Save Money With A VoIP Home Phone Service!

VoIP Home Phone Service

Introduction
This section takes a look at the various different aspects of a VoIP home phone service - what you need to know before you set up a VoIP residential phone service, how VoIP works, who the cheapest VoIP providers are, does FREE VoIP exist, and if so, how do you get it? Just follow the 4 Steps and Checklist below and you're ready to go!

What is VoIP?
A good starting point is to find out more about what VoIP is, and how it works.

Once you have got a good idea of this, there is a whole reference of information to assist you in your decision making. Our helpful tutorials guide you through all the terminology to give you a much clearer understanding of what VoIP's all about. You can access these tutorials by clicking here.

VoIP home phone service has been the focus of the press recently, mainly due to the huge swathe of advertising that can be seen pitching this new wave of services, and how it can save you a fortune over your current Telecoms provider.

Choosing a VoIP home phone package
The choices can be daunting, and it's often difficult to tell what you get for your money from each provider, all of whom offer different packages of bundled minutes and other bolt-on products.

We've compiled a set of guidelines to help you make the best choices. Getting the Cheapest VoIP Service page gives you all the advice you need to choose the right package for you, as well as helpful links to other resources that will help you make your choices.

Having read this, go to our Table of VoIP Residential Phone Service Providers, page, giving you the names of some of the major operators offering VoIP services.

Getting VoIP for Free
If it's FREE PC-PC VoIP you're looking for, then we've listed the crucial information for the major free VoIP providers on our Free PC-PC VoIP page.

Broadband at home
In theory, all you need to get started with a Home Phone service based on a VoIP connection is a broadband service, allowing you high speed access to the internet.

Voice Over IP involves taking your voice streams, breaking them up into thousands of tiny samples known as bits, then re-packaging them into 'packets' to be sent over the internet, rather than down a traditional phone circuit.

In order for these packets to be sent, a certain amount of bandwidth is required to make the quality of service good enough. Normal dial-up internet access may be sufficient for VoIP, but you may have problems with speech quality, and anyhow, you'll be paying a per minute charge for this internet access!

Click here to find out more about broadband and broadband phone service, and to use our online tool for viewing broadband deals available in the UK. We've also got two useful and interesting articles focusing on :

a. The speed of your broadband connection, and how you can understand more about the speed of your broadband connection (essential if you are planning to use high bandwidth applications such as video-conferencing). To go straight to this article, click here.

b. The changing market for broadband TV services, and how these changes may mean you could take advantage of Free Broadband TV. To find out more, Click here, or read this article ongetting free digital TV in your home.

WiFi and Wireless VoIP
You may also have heard a lot recently about WiFi (Wireless Fidelity), or the ability to turn your home or office into a Wireless Local Area Network. WiFi is taking off at a phenomenal rate, so click here to look at our article examining in detail this new technology, explaining WiFi home equipment, some basic WiFi training and everything you'll need to set up your own WiFi VoIP home phone service.

We then have an interesting and insightful article on Wireless VoIP and how being able to use a Voice Over Wireless LAN service could mean considerably cheaper calls for you as a consumer, but can also threaten the traditional revenue model of the mobile phone operators. This is a topic examined further in a great article about WiMax VoIP and the impact it will have on the market.

So, once you have broadband access and have considered the benefits of installing home WiFi equipment, what else will you need? Well, the only other essential component is to have appropriate software on your PC or notebook, that will allow your computer to convert your speech into the appropriate format for sending over the internet.

Many of the Free VoIP operators will provide this software free of charge to download. Most are proprietary, meaning you may find it difficult to contact somebody not on the same software.

However, some will give you the flexibility to call those on different software packages. Probably the best known company throughout the world offering free VoIP is Skype. To find out a lot more about Skype, and for an instant Free Skype Download to your PC, just Click Here!

Check out the page Free VoIP Providers to make your choice of free VoIP provider.

Building up your contacts
The next step towards getting a VoIP home phone service is to find friends and colleagues who also have access to a PC and get them to download the same residential VoIP service software. Once they have done this, use online instructions to make contact with them.

Even if the person you are contacting is in Australia and you yourself are in UK, this PC-PC call will be free! Quality should be reasonably good - you may sometimes notice a slight 'jitter' in speech, or perhaps a slight delay, though this shouldn't normally be a problem when calling is between two relatively developed countries.

Ok, so now you have the basic VoIP set-up, and are able to make VoIP calls with your friends and colleagues all over the world for free. However, there will always be the times when the person you wish to call is either not on a PC, or is unavailable at the time you need to speak to them, ie they are 'Off-Net'.

Save Money!
Most (VoIP) home phone service (or residential VoIP) providers will offer you the chance to purchase low cost calls worldwide, as well as other packages that are tailored to those of you that either make lots of national calls, or lot of international calls. Shop around, and you should find that by signing up to such a service, you can make significant savings over your existing service.

For example, if you currently have a phone bill with £100 of international calls, it's not unheard of to reduce that bill by 80 or 90%. In other words, you could save nearly £1,000 over the course of a year! Skype were one of the first to offer a VoIP service from your PC to a phone line - find out more information

Table of VoIP Home Phone Service Providers gives you details of those providers near to you that offer such deals. It's straight-forward to sign up, and many don't require a monthly commitment from you in order for you to benefit from their home phone service.

Alternatively, learn more about a Vonage Phone Service in your home or small business, with our article that looks at the features of Vonage's services, as well as some independent consumer reviews of the service.


Checklist
So what's the trick to saving time and money through setting up a residential VoIP service?

a. Get yourself a broadband package (many also come with a bundled VoIP calls package attached)

b. Use our links to research the market and make your choices. There are many home phone service providers looking to sign you up, each offering a different service. Find the one that suits your needs.

c. Get your friends and colleagues signed up to a home VoIP service package, in order to take advantage of free calls PC-PC.

d. See how VoIP home phone service works for you - and how much money you too can save.

That's all it takes to get started with VoIP in your home. Now it's over to you to find out more.

Further Reading


Voice Over IP Fundamentals, by Jonathan Davidson, James Peters, Manoj Bhatia, Satish Kalidindi & Sudipto Mukherjeeis is a detailed study of VoIP technology for the beginner, starting with the basics of VoIP, and using a selection of case studies to explain the concepts.







VoIP for Dummies, See how to get started with VoIP, how it works, and why it saves you money VoIP is techspeak for "voice over Internet protocol," but it could spell "saving big bucks" for your business! Here's where to get the scoop in plain English.








If you want to get started instantly, Go from VoIP Home Phone Service to Free Skype Download , and start making free calls NOW!