VoIP for home office suddenly got better with superfast broadband.
I find it very productive to work from home occasionally. I have an Avaya phone in the conservatory – hangs off our Genband A2 SIP platform. I guess not every conservatory is Cat5 cabled. My patch panel and switch are in the attic but I won’t win any prizes for the quality of the cabling (it’s a good job I don’t do the cabling for Timico).
What really makes it work is the FTTC connection. VoIP is rock solid over FTTC as I may have mentioned. Last week I had a conference call with a journalist called Jessica Twentyman (@jtwentyman). Her profile says she lives in Portugal but her CLI was an 0207. I didn’t think anything of it but at the end of the chat I asked her whether she was actually working out of London.
Turns out she was using Skype-in and still very much in Portugal. The call quality was astonishingly good considering I’ve had a few quite tinny Skype calls in my time1. The difference is that she has a fibre connection where she lives. This just goes to show what a difference the quality of the underlying bearer connection makes. I’ve had other calls with journos where they have been using their mobile phone and it doesn’t always make for an easy conversation – you are straining to hear what the person is saying rather than focussing on what to say.
As FTTC/FTTP gets more into people’s homes and businesses it can only be a matter of time before we all upgrade to using better quality voice codecs such as G722. If the bandwidth is there we might as well use it. Of course the call quality may well improve but the quality of what is said will still be down to you 🙂
Ciao…
1 I even heard John Humphrys once on Radio4 talking to someone in New Zealand using Skype and the call disappeared completely half way through the interview.
5 replies on “VoIP for a home office”
Hi Tref
we’re having a debate on fb about voip and one of the people who is now on fibre wants to port their old phone number from talk talk to a VoIP provider like voyage. They can’t do it because Talk talk won’t release it – and I have checked and they won’t hand over the number. Then I saw your post and wondered if you knew lots about it and if you knew of a provider who could get the customers number off talk talk? They don’t need a landline any more but want a phone service through the fibre.
ta muchly
chris
I suspect their system only lets a number be ported to another copper line.
It might be doable if you can find another provider willing to port it to an analogue line from TalkTalk and then cancel the line but let you keep the number using their own voip service. Don’t immediately know of anyone who “does” it and it would be a lot of trouble for very little return if they did it as a bespoke job.
Perhaps write to OFCOM or OFFTA, portability between any PATS service is supposed to be available.
http://www.offta.org.uk/AnnexA-MigrationScenarios-v6.1.pdf shows some gaps around Fibre Voice Access (FVA) and doesn’t mention transferring to VoIP at all but raising these things never does any harm.
Gradwell list Opal (TalkTalk) as portable if they don’t own the number range – which in Chris’ case is probably true as it would be a BT number originally. http://www.gradwell.com/phoneservices/keepmynumber/
TalkTalk is obligated to port the phone number to another provider in the UK. However, if the customer has a broadband subscription and phone service, they will lose their broadband service if the number is ported. There are ways to get around this, but they aren’t very customer friendly.
If the UK had naked DSL or broadband only, then customers would have a lot more choice and a lot less grief.