cheaper calls to landlines, but also many business rates you can get from voip providers will include an allowance of international call minutes as standard, which you can further increase if you need to have this provision for your business. Your internet softphone installation can sit on the office PC, or on your laptop allowing you to take your office contact number and cheap voip rates wherever you go on meetings.

One of the drawbacks mentioned about voip systems is that you need power for a PC to run the software. Seeing that most people also have a mobile phone as backup, and many landline systems are big and complicated enough to require power to the phone handsets, having a power cut is probably going to inconvenience you in other ways more than being able ring people. You do also need a broadband link, and this will preferably need to be a high speed connection so that voice clarity remains good on the calls, however a good quality data connection is another pre-requisite of a successful business so you should be upgrading this anyway if you currently lack one. Despite the perceived problems of voip, these are more than matched by the benefits it provides and the real savings that can be made on calls via a the various voip phone plans you can select.

Voip Calls - The Way Forward?

A great way to save yourself some money if you are prone to making a lot of calls is a Voip system. Standing for Voice Over Internet Protocol, this lets you use a broadband connection and some software on your PC to send and receive voice calls over the internet. You can either use a microphone headset plugged into your PC, or more commonly, a proper phone handset that plugs into your computer and broadband socket.

The benefits of a Voip set-up are mainly the cost implications; Voip rates are extremely cheap and very competitive compared to pricing plans from landline phone companies, and the installation of a home Voip system is extremely simple and doesn't require a great deal of technical experience. A great deal of businesses are switching to Voip networks to save on their running costs, but home owners are now waking up to the fact these are easy and cheap to install in a domestic setting too.

Most Voip plans will include software called a softphone. This allows you to make calls directly from your PC provided you have some sort of speaker and microphone input. This means that wherever you can take your PC, laptop or netbook, your phone system can go with you, withoutr haviong to carry around a dedicated phone handset. Many softphone set ups are designed to mimic an actual phone on your desktop, so are extremely easy to use.

Another plus you will enjoy with a Voip package is a whole host of extra features that are included as standard. Most of these would only be available through additional cost options with a landline phone company. Given the way the computer handles the call message information, it's far simpler to present and track this information for the user. This means that you can have voicemail, as it records onto the storage space of your PC, as well as other really useful extras such as Caller ID and emergency dial options that locate your Voip phone to the operator. More advanced features are usually available on higher rates plans or business contracts.