Beginning Home VOIP help

[BeachBum]

I have recently had my house wiring ran, approx 3000ft of Cat6. Several of the drops are for phones. Of course I know nothing about VIOP phones.

Can someone give me or point me too a lesson on basics of VOIP for home use please? So far I’m not finding many tutorials on this for home use.

I have searched and it seems there are services like Vonage, OOMLA, 1-VOIP etc that provide some sort of equipment/box you connect up to. I can’t seem to figure out how that connects in to you network. I have all my drops running to a patch panel, how old their box figure in?

How about the actual phones? Where does one buy VIOP phones?

(My network equipment will be pfSense firewall to switch (most likely Cisco SG-300) if that matters)

 

[thiggins]

Interest in consumer VoIP has declined since service providers started offering "triple play" packages and smart phones have replaced landlines.

Vonage and Ooma basically have a box that plugs into your router / network. The phones are cordless.

Services like Magic Jack have a box that plugs into your network. You then plug a regular corded or cordless phone(s) into the RJ11 jack on it.

There is really no need to use IP-based phones connected via Ethernet in the home.

 

[lighting]

I've put a lot of effort into my home office/residential VOIP, which is how I would up messing around with networking more than very casually. I switched my landlines over to VOIP using both Google Voice and Callcentric services and OBI boxes (inexpensive consumer interfaces that connect a standard phone to your router). It's far cheaper than the phone service the my ISP provider (Comcast) offers -- if you use Google Voice it's free, other than the one-time costs of the Obi and a Google porting fee if you want to use an existing number. It's also poorer quality and flakier than a traditional landline or cable phones. I do find we're using our mobile phones more and more and the VOIP lines less and less, but VOIP is a nice low- or no-cost way to keep an old landline number in service with an answering machine, provide a fax line, etc. It requires more fuss than a "triple play" phone line, but it's way cheaper. With a good QOS router the quality can even be pretty good. I think I'm at the point where my problems with voice quality are related mainly to Comcast's flakey network, not my local implementation.

 

[KenZ71]

MagicJack makes it easy.

Their website is incredibly annoying but I only visit a couple times a year to renew.

 

[abailey]

I switched my landlines over to VOIP using both Google Voice and Callcentric services and OBI boxes (inexpensive consumer interfaces that connect a standard phone to your router). It's far cheaper than the phone service the my ISP provider (Comcast) offers -- if you use Google Voice it's free, other than the one-time costs of the Obi and a Google porting fee if you want to use an existing number. It's also poorer quality and flakier than a traditional landline or cable phones.

I also use Obi with Google voice. I have experienced fantastic quality. 99% of the time I can not distinguish its quality from a traditional POTS landline.

 

[BeachBum]

Well I've thought it through and I just don't see a need for a home phone other than 911. What to do about 911 if you have no landline and only a cell phone?

OK Edit: I have a kid and if our cell phones aren't around how would he call 911? So, might have to have a voip line like Oomla or 1-voip and e911.

 

[RMerlin]

There is really no need to use IP-based phones connected via Ethernet in the home.

Especially as people have cordless phones at home, so they just hook the base to an ATA. Personally, I use voip.ms (costs me less than 4$/month including 911 fee) and a Cisco SPA112 ATA.

One advantage of the ATA is you don't have to spend as much time implementing QoS on your whole LAN - just on the router itself if you hook the ATA directly to it.

 

[thiggins]

Especially as people have cordless phones at home, so they just hook the base to an ATA.

Even not using VoIP or an ATA, cheap DECT phones make phone wiring unnecessary.

I use only one of the phone jacks I put in every room of our home when we built it 10 years ago. When you can get a four-handset DECT 6.0 phone kit for well under $100, there's no need for wired phones.

I used CAT5e for the phone wiring and ran them to a separate patch panel so that the jacks could be used for Ethernet. But I haven't needed most of those either...

 

[RMerlin]

Even not using VoIP or an ATA, cheap DECT phones make phone wiring unnecessary.

I use only one of the phone jacks I put in every room of our home when we built it 10 years ago. When you can get a four-handset DECT 6.0 phone kit for well under $100, there's no need for wired phones.

I used CAT5e for the phone wiring and ran them to a separate patch panel so that the jacks could be used for Ethernet. But I haven't needed most of those either...

Exactly. I was already using a cheap DECT 6.0 kit with three phones at home. When I moved to VoIP a few years ago, I simply moved the base right next to the ATA, and kept my existing phones.

 

[BeachBum]

If I have all the phone lines in the house (Cat6 cable) running to the patch panel how do I connect the ATA or Vonage/Oomla/1-VOIP's box to them all? My router/firewall has 4 separate NIC's so Im guessing I connect the voip box to its own NIC, then to my switch where I VLAN all the phone lines?

 

[CaptainSTX]

If I have all the phone lines in the house (Cat6 cable) running to the patch panel how do I connect the ATA or Vonage/Oomla/1-VOIP's box to them all? My router/firewall has 4 separate NIC's so Im guessing I connect the voip box to its own NIC, then to my switch where I VLAN all the phone lines?

The simplest solution would be to install your VOIP box adjacent to the patch panel and then depending on how many locations you want telephones at use a spliter on the box. ( 2-3-4 spliters are readily available ). More locations probably means installing a 66 block and punching down wires.

Then you can convert some of your Cat 6 wires to telephone wiring. This can be done by changing out the keystone jacks for phone jacks which will use just six of the conductors ( 3 pairs ) . Or instead of changing the jacks you can purchase either adapters to switch data - phone or base cords for the phones that do the same thing. Check on Amazon for options.

But as Merlin said the simplest solution is just to use cordless phones. That is how I have my MagicJack distributed to three locations in my home. I have enough cable but my thought was why bother.

 

[sfx2000]

I have recently had my house wiring ran, approx 3000ft of Cat6. Several of the drops are for phones. Of course I know nothing about VIOP phones.

Can someone give me or point me too a lesson on basics of VOIP for home use please? So far I’m not finding many tutorials on this for home use.

I have searched and it seems there are services like Vonage, OOMLA, 1-VOIP etc that provide some sort of equipment/box you connect up to. I can’t seem to figure out how that connects in to you network. I have all my drops running to a patch panel, how old their box figure in?

How about the actual phones? Where does one buy VIOP phones?

(My network equipment will be pfSense firewall to switch (most likely Cisco SG-300) if that matters)

If one wants to get deep into VOIP and things you're interested in - a good website is NerdVittles...

This guy has been doing it for years, and documents everything is fairly good detail

http://nerdvittles.com

 

[BeachBum]

If one wants to get deep into VOIP and things you're interested in - a good website is NerdVittles...

This guy has been doing it for years, and documents everything is fairly good detail

http://nerdvittles.com

Oh my, another rabbit hole to go down