VoIP quality

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

John Chambers wrote:

> One  restriction  here  (Waltham  MA)  is  that  they  only   support
> connecting  to  a  single  phone.  They say that this is because they
> can't guarantee reliability with a lot of  old  house  phone  wiring.
> They  are  working  on  it,  but can't say when they'll support house
> wiring.  Their advice is to get one of  the  N-phone  cordless  phone
> packages,  and  plug the VoIP adapter into the cordless base station.

This is one of the reasons we finally decided to not do VoIP.  We recently 
bought a cordless phone base that can take up to four handsets (we have two 
now), and it would be around $180 to get two more, but I don't want to lock 
myself into HAVING to have a single phone base in the house.  As someone 
else said, you then need to put it on a UPS, which I really don't want in my 
kitchen where the base is.

The other thing I asked them about, which is something you might not have 
thought about, is that your data bandwidth goes way down.  There's a small 
hit all the time, and a greater hit while you're actually on the phone.  I 
already dropped my speed by about half moving from cable to DSL, and I would 
not appreciate giving up even more.

> We already had a 3-phone cordless setup, so it was no big  deal.   If
> you  have a lot of wired house phones, replacing them with a cordless
> phone package could be a bit of an expense. OTOH, cordless phones are
> good  enough  now  that  you  may  be  glad to be forced to make this
> change.  (But look for one that doesn't use the same  frequencies  as
> your wifi. ;-)

Ypu, the older 2.4Ghz phones can interfere with that.  We got 5.8Ghz 
Panasonics and are incredibly happy with them.