VoIP quality in Canberra

I’m on naked VDSL and we have changed over from a hard landline to iiNet VoIP. The quality is excellent. All we find is that very occasionally I will call home and the phone won’t ring. But otherwise it’s a good service if you primarily use mobile phones for contact.

2nd para first line should read bog standard phone. Bloody iPhone changing my spelling.

With NBN be aware you can get two types of voice service both are technically VoIP but both treated differently in the network.

Option 1 is to get a service that terminates on the NBN router you then plug in a big standard phone. The advantage of this method is it is seperate from your internet connection (though of course does share the fibre back to the NBN ‘exchange’ but that’s neither here nor there. This in turn means that a higher quality of service can be provided to this traffic which in turn effects quality. With NBN you can also get a battery backup which keeps just this port and the fibre alive in a blackout. Not every ISP (or RSP’s as NBN calls them) offers a service to this port. If you don’t want internet in an NBn area you can get this installed without buy an Internet service.

The 2nd type is like what other deceived above where they subscribe to a VoIP service which can be from ones RSP or a 3rd party provider. You can buy a sip analogue terminal adaptor which will allow you to connect an analogue phone (though of nbn need to ask why you would bother but ADSL makes sense). Alternatively you can buy a SIP phone. I have a cordless SIP phone and use mynetfone and it works well.

To work you need an Internet service to carry the data. The main downside is the internet does not provide quality of service to voice packets so this data can get delayed which in turn can effect voice quality. There are also some cheap ATA’s or SIP phones.

curlylocks said :

I have Voip and never had a problem and even better no calls from people telling me I have a virus on my PC

Give it time…

I have Voip and never had a problem and even better no calls from people telling me I have a virus on my PC

Can confirm there was no copper network laid in Crace. Your only option for fixed line phone will be some sort of VOIP service through your NBN provider.

We ditched the landline almost two years ago and switched to VoIP via NBN thru iiNet. We get the occassional drop out but a modem reboot soon fixes that. They usually occur in the early mornings after they’ve done some work on the network overnight and the modem hasnt reconnected itself properly. A minor inconvenience for the added plus of one less bill a month. Id highly recommend it to anyone with NBN access.

We have been using VoIP for several years. It was originally on ADSL but made the transition to NBN just fine. I’m not sure what aspect of the VoIP experience you have received feedback on but there is an issue regarding echoing that is well documented in web searches. This usually happens when you are using VoIP to call telephone numbers that are still attached to the copper phone lines. It is our experience to have this ‘echoing’ when speaking with the olds who still have a copper line phone. This can sometimes be addressed by the way that your computer modem is set up. In addition to this you can buy ‘top of the line’ VoIP phones to try to address the problem. In our situation, we have fiddled with modem set-up and have Gigaset handsets that were (and may still be) one of the best VoIP phones on the market but we are still experiencing echoing when calling copper line phone numbers. Phone calls that are VoIP to VoIP or to mobile phones return superb quality.

We could also argue about the need to keep the VoIP service but as we have older relatives who like this technology and the fact that it only costs them 25c to call us (as opposed to the costs of calling mobiles) and as we only pay $10 a month and receive $10 value in free calls we keep it.

Also, note that VoIP is only available through selected modems – i.e they need to support the functionality so check before you start. Also check if your current handset will work for VoIP – some do – so don’t think that you need to buy expensive VoIP equipment to utilise the functionality.

I can’t remember how frequently we used to receive our copper phone line bill. It was either monthly or quarterly but either way, we save in excess of $100.00 a period from making this change.

I hope that you have found this information helpful.

Stinger said :

If you’re in Crace, I’d be surprised if you are able to use anything but the NBN…I doubt there’s any copper in the suburb at all.

And in the very unlikely case that there is copper there, it’ll be deactivated very soon.

If you’d rather use voip than iinet’s NBN fibre phone, then why not just cancel fibre phone and use voip?

If you’re in Crace, I’d be surprised if you are able to use anything but the NBN…I doubt there’s any copper in the suburb at all.