This article was written by Don VanSyckel, the club president, as a part of "The President's Pen". This article appeared in the September 2019 WYSIWYG newsletter.
VOIP Phones part 1
by Don VanSyckel
We continue to have a home phone; but we switched to a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) years ago. Why do we still have a home phone? A great many friends have the number and it's a convenient place to collect messages so I'm not bothered with them on a cell phone when in the middle of something. VOIP phones require four things 1) a VOIP vendor, 2) internet service, 3) a VOIP phone adapter, and 4) a real telephone.
The VOIP vendor registers your phone number, then they receive calls to your number and make calls from your number. The VOIP vendor communicates with the VOIP phone adapter in your house via your internet service. The telephone plugs into the VOIP phone adapter. After all is set up the telephone is used exactly like phones have always been used. The voice (audio) is sent/received via the internet as digital data. The sound quality is very good. Remember audio CDs and movie DVDs both produce audio that is digital on the CD/DVD.
You can purchase vendor and hardware packages or you can do your own which is what I did. I signed up with a service named CallCentric and I purchased a generic phone adapter for my house. The unit is a Cisco Linksys Phone Adapter PAP2-NA (I believe the NA is North America). This unit actually supports two separate phone line although I only have service for one. I believe this unit is out of production but it just keeps going. I have several phones connected to the one line using the phone wiring that was already in the house.
Since all my calls go through the CallCentric hardware, they can offer a lot of features, many of which I don't use but the features I do use are great.
- answering machine function is on their hardware and reachable from anywhere
- log of in bound and out bound calls, log can be downloaded
- low price, less than $9 a month, several plans are available
- up loadable address book
- call filtering, if calling number not in address book caller is challenged to press a random number 0 - 9, robo calls don't make it through this, yet calls from friends in the address book go right through
- three way calling
- call forwarding (during vacation you can forward to your cell phone)
- call forwarding on no answer (after X rings)
- quiet time, schedule calls to not ring the phone and go right to the answering machine
- any calling phone number can have specific handling instructions such as do busy signal, do out of service, or go directly to the answering machine, think about the possibilities, set that annoying caller to do busy so they try over and over again
- detect "anonymous" calls, for instance I have these set to a busy signal
- email alerts as needed for calls and/or voice messages
I do have a couple add ons. The first is a UPS on the phone adapter, cable modem, and router. The second is specialty device on the phone line that supports several phone ringers, not needed if one phone or multiple electronic phones.
End of Article