New to Voip

[booker53]

Hoping someone here can answer my questions as the Telkom call center hasn't been able to. We have fiber to the home and two of us work from home and have decided Voip would be a good option for us. I have at long last been able to get Telkom to add a Closer Bolt on Bundle to our fiber account. We work in different parts of the house and have one fiber line. What do i need for us both to have a handset in our office as well the ability to connect an old POT which is in the dinning room to the system. At present if you plug the POT handsets cable into the modem you can make and receive calls, just not sure if these calls will be included in the Bolt on billing system. I thought that a Yealink W60B and two W56H handsets would be what i need but can i plug the old POT set into the base station as well?

 

[Pineapple Smurf]

/ping @Iamn0tageek

 

[bizvoip]

You should go fully digital if you have good internet.
Port your number and throw away the copper. Number porting is around R150 once off.
You will also pay less for calls over voip, around 29c/min.
The voip service is typically free, but does not have advanced features. For that you will pay a little extra, but I dont think you need those. R30 or so per user should suffice.

With decent wifi you can probably register the voip account on your mobile phone, or if the wifi fails use your builtin LTE. A great smartphone app is groundwire, it can connect to any sip account. It costs around $10 once off.

For your pc you can get microsip, its free.

Throw away your landline.

 

[booker53]

You should go fully digital if you have good internet.
Port your number and throw away the copper. Number porting is around R150 once off.
You will also pay less for calls over voip, around 29c/min.
The voip service is typically free, but does not have advanced features. For that you will pay a little extra, but I dont think you need those. R30 or so per user should suffice.

With decent wifi you can probably register the voip account on your mobile phone, or if the wifi fails use your builtin LTE. A great smartphone app is groundwire, it can connect to any sip account. It costs around $10 once off.

For your pc you can get microsip, its free.

Throw away your landline.

We have two FLLA lines and will get rid of one of them when we have the Voip up and running. We will keep one of them to use during loadshedding. Nobody can tell me if Voip can automatically forward to cell phones during a power outage.

 

[Iamn0tageek]

get rid of copper

port your number over to switchtel or any decent telco that does VOIP as their primary function and not some add on crap

go for their hosted PBX option

You can add IVR, call forward, call waiting, all that stuff

W60B is old

Go for W70 series

1x base 2x cordless

Make sure the base can broadcast sufficiently to the cordless phones otherwise your phone calls are gonna be kak

thick concrete walls and houses with enough walls that look like a friggen chinese maze are not your friends

Make sure the signal strength is sufficient from the base to wherever the cordless handsets are going to be otherwise go for the W70B combo where each cordless has it's own base.

/end

There will be no charge for this consultation

@Pineapple Smurf Come fetching your f***** underpants from my house. I'm not going to Whatsapp asking again.

 

[Iamn0tageek]

We have two FLLA lines and will get rid of one of them when we have the Voip up and running. We will keep one of them to use during loadshedding. Nobody can tell me if Voip can automatically forward to cell phones during a power outage.

PBX can absolutely do a auto forward to a cell phone

Bear in mind that if you enable this option, YOU pay for the incoming due to the PBX forwarding it to a mobile number.

So not advised.

Rather record an IVR in event phones are down. Sorry we cant take your call bla bla bla call 082 xxxxxxx if you need assistance.

 

[yogidabear]

Hoping someone here can answer my questions as the Telkom call center hasn't been able to. We have fiber to the home and two of us work from home and have decided Voip would be a good option for us. I have at long last been able to get Telkom to add a Closer Bolt on Bundle to our fiber account. We work in different parts of the house and have one fiber line. What do i need for us both to have a handset in our office as well the ability to connect an old POT which is in the dinning room to the system. At present if you plug the POT handsets cable into the modem you can make and receive calls, just not sure if these calls will be included in the Bolt on billing system. I thought that a Yealink W60B and two W56H handsets would be what i need but can i plug the old POT set into the base station as well?

If you want to use what you have already, you need an analog DECT phone. The modem has an analog out (POTS) so you could use that to the DECT base and buy 2 phones. You can plug the old phone in to either a 2nd port on the modem, or an output on the DECT base - if they have! The base you want to use has no RJ11 port

This will die when the power fails unless you power the modem and DECT base, which is highly recommended if you work from home. If telkom has a failover service I wouldnt know

 

[bizvoip]

We have two FLLA lines and will get rid of one of them when we have the Voip up and running. We will keep one of them to use during loadshedding. Nobody can tell me if Voip can automatically forward to cell phones during a power outage.

VoIP can do nothing but make and receive calls and routing DIDs. Its a line only service. The rest of the features like forwarding are all considered to be PBX type features. You will need a provider who can offer you a cheap single extension PBX if you want to do things like call forward. Will cost you around R25-75 per month.

 

[dillydog]

The Gigaset IP phones can take a POTS line and do VOIP on one base with multiple handsets, I used to use that back in the day with my ADSL line. Alot of VOIP services can Auto forward after a timeout or if the line is unavailable. So porting could be a good option.

 

[Vis1/0N]

Oh good... I told my management last year and brought in quotes etc. Also brought in a Vox consultant etc.
Told management in February that when I called Telkom to log a fault they advised that they are doing away with copper in this area from 01 April. Today no connectivity. No fibre coverage (Frogfoot has a presence in the 4/5 office parks around our complex, and management did not want to deal with landlords to get the relevant permission). We do have wireless internet with a company that took over the previous' client base - with ongoing issues.

Went with management to Telkom and Vodacom. Telkom can migrate the lines to FLLA. Went to Vodacom, applied for wireless internet services, they did a site test 3 weeks ago and we still awaiting feedback. Was going to look at Voip after that.

Enough woe about management failure. I need to get access to our incoming calls. Telkom tells us we cannot move the geographical number to Voip once is goes to FLLA, not even to Telkom Voip solutions.

How do I get started 101 this week with a softphone application, either PC or Android? Need to find a provider and geographical port of landline which should take a few days. I see Vox Vobi does not have a good rating on the playstore. Vodacom? Afrihost? Does any of these support a softapp?

 

[Afrigirl]

Oh good... I told my management last year and brought in quotes etc. Also brought in a Vox consultant etc.
Told management in February that when I called Telkom to log a fault they advised that they are doing away with copper in this area from 01 April. Today no connectivity. No fibre coverage (Frogfoot has a presence in the 4/5 office parks around our complex, and management did not want to deal with landlords to get the relevant permission). We do have wireless internet with a company that took over the previous' client base - with ongoing issues.

Went with management to Telkom and Vodacom. Telkom can migrate the lines to FLLA. Went to Vodacom, applied for wireless internet services, they did a site test 3 weeks ago and we still awaiting feedback. Was going to look at Voip after that.

Enough woe about management failure. I need to get access to our incoming calls. Telkom tells us we cannot move the geographical number to Voip once is goes to FLLA, not even to Telkom Voip solutions.

How do I get started 101 this week with a softphone application, either PC or Android? Need to find a provider and geographical port of landline which should take a few days. I see Vox Vobi does not have a good rating on the playstore. Vodacom? Afrihost? Does any of these support a softapp?

Hi.
Yes, we do support softphones for our VoIP packages. You can use Zoiper or Linphone on your smartphone.

 

[ToniO]

You should go fully digital if you have good internet.
Port your number and throw away the copper. Number porting is around R150 once off.
You will also pay less for calls over voip, around 29c/min.
The voip service is typically free, but does not have advanced features. For that you will pay a little extra, but I dont think you need those. R30 or so per user should suffice.

With decent wifi you can probably register the voip account on your mobile phone, or if the wifi fails use your builtin LTE. A great smartphone app is groundwire, it can connect to any sip account. It costs around $10 once off.

For your pc you can get microsip, its free.

Throw away your landline.

Sorry for any duplication here. I'm considering throwing away my landline and looking at VOIP options. Vox seems like an option but I'm not sure their pricing is transparent.
They say you just need Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G or LTE. I've got fiber/WIFI at home uncapped, but if I'm not at home or my fiber is down, I presume I'll have to have a data connection? My pay as you go Vodacom data is super frustrating as it expires after a month. I want to avoid having to top up data to make emergency calls and I don't want to be tied to another contract or buy data every month.
Any thoughts?