VOIP?

[Henro]

Still using a landline at home, since the cell tower goes dark with power outages, which are frequent around here. We loose all services regularly, as the trees are always falling across the wires during a storm.

We still use our landline too. But our cell phones are set up to use WiFi calling when connected to WiFi. Works great at home, and even when out of the country and using a vpn when connected to public networks abroad.

Our cell phone signal is minimal with ATT here at home, but a friend with Verizon cell service was surprised he had five bars! I believe the Verizon tower is just up the road at the fire hall.

Thinking about it, we aren’t really using landlines anymore. The phone goes out over the fiber optic line. So it may effectively be VOIP.

With WiFi calling it makes no difference to us. Previously we had an ATT box that plugged into our router and served the same purpose. But WiFi calling is better as it works anywhere there is WiFi connectivity.

I am guessing that VOIP would be the same. We still do have one bar of cell signal, so if the power goes out we are able to use the cell phones to some degree.

 

[bearbait]

My Starlink came in a couple days ago and I have to say it's great. Couldn't be easier to set up and I'm also running a VPN. We went from a low of 0.29 Mbps to a high of 3Mbps with the old internet and now we're getting between 150Mbps and 200 Mbps.

 

[Geezer3d]

I have been using an Ooma device for VOIP for at least ten years. The Ooma is wired directly into my internet router. The Ooma device cost me about 100 bucks at the time and my state charges a tax on landline phone numbers and that includes VOIP numbers so I pay a few bucks a month tax for the phone number.

The only drawback is that when the power goes out I have no internet and no landline because both the router and the Ooma require power. I did not have cell service when I installed the Ooma, but I do have it now so the landline is redundant. In fact the wired internet is redundant because I can use my cell phone as a wifi hotspot.

 

[Porcupine]

StarLink is planning on offering VoIP phone services, but is working through regulatory and network architecture requirements.

I’d expect it should work anywhere from fair to very well if you were to use a third party VoIP provider, but if you have issues don’t expect much in the way of support.

 

[Tornado]

We use VOIP for all of our phones in the government office I work in. We just upgraded to this phone system this year. The phones themselves are really nice, enterprise level phones with wireless, blue tooth handsets. The VOIP works well but we have noticed one little issue. Occasionally there are little blips or drops when talking to someone and they may miss a word here and there. This is likely down to our provider though, not with VOIP technology as a whole. One good thing about VOIP is the sound quality on phone calls is higher. Sometimes they refer to this as "HD calling" IE: High Definition calling. Essentially its just a higher bit rate audio signal.

 

[random]

Ended up with Ooma. It's working great so far, just has weird dialtone and rings...

Unfortunatley, I didn't really have the option to wait for Starlink to get around to it.