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Article - Getting the most from a new free Voip Phone
We have a home in one city. Our office is 35 miles south in another city. Frequently we do business in another location 750 miles away. Two of our children are married and live far away from each other and far from us. One is in college while the fourth frequently travels as an advisor. One or both of us travel overseas on business.
...forward calls with Voip...
Our telephone bills could be prohibitively high but they are not. In fact most of our phone bills are very low although we communicate all the time. Granted the cell phone helps, with free in-network calls and roll over minutes. We could talk on our cell phones all the time but we are not with the same carriers. Cell phone minutes and different networks are not the issues.
We also have two toll free lines, one of which is a traditional original 800 number. The other is an 888 number. The business is more of a telecommunications issue than just talking to our extended family. Telecommuting and offsite employees further complicate office telecommunications. Simply put we must keep in touch while avoiding high in state per minute rates.
Voice over Internet, or VoIP, is a nice feature of broadband, whether it is WiFi, DSL, cable modem, or satellite. How the hotel, coffee shop, airport or foreign office gets their high speed internet can remain a mystery to me as long as it works. I need it to work with my VoIP phone so I can make and receive calls overseas. With voice over Internet your telephone will always ring no matter where you are, as long as you are connected to the Internet. A New York or Los Angeles phone number will ring in China if you are there and hooked up to the net. An Italian or London phone number will ring if the person is hooked to the Internet in any living room in Croatia or the United States.
...voip will find you...
When you turn on your computer, plug in an ATA adapter such as a small Grandstream unit, or use a soft phone or WiFi phone you register with a SIP server. People calling your VoIP (Internet telephone number) are routed to the server and the server finds you because your phone already said, "I'm here and available" - and it doesn't matter where "here" actually is.
When we go overseas we forward our cell phone calls to our VoIP phone number which is a New York City number. It accepts real calls from regular telephones. We also forward our home telephone number to the New York voice over Internet telephone number. Imagine the look on the neighbor's face when they call your home asking to borrow the lawn mower and you say you are in South Africa or in the middle of the ocean on a ship. It happens, and calls are clear. Recently a man called me from 200 miles north of Moscow and I could hear his birds chirping and his television set in the background. The call was free for him and free for us.
If you are in a remote location such as above the Arctic Circle, as we were recently, you can't rely on your cell phone. If you are out of the country you need a satellite phone instead of your traditional cell phone. Yes, you can call internationally on your cell but we want to save money while having the best call quality and clarity available. Once we had a high-speed connection to the Internet our calls came through and we placed calls as though we were in New York. All of our calls to our home, office, children, realtor, doctor, dentist and friends were only 1.9 cents a minute. Some VoIP providers let you call for free.
...easy to install...
At home and at the office we just hook up our Grandstream adapter box to our router, and plug the phone into the adapter. The red light turns green and we have a dial tone on our New York telephone number. Did I say we are located about 1200 miles away from New York? It makes no difference with most providers. We also have a London telephone number and another number from England that rings to our New York number. They are also free. On our end we actually plug the fax machine into the Grandstream adapter and then we plug a wireless cordless phone system with answering machine into the fax machine. You can do it with video phones too, if you want.
...voip to cell phone or cell to voip phone...
Some days it is more convenient to forward all calls to our cell phone instead. If we are out fishing or just enjoying a day away from the office we never miss a call, even from overseas. It costs 1.9 cents a minute to forward our New York VoIP number to our cell phone. If you are afraid to leave the home or office because an international call is important and crucial to business just do what we do. Forward it.
...faxes are free...
Our offices all have voice over Internet phones from the same provider because all in-network calls are free. What that means - and I know you are thinking cell phone calls are free - is our fax transmissions are free. Faxing multiple page contracts at in state rates would otherwise be prohibitive. Now you see some of the hidden benefits of VoIP and how to tailor the system to your advantage.
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